Georg Lukács’s Archimedean Socialism

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F67985955%3A_____%2F20%3A00535791" target="_blank" >RIV/67985955:_____/20:00535791 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789004430082_011" target="_blank" >http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789004430082_011</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789004430082_011" target="_blank" >10.1163/9789004430082_011</a>

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Georg Lukács’s Archimedean Socialism

Original language description

In this paper I take up an idea that was central to Lukács’s best-known work “Reification and the Standpoint of the Proletariat”, but which subsequently became the object of extensive criticism and is now one of Lukács’s least accepted ideas: that the antinomies of bourgeois thought can be overcome when looked at from “the standpoint of the proletariat.” Lukács’s diagnosis of modern consciousness is still widely discussed and drawn on for its penetrating analysis of how the commodity economy structures and imposes limits on thought. But Lukács’s proposed response to this situation has been much less readily accepted: the notion that there exists a privileged subject-object of history that can transgress these limits, and that this subject-object is the proletariat. In this paper I do not aim to revive and defend Lukács’s original conception of “the standpoint of the proletariat,” but rather to return to and reinterpret certain of the key conceptual moves made by Lukács in developing this idea. In particular, I would like to draw attention to the ways in which Lukács de-emphasizes the sociological understanding of the proletariat as a set of people defined positively by the fact that they earn wages, in favor of a negative understanding of the proletariat as an entity excluded from bourgeois society, and thus capable of viewing this society, in a sense, from outside, grasping it in its totality. Although this conception is implicit in Lukács’s essay, it is not explicitly laid out in full. I will try to show, however, that this conception is most appropriate to the structure of Lukács’s argument in this essay, and I will reflect further on the significance of this shift in perspective-from within bourgeois society to this position of relative outsiderness. In light of contemporary discussions of the so-called “white working class” opposed to immigrant laborers, at a moment when the political urgency of understanding how and in what ways workers are included within or are excluded from the privileges of national-bourgeois societies, I argue that the concept of exclusion should be seen as central to the concept of the proletariat.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

C - Chapter in a specialist book

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

60301 - Philosophy, History and Philosophy of science and technology

Project

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Continuities

I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace

Publication year

2020

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Book/collection name

Confronting Reification: Revitalizing Georg Lukács’s Thought in Late Capitalism

ISBN

978-90-04-35758-7

Number of pages of the result

17

Pages from-to

186-202

Number of pages of the book

326

Publisher name

Brill

Place of publication

Leiden

UT code for WoS chapter

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