When Spinoza Met Marx

When Spinoza Met Marx PDF Author: Tracie Matysik
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226822338
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
"How did Baruch Spinoza, the seventeenth-century Dutch-Jewish philosopher, become a nineteenth-century German Marxist? It is on its face an unlikely development. Karl Marx was a fiery revolutionary theorist who heralded the imminent demise of capitalism, while Spinoza was a contemplative philosopher who preached rational understanding and voiced skepticism about open rebellion. Further, Spinoza criticized all teleological ideas as anthropomorphic fantasies, while Marxism came to be associated expressly with teleological historical development. Yet socialists of the German nineteenth century were consistently drawn to Spinoza as their philosophical guide. Tracie Matysik shows how the metaphorical meeting of Spinoza and Marx arose out of an intellectual conundrum about the meaning of activity. How is it, exactly, that humans can be fully determined creatures - creatures in nature and governed by causal laws of nature - and also able to change their world? To address this seeming paradox, many revolutionary theorists scrapped the idea of activity as something autonomous humans do when they assert themselves against nature and its causal laws. Thinking with Spinoza, they came to think of activity instead as relating - as the state of relations between humans and between humans and the non-human world. Matysik follows these Spinozist-socialist intellectual experiments in the meaning of activity that unfolded across the nineteenth century, drawing lessons from them that may be meaningful for the environmental-justice issues confronting the contemporary world"--

When Spinoza Met Marx

When Spinoza Met Marx PDF Author: Tracie Matysik
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226822338
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Get Book Here

Book Description
"How did Baruch Spinoza, the seventeenth-century Dutch-Jewish philosopher, become a nineteenth-century German Marxist? It is on its face an unlikely development. Karl Marx was a fiery revolutionary theorist who heralded the imminent demise of capitalism, while Spinoza was a contemplative philosopher who preached rational understanding and voiced skepticism about open rebellion. Further, Spinoza criticized all teleological ideas as anthropomorphic fantasies, while Marxism came to be associated expressly with teleological historical development. Yet socialists of the German nineteenth century were consistently drawn to Spinoza as their philosophical guide. Tracie Matysik shows how the metaphorical meeting of Spinoza and Marx arose out of an intellectual conundrum about the meaning of activity. How is it, exactly, that humans can be fully determined creatures - creatures in nature and governed by causal laws of nature - and also able to change their world? To address this seeming paradox, many revolutionary theorists scrapped the idea of activity as something autonomous humans do when they assert themselves against nature and its causal laws. Thinking with Spinoza, they came to think of activity instead as relating - as the state of relations between humans and between humans and the non-human world. Matysik follows these Spinozist-socialist intellectual experiments in the meaning of activity that unfolded across the nineteenth century, drawing lessons from them that may be meaningful for the environmental-justice issues confronting the contemporary world"--

When Spinoza Met Marx

When Spinoza Met Marx PDF Author: Tracie Matysik
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226822346
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Explores concepts that bring together the thinking of Spinoza and Marx. Karl Marx was a fiery revolutionary theorist who heralded the imminent demise of capitalism, while Spinoza was a contemplative philosopher who preached rational understanding and voiced skepticism about open rebellion. Spinoza criticized all teleological ideas as anthropomorphic fantasies, while Marxism came to be associated expressly with teleological historical development. Why, then, were socialists of the German nineteenth century consistently drawn to Spinoza as their philosophical guide? Tracie Matysik shows how the metaphorical meeting of Spinoza and Marx arose out of an intellectual conundrum around the meaning of activity. How is it, exactly, that humans can be fully determined creatures but also able to change their world? To address this paradox, many revolutionary theorists came to think of activity in the sense of Spinoza—as relating. Matysik follows these Spinozist-socialist intellectual experiments as they unfolded across the nineteenth century, drawing lessons from them that will be meaningful for the contemporary world.

Reforming the Moral Subject

Reforming the Moral Subject PDF Author: Tracie Matysik
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801447129
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Introduction : critical ethics, or the subject of reform -- An ethics of Gesellschaft -- The "new ethic" : a particularist challenge -- Conflicted sexualities and conflicted secularisms -- Global influences, local responses -- Moral laws and impossible laws : the "female homosexual" and the Criminal Code -- Social matters : social democracy and the ethics of materialism -- Losses and unlikely legacies : psychoanalysis and femininity -- Afterword : moral citizenship, or ethics beyond the law.

Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization

Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization PDF Author: Hasana Sharp
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022679248X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
There have been many Spinozas over the centuries: atheist, romantic pantheist, great thinker of the multitude, advocate of the liberated individual, and rigorous rationalist. The common thread connecting all of these clashing perspectives is Spinoza’s naturalism, the idea that humanity is part of nature, not above it. In this sophisticated new interpretation of Spinoza’s iconoclastic philosophy, Hasana Sharp draws on his uncompromising naturalism to rethink human agency, ethics, and political practice. Sharp uses Spinoza to outline a practical wisdom of “renaturalization,” showing how ideas, actions, and institutions are never merely products of human intention or design, but outcomes of the complex relationships among natural forces beyond our control. This lack of a metaphysical or moral division between humanity and the rest of nature, Sharp contends, can provide the basis for an ethical and political practice free from the tendency to view ourselves as either gods or beasts. Sharp’s groundbreaking argument critically engages with important contemporary thinkers—including deep ecologists, feminists, and race and critical theorists—making Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization vital for a wide range of scholars.

German Modernities From Wilhelm to Weimar

German Modernities From Wilhelm to Weimar PDF Author: Geoff Eley
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474216307
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
What was German modernity? What did the years between 1880 and 1930 mean for Germany's navigation through a period of global capitalism, imperial expansion, and technological transformation? German Modernities From Wilhelm to Weimar brings together leading historians of the Imperial and Weimar periods from across North America to readdress the question of German modernities. Acutely attentive to Germany's eventual turn towards National Socialism and the related historiographical arguments about 'modernity', this volume explores the variety of social, intellectual, political, and imperial projects pursued by those living in Germany in the Wilhelmine and Weimar years who were yet uncertain about what they were creating and which future would come. It includes varied case studies, based on cutting-edge research, which rethink the relationship of the early 20th century to the rise of Nazism and the Third Reich. A range of political, social and cultural issues, including citizenship, welfare, empire, aesthetics and sexuality, as well as the very nature of German modernity, are analyzed and placed in a global context. German Modernities From Wilhelm to Weimar is a book of vital significance to all students of modern German history seeking to further understand the complex period from 1880 to 1930.

Marx’s Ecology

Marx’s Ecology PDF Author: John Bellamy Foster
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1583673806
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Progress requires the conquest of nature. Or does it? This startling new account overturns conventional interpretations of Marx and in the process outlines a more rational approach to the current environmental crisis. Marx, it is often assumed, cared only about industrial growth and the development of economic forces. John Bellamy Foster examines Marx's neglected writings on capitalist agriculture and soil ecology, philosophical naturalism, and evolutionary theory. He shows that Marx, known as a powerful critic of capitalist society, was also deeply concerned with the changing human relationship to nature. Marx's Ecology covers many other thinkers, including Epicurus, Charles Darwin, Thomas Malthus, Ludwig Feuerbach, P. J. Proudhon, and William Paley. By reconstructing a materialist conception of nature and society, Marx's Ecology challenges the spiritualism prevalent in the modern Green movement, pointing toward a method that offers more lasting and sustainable solutions to the ecological crisis.

Becoming Political

Becoming Political PDF Author: Christopher Skeaff
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022655550X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
In this pathbreaking work, Christopher Skeaff argues that a profoundly democratic conception of judgment is at the heart of Spinoza’s thought. Bridging Continental and Anglo-American scholarship, critical theory, and Spinoza studies, Becoming Political offers a historically sensitive, meticulous, and creative interpretation of Spinoza’s texts that reveals judgment as the communal element by which people generate power to resist domination and reconfigure the terms of their political association. If, for Spinoza, judging is the activity which makes a people powerful, it is because it enables them to contest the project of ruling and demonstrate the political possibility of being equally free to articulate the terms of their association. This proposition differs from a predominant contemporary line of argument that treats the people’s judgment as a vehicle of sovereignty—a means of defining and refining the common will. By recuperating in Spinoza’s thought a “vital republicanism,” Skeaff illuminates a line of political thinking that decouples democracy from the majoritarian aspiration to rule and aligns it instead with the project of becoming free and equal judges of common affairs. As such, this decoupling raises questions that ordinarily go unasked: what calls for political judgment, and who is to judge? In Spinoza’s vital republicanism, the political potential of life and law finds an affirmative relationship that signals the way toward a new constitutionalism and jurisprudence of the common.

Karl Marx

Karl Marx PDF Author: Allan Megill
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742511668
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
Why did Karl Marx want to exclude politics and the market from his vision of a future socialism? In Karl Marx: The Burden of Reason, Allan Megill begins with this question. Megill's examination of Marx's formative writings casts new light on Marx's relation to philosophy and reveals a hitherto largely unknown 'rationalist' Marx. In demonstrating how Marx's rationalism permeated his attempts to understand politics, economics, and history generally, Megill forces the reader to rethink Marx's entire intellectual project. While Megill writes as an intellectual historian and historian of philosophy, his highly original redescription of the Marxian enterprise has important implications for how we think about the usability of Marx's work today. Karl Marx: The Burden of Reason will be of interest to those who wish to reflect on the fate of Marxism during the era of Soviet Communism. It will also be of interest to those who wish to discern what is living and what is dead, what is adequate and what requires replacement or supplementation, in the work of a figure who, in spite of everything, remains one of the greatest philosophers and social scientists of the modern world.

Partisan Review

Partisan Review PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literature
Languages : en
Pages : 616

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Book Description


Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society

Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society PDF Author: Michael Heinrich
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1583677364
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
A new, comprehensive biography of the life and work of Karl Marx For over a century, Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism has been a crucial resource for social movements. Now, recent economic crises have made it imperative for us to comprehend and actualize Marx’s ideas. But without a knowledge of Karl Marx’s life as he lived it, neither Marx nor his works can be fully understood. There are more than twenty-five comprehensive biographies of Marx, but none of them consider his life and work in equal, corresponding measure. This biography, planned for three volumes, aims to include what most biographies have reduced to mere background: the contemporary conflicts, struggles, and disputes that engaged Marx at the time of his writings, alongside his complex relationships with a varied assortment of friends and opponents. This first volume will deal extensively with Marx’s youth in Trier and his studies in Bonn and Berlin. It will also examine the function of poetry in his intellectual development and his first occupation with Hegelian philosophy and with the so-called “young Hegelians” in his 1841 Dissertation. Already during this period, there were crises as well as breaks in Marx’s intellectual development that prompted Marx to give up projects and re-conceptualize his critical enterprise. This volume is the beginning of an astoundingly dimensional look at Karl Marx – a study of a complex life and body of work through the neglected issues, events, and people that helped comprise both. It is destined to become a classic.