Philosophy and Revolution: From Kant to Marx

by Stathis Kouvelakis

Overview

Throughout the nineteenth century, German philosophy was haunted by the specter of the French Revolution. Kant, Hegel and their followers spent their lives wrestling with its heritage, trying to imagine a specifically German path to modernity: a “revolution without revolution.” Trapped in a politically ossified society, German intellectuals were driven to brood over the nature of the revolutionary experience.

In this ambitious and original study, Stathis Kouvelakis paints a rich panorama of the key intellectual and political figures in the effervescence of German thought before the 1848 revolutions. He shows how the attempt to chart a moderate, reformist path entered into crisis, generating two antagonistic perspectives within the progressive currents of German society. On the one side were those socialists—among them Moses Hess and the young Friedrich Engels—who sought to discover a principle of harmony in social relations, bypassing the question of revolutionary politics. On the other side, the poet Heinrich Heine and the young Karl Marx developed a new perspective, articulating revolutionary rupture, proletarian hegemony and struggle for democracy, thereby redefining the very notion of politics itself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781786635785
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	12/04/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	480
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Stathis Kouvelakis is a reader in political theory at King's College London. He is author and editor of many books, including the La France en révolte. Luttes sociales et cycles politiques (Textuel, Paris, 2007), Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism (Haymarket, New York, 2009) and Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth (co-edited with Sebastian Budgen and Slavoj Zizek, Duke University Press, Durham, 2007), a book translated in German, Italian, Spanish and Turkish.

Fredric Jameson is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University. The author of numerous books, he has over the last three decades developed a richly nuanced vision of Western culture’s relation to political economy. He was a recipient of the 2008 Holberg International Memorial Prize. He is the author of many books, including Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, The Cultural Turn, A Singular Modernity, The Modernist Papers, Archaeologies of the Future, Brecht and Method, Ideologies of Theory, Valences of the Dialectic, The Hegel Variations and Representing Capital.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ix

Preface Fredric Jameson xi

Introduction: From Philosophy to Revolution 1

Chapter 1 Kant and Hegel, or the Ambiguity of Origins 9

A Foundation for Politics? 12

The impossible compromise 12

Politics between a foundation and the salto mortale 16

The force of events 19

Superseding the Revolution? 23

Is the revolution Kantian? 23

Revolution as process, revolution as event 27

Short of liberalism, and beyond it 29

A state beyond politics? 38

Chapter 2 Spectres of Revolution: On a Few Themes in Heine 44

Flânerie as dialectical exercise 47

The philosophy of history: A clinical description of decomposition 53

The politics of the name 82

Exorcizing the spectres 88

The other German road: Revolution democracy 99

Chapter 3 Moses Hess, Prophet of a New Revolution? 121

'We Europeans…' 123

From the 'social' to the state 129

Defending the 'German road' 135

Radicalization or flight to the front? 145

The 'religion of love and humanity' 158

Chapter 4 Friedrich Engels Discovers the Proletariat, 1842-1845 167

The 'English Condition': The Ancien Régime Plus Capitalism? 172

Germany - England 172

The status of critique: Hegel in Feuerbach 178

The inevitable revolution 185

The Proletariat: 'Population' or 'Class'? 193

From the 'social' to 'socialism': The great romance of organization 194

A physiologist in the big city 199

From class struggle to race war (and vice versa) 207

The battlefield 211

Tertium datur? 217

Revolution without a revolution? 219

Chapter 5 Karl Marx: From the Public Sphere to Revolutionary Democracy, 1842-1844 232

Fighting for Freedom with Pinpricks 237

The 'party of the concept' 237

Non-contemporaneousness in the Rhineland 243

From civil society to the state 246

The system of the free press 256

Volksgeist and revolution 267

The Roads of Exile 275

The ship of fools 275

Hegel beyond Hegel 288

The origins of permanent revolution: 'True democracy' 303

The new world 315

The radical revolution 324

The paradoxical protagonist 329

'Nulla salus sine Gallis' 332

Conclusion: Self-Criticisms of the Revolution 337

Afterword Stathis Kouvelakis Sebastian Budgen 353

Notes 383

Index 455

Editorial Reviews

Quite simply the best study of the ‘young Marx’ (pre-1848) and his immediate predecessors I have ever read.”—Science & Society

“Perhaps the first truly original new version of [Marx’s] formation since Auguste Cornu’s monumental postwar history ... but also a new theory of what is structurally most central and distinctive in Marx’s achievement, namely the unique political nature and powers of the proletariat.”—Fredric Jameson, from the Preface

From the Publisher

A novel starting point in understanding the genesis of historical materialism and the philosophy of the Young Hegelians.

Etienne Balibar

This ambitious tract on the formation of Karl Marx's ideas brings together disparate currents in an original and multifaceted reading. Combining intellectual history and biographical narrative, with a hemming and hawing distrust of both modes, Kouvelakis re-evalutates the cultural context of Marx's ideological development, and the constellation of personalities that made it possible. Poet Heinrich Heine, the "first ironic German," gains some footing in Kouvelakis's evaluation, while Engels recedes a bit, and the primacy of the 1848 French Revolution's effects on the thought of 19th century German philosophy in general remains unquestioned. Overall, the book produces the effect of bright webbing strung between the people and events of a pivotal time, as the ancien regime of Europe segued convulsively into modernity, winding pathways of thought leading always towards the explosive event of revolution. Admittedly, some of this effect might be a result of unwieldy translations: "I have chosen to approach the early Marx's trajectory as a theoretical event that is utterly incomprehensible when it is considered apart from the sequence that precedes it (chronologically, to begin with, but also in the order of my exposition) yet is radically irreducible to it." And that's only the second half of a weighty, establishing thought. For scholars of Marx or European philosophy, and those accustomed to labored, academic prose, this book offers a fresh methodology and original interpretation of Marx's achievements. (Mar.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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