“It Would be Helpful to Know Which Textbook Teaches the ‘Dialectic’ he Advocates.” Inserting Lukács into the Neurath–Horkheimer Debate

Bibliographic Data

ID16995016
AuthorsPaolo Tripodi (0000-0002-2972-9546, University of Turin, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume7
Issue1
Publication date2024-07-23
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueOpen Philosophy (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2543-8875 • E-ISSN: 2543-8875
PublisherWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/opphil-2024-0014
OpenAlexW4400917581
LanguageEN
References cited24

The present article aims at providing some clarification on the Horkheimer-Neurath 1937 debate, so as to make three main claims: (a) around 1937 (even though perhaps neither in the early 1930s, at the time of his review of Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia , nor after the Second World War, at the time of Adorno’s disenchanted statement, “the whole is the false”), Horkheimer belonged to the Hegelian-Marxist tradition stemming from Lukács’s History and Class Conscioussness (1923); (b) notwithstanding Neurath’s semantic and epistemological holism, his fallibilism, his rejection of Wertfreiheit in the social sciences, his commitment to socialism, there is still a gulf between his position and Horkheimer’s, for Neurath did not accept the main methodological claim made by the latter, namely, the Lukács-inspired view that what “constitutes the decisive difference between Marxism and bourgeois thought” is the Hegelian “point of view of totality”; (c) highlighting the main differences between Neurath’s and Lukács’s versions of Marxism – one concerning the very idea of dialectic, and the other concerning the epistemic privilege of the proletariat – can throw some light on and help understand better the distinctive features of Lukács’s Hegelianization of Marxism

Dialectic · Epistemology · Sociology · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · Philosophy · Philosophy, Science, and History

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