Philosophy and Revolution: From Kant to Marx

by Stathis Kouvelakis, G.M. Goshgarian (Translator)

Throughout the nineteenth century, German philosophy was haunted by the specter of the French Revolution. Kant, Hegel and their followers spent their lives wrestling with its heritage, trying to imagine a specifically German path to a “revolution without revolution.” Trapped in a politically ossified 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, reformist path entered into crisis, generating two antagonistic perspectives within the progressive currents of German society. On the one side were those socialists—among them Moses Hess and the young Friedrich Engels—who sought to discover a principle of harmony in social relations, bypassing the question of revolutionary politics. On the other side, the poet Heinrich Heine and the young Karl Marx developed a new perspective, articulating revolutionary rupture, proletarian hegemony and struggle for democracy, thereby redefining the very notion of politics itself.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

450 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2003

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book lol... I really tried hard to engage with it, and like I'm extremely extremely interested in the subject matter (I literally sometimes will read an entire book on this shit in one night, unable to put it down), but wow, it just starts talking about like Foucault and biopower and shit RIGHT at the beginning, I had no idea what was going on, I saw zero connection with any philosophy from Kant to Marx, so... yeah I just stopped reading it. Yikes. There are enough works out there on Kant to Marx (like, too fucking many already) that I'll try instead.

[Ramzey · Rating 1 out of 5]

Better to read Karl Marx or Plekanov this was a total waste of time to help me better understand Marx.

This book reminds me of another book the essence of Nilhism by Emanuel servino which was also a total waste of time.

I don't recommend this book at all, not even as an introduction.

[TishTish · Rating 4 out of 5]

Je ne suis pas de ceux qui aiment lire pour lire. Je ne veux pas dire par là que je n’y prends pas de plaisir, mais plutôt que je ne m’y arrête pas.

Une lecture, en ce qui me concerne, s’inscrit toujours dans quelque chose de plus vaste et s’accompagne, aussi tiré par les cheveux qu’elle puisse paraître, d’une intentionnalité.

Et l’intention, en ouvrant un livre comme celui-ci, ne peut qu’être politique.

Cette lecture avait donc pour but de s’ajouter aux précédentes et de contribuer à la toile de connaissances politiques que je tisse en ce moment, avec évidemment l’objectif de pouvoir ensuite mobiliser ces connaissances sur un plan concret.

C’est en tout cas comme ça, en militant, que j’ai abordé Philosophie et Révolution.

Me voilà embêté. Je ne peux pas dire que je n’ai rien appris. Au contraire, j’ignorais tout ou presque. Le Paris des années 1840 m’était lointain et les débats des jeunes hégéliens abstraits. Pareil pour le caractère archaïque de l'État prussien ou bien l’obsession stérile de la philosophie allemande pour le réformisme… Tout m’était neuf et pourtant, il m’est difficile de secouer cette sensation d’être arrivé après l’heure. Oui, cette lecture longue et surtout exigeante a comme le goût amer qu’on éprouve en arrivant à une soirée où l’hôte a déjà entamé le rangement et où l’on aperçoit les invités à genoux en train de faire leurs lacets.

C’est bien entendu la raison d'être du bouquin qui en est responsable. Philosophie et Révolution est le fruit d’une thèse universitaire rédigée dans les années 90 qui visait à illustrer deux points convergents :

Premièrement, que la pensée de Marx ne surgit pas de nulle part mais qu’elle s’inscrit précisément dans la lignée de ses prédécesseurs et dans une époque bien particulière, la Vormärz. Qu’elle est dépendante de sa condition d'exilé, faisant de lui le parfait croisement de la philosophie allemande et de l’épave de la révolution française. En somme, qu'elle ne pouvait émerger d’un rien.

Secondement, et à mon avis ici réside l'intérêt principal, qu’elle est le début de l’aboutissement de la philosophie allemande qui, après avoir poussé à bout chaque concept, après s’être heurté contre chaque mur qu’elle a bâti, après avoir retourné chaque caillou de sa logique interne, ne pouvait que s’extérioriser, se réaliser. Philosophie et Révolution est donc un travail d'historicisation du mouvement (au sens hégélien) qui a commencé à s'opérer via Marx. Kouvélakis nous montre comment la philosophie, par sa reconfiguration en termes de classes et de conflictualité, peut cesser désormais d’être l'affaire unique des intellectuels pour devenir une force historique réelle.

On pourrait synthétiser en disant que le livre cherche à remettre en contexte la fameuse phrase de Marx “Les philosophes n'ont fait qu'interpréter le monde, il s'agit maintenant de le transformer”, qu’il ne faut donc pas voir comme une condamnation dédaigneuse de la philosophie mais comme un appel à l’effacement de la séparation entre théorie et pratique et, par ce geste, à la réalisation même de la philosophie.

Qu’on ait l’impression d’avoir lu une évidence n’accable en rien Kouvélakis. Cela témoigne plutôt d’un changement de paradigme entre l’époque de l’écriture et le présent. Ce qui, un temps, faisait débat dans le milieu militant est aujourd’hui acquis, et les nœuds se sont déplacés ailleurs. Que Philosophie et Révolution ait été dépassé par le mouvement même qu’il décrit est une bonne chose, et nous ne pouvons que nous en réjouir. La question maintenant est de savoir où exactement nous nous situons dans ce mouvement et quel nœud il nous faut défaire pour continuer à nous tirer vers l’avant.

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

As Jameson put it in the intro, "indeed, the mediations linking Marx back to Hegel himself are the narrative frame of the book." So at the outset this rendering of Philosophy and Revolution follows the trail of Dunayevskaya's Philosophy and Revolution: From Hegel to Sartre and From Marx to Mao, yet oddly she goes unmentioned, and probably unknown to the author. Be that as it may, this work is an extremely interesting work about the historical situation Marx found himself in, but focusing on his "earliest" work, before he was introduced to communism:

To some extent, the defeat of the revolution is fully registered in its actuality, which it confirms without, for all that, offering any guarantee whatsoever for the future.

It seems to me that this offers rich food for thought about history, which is, as we all know, a force that we encounter not in person, by virtue of a mystical illumination or founding anthropological experience, but only indirectly, through its effects. And if it is true that those effects are always apprehended as limits that individual and collective action comes up against in traumatic moments, the fact remains that these limits do not originate in a transcendent absolute; they can therefore be displaced, though not ignored or abolished. This, perhaps, is the only acceptable definition of an absolutely historicist approach, such as the one I have tried to adopt, and, simultaneously, the corresponding political practice, which deserves to be put to the test of experience or, at the very least, of thought.

There are four main critical thinkers studied here—Heinrich Heine (the original flaneur) and Moses Hess on one hand, and Friedrich Engels and "early" K. Marx on the other. All had many similarities: each was a German emigre who lived in Paris; each was focused on the French Revolution as seen through the spectacles of German philosophy—the French being political revolutionaries and the Germans being philosophical (or perhaps you could say theoretical?) revolutionaries; each was in some way also concerned with English and their economics in some way:

Of course, a third term, in addition to the France-Germany pairing, was represented by England – which represented capitalist development, but also political economy. Here, we again find ourselves in a landscape that at first glance recalls the 'three sources of Marxism': the harmonious synthesis theorized by Karl Kautsky. This reading would enjoy extraordinary fortune in the workers' movement's self-representation of the emergence of Marxian theory. Yet research into this problem does not bring to light any quasi-spontaneous convergence leading to such a harmonious synthesis of knowledge. Rather, it shows a difficult process involving an irreducible element of contingency, constituted by way of a constant interplay of discrepancies. It was Gramsci who reflected most deeply on this question, which constituted the point of departure for his key concept of 'translation' – the operator of the passage between these three European realities and languages.

Each was also a student of Hegel, who showed all of them the path forward from Kant; and each was introduced to communism once they became established in the Capital of the Nineteenth Century:

Heine, as I have said, was not the only one to have been struck by the singular destiny of the word 'communism'. On the eve of the 1848 Revolution, Comte, too, took note of it. He saw in this name a collective creation, the fruit of a historical necessity, and considered it serious competition for what he himself was proposing in this period, a 'fundamental coalition between philosophers and proletarians' united around positivism: 'communism, which does not bear anyone's name, is not at all the by-product of an exceptional situation. We must rather see in it the spontaneous progress, rooted in feelings rather than reason, of the true revolutionary spirit, which today tends to be primarily preoccupied with moral questions, and to treat political solutions, in the true sense of the word, as secondary.' Comte even admitted that communism was 'the only movement that is today capable of posing and pursuing, with irresistible energy, the most important question' – that is, the social question.

Furthermore, Kouvkelakis presents Marx's (and Hegel's) dialectic as having the form of a syllogism, or movement from the particular to the universal (and come to think of it Dunayevskaya brings this up too). If the logic of the syllogism moves from a particular statement: all cats are warm blooded, to a more general one: all cats are mammals, and finally to the universally valid combination: all mammals are warm blooded, then it holds for the Marx/Hegelian form of thesis, antithesis or negation, and finally the negation of the negation. The dialectic may somewhat reverse the logic at the beginning—it's about contradiction: the first two terms are opposites rather than one logically following another—but the form holds true, but in the negative: one side negates the other; then the negation itself is overrided on a higher, universal plane (which is not really a synthesis—here's a simple illustration, at least the best I could come up with: it was once believed the earth sat at the center of the universe and the heavens circled around it; Copernicus negated this theory with mathematical proof and theorized the sun was at the center of the universe instead; Galileo showed neither the earth nor the sun were the center, themselves being only one small movement of a universal whole).

Kouvkelakis not only shows the dialectic in a light I personally haven't seen before (though of course I'm no philosopher), but also shows how valuable the Marxist-Hegelian dialectic remains as a method of inquiry. To combine this work with Dunayevskaya's, the negation of the negation, the movement which brings us from the particular to the universal, is the realization of the revolution.