Hegelianism and Marxism to 'poststructualism'

Tutor: Denise Riley

This course will entail readings of some early nineteenth to mid-twentieth century classics of French and German philosophy and social thought, with an emphasis on phenomenology; we will also be tracing their consequences for critical theory.  The aim is to consider the effects of Hegelian thinking on marxism, and on postwar French developments, and to familiarise you with the orgins of some concepts, including those reworked by ‘post-structuralist’ writers.  These may include ‘materialism’, ‘alienation’, ‘ideology’, ‘overdetermination’, ‘existentialsim’ – but several others, too. No previous familiarity with these theories is assumed.  We will work closely with the original texts, reading them as also rhetorical forms.

Preliminary reading:

Andrew Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory, Routledge 1997

David McLellan  The Thought of Karl Marx, Macmillan l971  This gives useful historical details and context, alongside very brief selections from Marx’s writings.

Terry Pinkard, Hegel: a Biography C.U.P., Cambridge, 2000. Situates Hegel  re Goethe, Holderlin, Schelling and others.

Michael Inwood,  A Hegel Dictionary, Blackwell 1992

Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire; Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. Columbia University Press, l987, second edition 2000. 

G R G Mure, The Philosophy of Hegel OUP 1965   A sympathetic and short overall survey.

Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, Harcourt Inc, USA, 1977,.  See Part 11, p39, ‘Hegel’s solution; the philosophy of History’ for a valuable and brief commentary.

Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution : Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1968.  A lucid overview which dates back to 1941, critical for 1968’s rediscovery of marxist Hegelianism. and still of great interest for the light it sheds on Frankfurt School critical theory’s effects.

For a (less than sympathetic) contextual account, see Sunil Khilnani, The Struggle of Reason; French Intellectuals and the Postwar Left, Verso, London l994

Jean Hyppolite,  Studies on Marx and Hegel  (1955) Basic Books, Heinemann, London l969 has a useful short preface which comments on the rediscovery of Hegel in postwar France.

Raymond Williams  Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society.  (Fontana Paperbacks, l976 and later editions)  This gives very helpful short historical accounts of the changing uses of words including ‘alienation’, ‘class’, ‘structural’, ‘dialectic’, ‘idealism’, ‘ideology’.