On Changing the World: Essays in Political Philosophy, from Karl Marx to Walter Benjamin

by Michael Löwy

This collection of essays deals with the history of Marxism as a political philosophy and provides a heterodox reintegration of the revolutionary socialist tradition. Michael Lowy highlights cultural, "spiritual," or ethical dimensions largely neglected by the economistic tendency dominant in much Marxist literature - the national question, religion, Utopia, and above all the Romantic impulse in Marxist political culture.
"Politics" does not mean here only questions relating to power and state, but the broad range of issues common to everyday human life. And "philosophy" refers to basic theoretical, methodological, or ethical interrogations. Moreover, this is a political philosophy that aims, as Marx wrote in his famous "Thesis XI on Feuerbach," not only at interpreting but above all at changing the world. That is why the concept of revolution - its various historical and social dimensions-is a central theme in most of these essays.
In addition to Karl Marx, the essays focus on authors belonging to the revolutionary/humanist tendency in Western Rosa Luxemburg, Gramsci, Lukacs and Walter Benjamin. These diverse writers share an understanding of socialism as the only truly human alternative to modern forms of barbarism, a dialectical or Hegelian approach to social reality, and, Lowy stresses, a recognition of Romanticism as one of the key sources of the Marxist critique of capitalist civilization and an important component of the Marxist Utopia.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

176 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1992

About the author

French-Brazilian Marxist sociologist and philosopher. He is presently the emerited research director in social sciences at the CNRS (French National Center of Scientific Research) and lectures at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS; Paris, France). Author of books on Karl Marx, Che Guevara, Liberation Theology, György Lukács, Walter Benjamin and Franz Kafka, he received the Silver Medal of the CNRS in 1994.

Reviews

[Eliot Cohen · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Benjamin took much too seriously the promise contained in the word 'Peace' to be a pacifist" (Marcuse)
"We need to build a socialist society which is more just, more free and more humane and not a society of false conciliation and apparent equality" (Gutierrez)
"To paraphrase an old formulation of Lenin's, today we could say that without revolutionary utopia there will be no revolutionary practice" (Lowy)
"The Messiah shatters history" (Benjamin)

it seems i am now a trotskyite

[Lawrence Cusipag · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some parts of essays on Benjamin are repetitive.

[Jonas Marvin · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent book that introduces some of the key debates in Marxist philosophy and grounds them concretely in the struggle and social relations. Don't want to ruin too much of this book, except to say, the articles on Lenin's philosophical break from the 2nd International; Luxemburg's "socialism or barbarism"; the national question and romanticism are excellent!

[Ting · Rating 4 out of 5]

from karl marx to rosa luxemburg to walter benjamin, a clear navigation of revolutionary romanticism. high recommend for a change of mind