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26 4 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Andrew Feenberg, Lukdcs, Marx and the Soures of Critical Theory. Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981. Pp. xiv + 286. $~4.5 o. Marx's theory was always a tenuous synthesis of disparate elements: a theory of alienation, of historical materialism, of capitalist economic dynamics, of ideology and cultural "fetishism," and of the politics of capitalist breakdown and socialist transformation . As the demise of" that synthesis has become increasingly evident, philosophers concerned with revivifying Marx's project in some form have tended to take their point of departure from one strand or period in this theory and to discard many if not all of its remaining aspects.' The author of the present volume has followed this route but in a manner somewhat out of favor in recent years despite the abiding interest in Marx's 1844 Manuscripts. Like Marcuse who was his teacher, Feenberg has chosen to return to the Manuscripts , to consider how its problematic of a "philosophy of praxis" was further and somewhat differently developed by the early Luk~cs, and then to fuse the best from each attempt into a new effort at a fully satisfactory version. Such a theory would have to be both philosophically coherent and politically realistic, while at the same time avoiding the resignation and despair of Adorno's "negative dialectics." Given a goal so ambitious, one is hardly surprised to discover that Feenberg has not quite succeeded. Yet the path of this discovery is so strewn with rich and keenly analytical reconstructions of the earlier projects, as well as supple and original philosophical departures, that there is no student of Marx and Marxism who will not be enormously indebted for the privilege of having been led along. Feenberg defines a philosophy of praxis as "the attempt to show that the 'antinoroles ' of philosophy can be resolved only in history" (5)' Such an attempt necessarily takes the modern tradition of "identity philosophy" (Descartes through Hegel) with utmost seriousness. It refuses to discard the goal of subject-object identity in favor of a merely empirical and sociological reconstruction of capitalism and its historical background. (The latter is the strategy of the later Marx, which Feenberg regrets). But a philosophy of praxis necessarily also goes beyond this tradition by taking fundamental historical change seriously as the mode by which antimonies are resolved . In a suggestive formulation, Feenberg writes that "[br Lukfics traditional philosophy is in essence theory of culture that does not know itself as such..., reflection on cultural structures misinterpreted as eternal principles disconnected from the accidents of history and social life" (87). To vindicate such an audacious claim, a philosophy of praxis would have to demonstrate its coherence and vitality at both sociological and ontological levels. ' For an earlier reconstruction based essentially on the Marx of ~844 see Bertell Ollman, Alienation (Cambridge, 1971). For one based on The German Ideology of 1845-46 see Helmut Fleischer, Marxism and History, transl. E. Mosbacher (London, 1973). For recent and somewhat different reconstructions based on the 1859 Preface to the Critiqueof PoliticalEconomysee G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx~ Theory of History: A DeJence(Princeton, 1978) and Melvin Rader, Marx~ Interpretation of History (New York, 7979). For a reconstruction based heavily on the Grundris,se see Alfred Schmidt, Hi,~toryand Structure, transl. J. Herf (Boston, 198 l). BOOK REVIEWS 265 Feenberg maintains (persuasively and in contrast to the interpretations of Habermas and Schmidt) that Marx had a fully ontological philosophy of praxis in his early works, but that his attempt there to establish a "deontological ground of revolution" was insufficiently developed and then hopelessly compromised by the more naturalistic tendency of his later historical materialism. Moreover, Marx's theory was inherently unsatisfactory because, in taking human labor as its starting point, its claim that man could overcome all opposition through social revolution became absurd. It remained for Lukfics to perceive that the "key to developing an adequate Marxist theory of revolution" lay in reconceiving Marx's late economic project as a "critique of formal rationality" (58). Much of the rest of the book aims at showing how fruitful this perception was. Yet Lukfics ultimately runs into a difficulty in many respects the opposite...

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