Abstract
The critique of bourgeois theory found in the work of the Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács is predicated on his argument that no part of capitalist society is free from the effects of a generalized reification, and primarily intellectual activity is very much included in the accusation. In these circumstances, if philosophical and scientific theories are blind to what lies beneath or beyond them, it is because their historically transcendent constructions reflect and reinforce the commodification that is constitutive of all of bourgeois society – economic, political, social and cultural. This article seeks to bring out the detail of these associations as they affect different types of theoretical writing at different times, from Cartesian and Kantian views through positivist science to a good deal of Marxist theory itself.
Highlights
The critique of bourgeois theory found in the work of the Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács is predicated on his argument that no part of capitalist society is free from the effects of a generalized reifi cation, and primarily intellectual activity is very much included in the accusation
[T]he problem of commodities must not be considered in isolation or even regarded as the central problem in economics, but as the central, structural problem of capitalist society in all its aspects
In this case can the structure of commodity-relations be made to yield a model of all the objective forms of bourgeois society together with all the subjective forms corresponding to them
Summary
Lukács’s response to the problem of a transition from a theoretical model of particular social conditions to action taken to alter them lies in an attempt to revive the Hegelian aspect, the dialectic, of Marxism as an intellectual tradition. As explicit statements about dialectics are rarely found in Marx’s own work, Lukács draws to some extent on Engels’s detailed account of the subject, though he adds a very different dimension to its analysis. While Kant ties together the exercise of rationality, a release from external forces and (through moral correctness) freedom of a fundamental kind, for Lukács rationality, in abstracting from actual processes to achieve complete knowledge of a closed system of static forms, can make reality seem open to control, but only at the cost of a new helplessness in the face of everything left outside this system: a world of superfluous material that must be accepted as it is On this schema, and against Kant’s view, the power of human reason is very limited. It was not for nothing that the young Hegel erected his philosophy upon the principle that ‘truth must be understood and expressed not merely as substance, and as subject’ (ibid.; 39, emphasis in original).
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