Marx & Simmel Special Issue
DEADLINE: SEPTEMBER 10TH 2018
Editors: Mariana Teixeira (Cebrap) & Arthur Bueno (University of Erfurt)
The year 2018 marks the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth and the 100th anniversary of Georg Simmel’s death. This occasion presents a timely opportunity to reflect on the relation between their works and their significance for critical theory.
The relevance of Marx’s writings to Simmel’s oeuvre is often alluded to, but the precise extent of this influence still calls for further exploration. The continuities are most striking at the level of the diagnosis of modern society: Marx’s analyses of alienation, commodity fetishism, and capital’s quantifying and accelerating tendencies are not only critically discussed but also expanded in Simmel’s investigations of the paradoxes of modern culture, to the point that his Philosophy of Money could appear to a contemporary reader as a psychological counterpart to Capital. Perhaps nowhere else have these affinities been more productively articulated than in Georg Lukács’ 1923 History and Class Consciousness, a book whose importance to 20th century critical theory cannot be overestimated.
Their diagnoses, however, were formulated on very different philosophical and political foundations: whereas Marx relied on the tradition of Left Hegelianism, English political economy, and French socialism, Simmel dialogued mainly with neo-Kantianism, neoclassical economics, and vitalism. To what extent, then, do Simmel’s investigations on money supplement, widen, or contradict Marx’s analysis of capital? Do their different philosophical and methodological starting points prevent a productive dialogue between their arguments? How to reconcile Marxian analyses of class and exploitation with Simmel’s focus on pathologies affecting the totality of modern individuals? In what way can the confrontation between their perspectives become relevant for critical theory today?
Dissonância: Critical Theory Journal welcomes contributions that reflect on these or other aspects of the relation between Marx and Simmel.
If you have any enquiries, please contact the journal (revteoriacritica@gmail.com) or the editors of the Special Issue (mariana.on.teixeira@gmail.com and arthur.bueno@uni-erfurt.de).
