Peter Harrison

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Peter is Currently Reading

Peter Harrison is currently reading

Microeconomics: A Critical Companion (Political Economy and Development)

by Ben Fine

bookshelves: economics, currently-reading

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Oct 20, 2026 02:40PM

Peter Harrison is currently reading

The Philosophy Of Praxis: Marx, Lukács And The Frankfurt School

by Andrew Feenberg

bookshelves: philosophy, marx, currently-reading

Reading for the 2nd time

read in January 2019

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Peter Harrison said: " In this book, Feenburg connects Marx's writing on alienation from his early "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts" to the early work of Lukacs on totality and reification and then through to the work of the Frankfurt school, and in particular Marcu In this book, Feenburg connects Marx's writing on alienation from his early "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts" to the early work of Lukacs on totality and reification and then through to the work of the Frankfurt school, and in particular Marcuse.

The thread that Feenburg draws out is that of a common "Philosophy of Praxis" - hence the title of the book. This is founded on the connection between practical activity in the world ("praxis") and how we think, understand, and analyse that world. He draws on Marx's early work to describe this not as philosophy but as theory or "metacritique", seeking the emphasise the break between classical German philosophy and the thinking of Marx and subsequent thinkers. The difference is that this metacritique does not take as its starting point the division between thought and reality used for example by Kant. Instead both the early Marx and the early Lukacs see a unity between the two, something Lukacs used the word "totality" to describe.

This means that the basis for our understanding of the world is at its core socially determined. Under capitalism the very structure of knowledge is based on individualism, market forces, and the separation of ownership of the means of production from living labour. It is this separation of people from each and particularly from the outcome of their labour that the early Marx describes as 'alienation'. In Lukacs early work (in particular History and Class Consciousness) he develops this further in the theory of 'reification'. Social relations between people under capitalism become static relations between things, leading to the assumption that social constructs (such as the 'laws' by which the economy operate) become fixed and immutable.

In fact this things are socially determined during the course of history, and our understanding of the world about us is inseparable from the history of society (a point not dissimilar from one made regularly by Zizek about historical subjects positing their own presuppositions). This raises a challenge for Lukacs' view of science, and in particular natural science, as it implies that much of what we 'know' is in fact determined by how capitalism structures society. But if that is the case, how are we to restructure knowledge without returning to the absurdities of a Stalinist "science" driven by the political needs of a ruling party?

Feenburg does a good job of working through the intricacies of these theories and narrating its development from Marx to Lukacs to Marcuse. The end result is that he largely rehabilitates Lukacs in particular from the condemnation of writers such as Leszek Kolakowski whilst not shying away from the challenges and difficulties. A useful book to read for anyone with an interest in the Hegelian strand of Marxism.

You can also read this review on my blog:
https://marxadventure.wordpress.com/2...

Together with the post I wrote about Lukacs based on Fredric Jameson's "Valences of the Dialectic:
https://marxadventure.wordpress.com/2... ...more "

progress:

(page 230 of 272)
— Jan 29, 2019 02:52PM

Feb 03, 2019 03:53AM · see review