Philosophy and Revolution

From Kant to Marx

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by Stathis Kouvelakis,

Preface by Fredric Jameson,

Translated by Geoffrey Goshgarian

Verso

Due/Published February 2003, 352 pages, paper

ISBN 1859844715

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 study, Kouvelakis paints a rich panorama of the key intellectual and political figures in 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.

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

Review

Kouvelakis’s innovative interpretation of Marx views his early work in light of German philosophy’s efforts to respond to the political and intellectual challenges of revolution. In the opening chapter, Kouvelakis considers the French revolution’s influence on the thought of Kant and Hegel. In a particularly illuminating chapter, Kouvelakis then assesses Heinrich Heine’s importance in radicalizing Hegel’s thought and developing the concept of the proletariat. Kouvelakis also returns Moses Hess to the center of German thought in exploring how he and his most famous recruit, Friedrich Engels, envisioned the liberation of German society. The early writings of Marx picked up on Heine’s work and developed a perspective that calls for proletarian revolution. Kouvelakis’s ambitious study offers a compelling interpretation of nineteenth-century German philosophy and its relationship to German politics and to revolutionary thought. He also presents a bold new view of Marx that resonates with contemporary discussions regarding the place of revolutionary thought in the post-Communist world.

In his preface, Fredric Jameson writes, “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.”