Theory in Retrospect

In 1906, Benedetto Croce, in his What is Living and What is Dead of the Philosophy of Hegel, inquired about philosophy in a new way. Instead of asking what is true and what false in the established idiom of philosophy, he posed the question in a way that was immediately historical: what was true might…

Introduction I adopt the basic outline of this essay from Miguel Abensour’s distinction of “two interpretations of totalitarianism” in Lefort’s work. In a word, his first critique was directed at defining, denouncing, and overcoming the practices of Soviet totalitarianism (and its influence on the politics of western Communist parties and their intellectual camp-followers). Step-by-step, beginning…

…Man is only individualized through the process of history. He originally appears as a generic being, a tribal being, a herd animal….Exchange itself is a major agent of this individualization…Once the situation is such that man as an isolated person has relation only to himself; the means of establishing himself as an isolated individual have…