Philosophy by other means?

Author:Howard, D

Article Title:Philosophy by other means?

Abstract:
I attempt to show that Marx was driven by a systematic philosophical goal expressed already in his doctoral dissertation and present throughout his mature political economic theory as well as in his practical political writings. I reconstruct this systematic--and critical--philosophical adventure in order to suggest that it is as philosophy that Marx's work retains its political bite today. In the process, I proposed a reinterpretation of Marx's political theory that, once again, is traced through the entirety of Marx's corpus. The young Marx criticized Hegel's separation of the political from society; he then attempted to reduce the political sphere to civil society; the theory of alienated labor was elaborated as a theory of political economy that replaced the political; but in the end, when all three volumes of Capital and the unpublished Grundrisse are considered systematically, Marx sees capitalism as threatened ultimately by its inability to reflect politically on its own presuppositions, and hence its limits.

Keywords: Marx; Hegel; communism; systematic philosophy; genesis and normativity; phenomenology and logic; critical theory; alienation; political economy; politics; revolution; philosophy of history; democratic theory; democracy

DOI: 10.1111/1467-9973.00204

Source:METAPHILOSOPHY

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