On Changing the World: Essays in Political Philosophy, From Karl Marx to Walter Benjamin

This collection of essays deals with the history of Marxism as a political philosophy and provides a heterodox reintegration of the revolutionary socialist tradition. Michael Lowy highlights cultural, "spiritual," or ethical dimensions largely neglected by the economistic tendency dominant in much Marxist literature - the national question, religion, Utopia, and above all the Romantic impulse in Marxist political culture. "Politics" does not mean here only questions relating to power and state, but the broad range of issues common to everyday human life. And "philosophy" refers to basic theoretical, methodological, or ethical interrogations. Moreover, this is a political philosophy that aims, as Marx wrote in his famous "Thesis XI on Feuerbach," not only at interpreting but above all at changing the world. That is why the concept of revolution - its various historical and social dimensions-is a central theme in most of these essays. In addition to Karl Marx, the essays focus on authors belonging to the revolutionary/humanist tendency in Western Marxism: Rosa Luxemburg, Gramsci, Lukacs and Walter Benjamin. These diverse writers share an understanding of socialism as the only truly human alternative to modern forms of barbarism, a dialectical or Hegelian approach to social reality, and, Lowy stresses, a recognition of Romanticism as one of the key sources of the Marxist critique of capitalist civilization and an important component of the Marxist Utopia.