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