Synopses & Reviews
Throughout the nineteenth century, German philosophy was haunted by the spectre 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 frozen 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 and reformist path entered into deep crisis, generating two antagonistic perspectives. In one camp, represented by Moses Hess and the early Friedrich Engels, were those socialists who sought to discover a principle of reconciliation and harmony in social relations, by bypassing the question of revolutionary politics. In sharp contrast, the poet Heinrich Heine and the young journalist Karl Marx developed a new perspective articulating revolutionary rupture and struggle for democracy, thereby redefining the very notion of politics.
Synopsis
A novel starting point in understanding the genesis of historical materialism.
About the Author
Stathis Kouvelakis is the co-editor of the
Dictionnaire Marx Contemporain and a member of the
Actuel Marx editorial board.
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.