Philosophy and Revolution

Stathis Kouvelakis, G M Goshgarian

Description

A remarkable history of the formation of Marxist thought.
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 one side were those socialists - such as Moses Hess and the young Friedrich Engels - who sought to discover a principle of harmony in social relations. On the other side, the poet Heinrich Heine and the young Karl Marx developed a new perspective, articulating revolutionary rupture, thereby redefining the very notion of politics itself.

This new edition of the book includes a long interview with Kouvelakis which puts the work in context.

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie politique
• Philosophie moderne
• Philosophie moderne
• Political Ideologies
• Critical Theory
• Movements
• Political
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• History of ideas
• Communism
• Marxism
• 19th-century philosophy
• Revolution
• Politics
• Immanuel Kant
• French Revolution
• Révolution (homonymie)
• Moses Hess
• Communisme
• Heinrich Heine
• Friedrich Engels
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
• Emmanuel Kant
• Karl Marx
• 1848

Informations

• Publié par: Verso
• Date de parution: 20 novembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786635792
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Philosophy and Revolution

Philosophy and Revolution From Kant to Marx

STATHIS KÔUVELAKIS

TranslateD by G.M. Goshgarian Preface by FreDric Jameson New AfterworD by Stathis Kouvelakis anD Sebastian BuDgen

In memory of Nicos Poulantzas

This book is supported by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs as part of the Burgess Programme, headed for the French Embassy in London by the Institut Français du Royaume-Uni

This edition published by Verso 2018 First published by Verso 2003 © Stathis Kouvelakis 2003, 2018 Translation © G.M. Goshgarian 2003, 2018 Preface © Fredric Jameson 2003, 2018 Afterword © Stathis Kouvelakis and Sebastian Budgen 2018

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Aerso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-578-5 ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-579-2 (UK EBK ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-580-8 (US EBK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Typeset in Baskerville Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

Acknowledgements Prefaceby Fredric Jameson

Contents

Introduction: From Philosophy to Revolution

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

A FOUNDATION FOR POLITICS?

The impossible compromise Politics between a foundation and thesalto mortale The force of events

SUPERSEDING THE REVOLUTION?

Is the revolution Kantian? Revolution as process, revolution as event Short of liberalism, and beyond it A state beyond politics?

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

FlDnerieas dialectical exercise The philosophy of history: A clinical description of decomposition The politics of the name Exorcizing the spectres The other German road: Revolution democracy

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

‘We Europeans …’ From the ‘social’ to the state Defending the ‘German road’ Radicalization or flight to the front? The ‘religion of love and humanity’

Chapter 4: Friedrich Engels Discovers the Proletariat, 1842–1845

THE ‘ENGLISH CONDITION’: THEANCIEN RÉGIMEPLUS CAPITALISM?

Germany – England The status of critique: Hegel in Feuerbach The inevitable revolution

THE PROLETARIAT: ‘POPULATION’ OR ‘CLASS’?

From the ‘social’ to ‘socialism’: The great romance of organization A physiologist in the big city From class struggle to race war (and vice versa) The battlefield Tertium datur? Revolution without a revolution?

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

FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM WITH PINPRICKS

The ‘party of the concept’ Non-contemporaneousness in the Rhineland From civil society to the state The system of the free press Volksgeistand revolution

THE ROADS OF EXILE

The ship of fools Hegel beyond Hegel The origins of permanent revolution: ‘True democracy’ The new world The radical revolution The paradoxical protagonist ‘Nulla salus sine Gallis’

Conclusion: Self-Criticisms of the Revolution Afterwordby Stathis Kouvelakis and Sebastian Budgen

Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

To my mother, Mitzi Koudounis, who was always at my side at the most important moments, notably during the composition of this work, but who left us unexpectedly. To Georges Labica and Jean-Marie Vincent, without w hom this research would have proved impossible. To Fredric Jameson, Jacques Bidet and Kostas Vergopoulos, whose support never faltered. To Étienne Balibar, Sebastian Budgen, Gregory Ellio tt, Jacques Guilhaumou, Annie Mordrel, Emmanuel Renault and André Tosel, who, in different ways, examined all or a part of this bulky manuscript. To my former colleagues at the Department of Europe an Studies of the University of Wolverhampton and particularly to Mike Haynes. To Marie-José Gransard, for her indispensable generosity. To G.M. Goshgarian, whose lessons in rigour and method I am not going to forget. To the whole Verso team, for their goodwill and their hard work.

The revolution is one and indivisible. Heinrich Heine

Preface FREDRIC JAMESON

If it is a truism that every generation rewrites Marx in a new way, what has to be added is that every age also brings its own historically specific mode of rewriting to the process. This one, for example, is characterized by a paradoxical combinat ion of a distrust of teleology, and even historical narrative as such, with an extraordinary renaissance of biographical writing. The apparent paradox can be reduced if we begin to grasp the way in which nowadays narratives of emergence, influence, causality, and formation in reality have begun to function as devices for highlighting and foregrounding the component parts of structure as such: a narrative trajectory serving as a visible pathway on a multidimensional construct formed out of tubes of distinctly coloured beams of light. This is the sense in which Stathis Kouvelakis’s remarkable new history of the formation of Marx’s thought – perhaps the first truly original new version of that formation since Auguste Cornu’s monumental postwar history – is not to be taken only as an account of the contingencies and encounters, the accidents of intellectual discovery and the unpredictable exposure to the winds of theZeitgeist; but also as 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. As for Marx’s formation and development, the classical narrative was already constructed by Engels: the confluence of German philosophy, Britis h political economy, and French revolutionary politics. It was an enormously satisf ying dialectical synthesis, which positioned ‘Marxism’ (about which it is today generally agreed that it was Engels who invented it) centrally as the inheritor of European thought as such. Today, perhaps, in the light of globalization and the new thought modes it is in the process of teaching us, and also in the hindsight of Moses Hess’s notion (rediscovered here) of atriarchy of relations between Paris, Germany and Manchester (rather than London), we may grasp this as something like a spatial or geographical force-field, the after-image in thought of an international and cross-cultural pattern of the type most universally revealed today in the current world system. This is, so to speak, the geopolitical substratum of philosophy; and Kouvelakis’s book reminds us insist ently of the perceptual and intellectual advantages of figures we might once have considered as exiles, but who come before us today as the bearers and vehicles of transnationality. The first dramatic crystallization of this process is to be identified in the French Revolution itself, which resonated beyond all the old national boundaries with the shattering and terrifying force of an event – and, indeed, an event of wholly new historical structure, which now redefines our conception ofévénementialité or ‘eventfulness’, even of history itself. Revolut ion now becomes a new kind of collective event, and the historical chronicle is suddenly and dramatically reorientated around it in a radically new kind of historicity, which in the process changes all the conditions of philosophizing as such. Kouvelakis demonstrates this process centrally at work in the renewal of philosophy by Kant and Hegel. Characteristically, the Anglo-American perspective on these thinkers has never been passionately committed to any curiosity about their political positions, beyond some vague sense that Kant was an Enlightenment figure and Hegel a s eemingly more conservative or even reactionary one. We therefore have everything to le arn from the newer French and Italian intellectual scholarship, and Kouvelakis’s discussion may well serve, not only as an introduction to this new material, but as a way of producing new kinds of philosophical problems. Thus André Tosel has demonstrated the centrality of the French Revolution for Kant, and Domenico Losurdo has definitively dispelled the myth of a reactionary Hegel: these are positions more in consonance