The Concept of the Self in Western Marxism

Richard Westerman
Assistant Professor, Dept. of Sociology
University of Alberta
rwesterm@ualberta.ca

Unpublished doctoral thesis on the ideas of freedom, self-consciousness, identity, and
experience as the basis of social critique in the thought of Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno,
Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin, amongst others.


Reification Revalued: Lukács's Phenomenology of Capitalism

Richard Westerman

Prospectus for a book offering a new phenomenological interpretation of the work of Georg Lukács. I interpret his work as a semantics of practice, in which the social being of objects is determined by the structural features of the relations and practices around them. These practices can be understood as intentional, and it is their form that determines the relation of subject to object. This implies that Lukács's theory does not rest on the expressive subject that many previous interpretations (including that of e.g. Habermas) have assumed.

I support this interpretation by tracing Lukács's early interest in Edmund Husserl, Emil Lask, Alois Riegl, and Konrad Fiedler in his so-called "Heidelberg Philosophy of Art" - an unfinished manuscript predating his conversion to Marxism.

I argue that this perspective on Lukács offers new ways to think about social movements, populism, reification, and the problems of late capitalism - and, moreover, has implications for the relation of society and nature.

The Social and the Natural (sample chapter from "Reification Revalued.")

Richard Westerman

This document is the sixth chapter of my book-length project, Reification Revalued: Lukács’s Phenomenology of Capitalism. The book as a whole offers a new reading of Lukács through the lens of his earlier attempts to write a philosophy of art while studying in Heidelberg between 1912 and 1918. Rediscovered and published after his death, these drafts reveal the young Lukács’s explicit engagement with a series of thinkers whose influence on his thought has been underexplored for too long – particularly Edmund Husserl, Emil Lask, Konrad Fiedler, and Alois Riegl.

I argue that his most important work of Marxist thought, History and Class Consciousness, drew heavily on the model of meaning that he developed in his earlier work. Lukács presents social being as a sphere in which objects are constituted as meaningful through a set of intentional practices that may be analysed phenomenologically. Earlier chapters in the book re-examine some of the central arguments of History and Class Consciousness through this lens – with a particular focus on his account of subjectivity. In this chapter, I try to apply this re-reading of Lukács to an area he paid relatively little explicit attention to – that of nature, and the relation between the social and the natural. To do so, I draw on two significant criticisms of HCC – that of Lukács himself in his final years, and that made more recently by Andrew Feenberg. While conceding that Lukács’s account is deficient in many regards, I suggest that there is more to his view than is normally allowed.

For more information on the book as a whole, please see the prospectus at http://goo.gl/bBhQyK

Populism and the Logic of Commodity Fetishism: Lukács's Theory of Reification and Authoritarian Leaders (full text)

Richard Westerman

The continued effects of the 2008 economic crisis and its aftershocks have contributed to the electoral collapse across the world of technocratic centrist parties that had come to dominate in the previous decades. In their place, a number of authoritarian populists such as Donald Trump and Rodrigo Duterte have risen, explicitly setting themselves against the logic of late capitalism. For Georg Lukács, such an opposition is integral to capitalism: he noted the conflicting tendencies in bourgeois thought towards fatalistic belief in an unalterable social system on the one hand, and an irrational faith in so-called ‘great men’ on the other. Drawing on Lukács’s analysis of the logic of the commodity structure as social form, I will explain this through the way capitalist society determines itself as rational in its abstract, quantifiable universality, and excludes all specific content as ‘irrational.’ In this way, I suggest, it symbolically defines its own antithesis – not a revolutionary proletariat, but a mystical nationalism based on a belief in a ‘spiritual’ unity.

Show less ▴