Coordinates	32°30′20″N45°49′29″N
Region	Western Philosophy
Era	19th-century philosophy
Color	lightsteelblue
Name	François Marie Charles Fourier
Birth date	7 April 1772
Birth place	Besançon
Death date	10 October 1837
School tradition	Utopian socialism
Main interests	civilization, work, economics, intentional communities, desire
Notable ideas	Phalanstère, ''attractive work''
Influenced	Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Joseph Déjacque, Karl Marx, Peter Kropotkin, Stephen Pearl Andrews, Emile Armand, Hakim Bey, Paul Goodman, Andre Breton, Situationist International, Bob Black
Signature	}}

François Marie Charles Fourier (7 April 1772 in Besançon– 10 October 1837 in Paris) was a French philosopher. An influential thinker, some of Fourier's social and moral views, held to be radical in his lifetime, have become main currents in modern society. Fourier is, for instance, credited with having originated the word ''feminism'' in 1837.

Fourier's views inspired the founding of the community called La Reunion near present-day Dallas, Texas as well as several other communities within the United States of America, including the North American Phalanx in New Jersey and Community Place in New York State.

Biography

Fourier was born in Besançon, France on April 7, 1772. The son of a small businessman, Fourier was more interested in architecture than he was in his father's trade. He wanted to become an engineer, but the local Military Engineering School only accepted sons of noblemen. Fourier later said he was grateful that he did not pursue engineering, because it would have consumed too much of his time and taken away from his true desire to help humanity.

His father died in 1781, and Fourier received two-fifths of his father’s estate, valued at more than 200,000 francs. This inheritance enabled Fourier to travel throughout Europe at his leisure. In 1791 he moved from Besançon to Lyon, where he was employed by the merchant M. Bousqnet. Fourier's travels also brought him to Paris, where he worked as the head of the Office of Statistics for a few months. Fourier was not satisfied with making journeys on behalf of others for their commercial benefit. Having a desire to seek knowledge in everything he could, Fourier often would change business firms as well as residences in order to explore and experience new things. From 1791 to 1816 Fourier was employed in the cities of Paris, Rouen, Lyon, Marseille, and Bordeaux. As a traveling salesman and correspondence clerk, his research and thought was time-limited: he complained of "serving the knavery of merchants" and the stupefaction of "deceitful and degrading duties". He took up writing, and his first book was published in 1808.

Fourier died in Paris in 1834.

==Ideas==

Fourier declared that concern and cooperation were the secrets of social success. He believed that a society that cooperated would see an immense improvement in their productivity levels. Workers would be recompensed for their labors according to their contribution. Fourier saw such cooperation occurring in communities he called "phalanxes," based around structures called Phalanstères or "grand hotels." These buildings were four level apartment complexes where the richest had the uppermost apartments and the poorest enjoyed a ground floor residence. Wealth was determined by one's job; jobs were assigned based on the interests and desires of the individual. There were incentives: jobs people might not enjoy doing would receive higher pay. Fourier considered trade, which he associated with Jews, to be the "source of all evil" and advocated that Jews be forced to perform farm work in the phalansteries.

Fourier characterized poverty (not inequality) as the principal cause of disorder in society, and he proposed to eradicate it by sufficiently high wages and by a "decent minimum" for those who were not able to work.

He believed that there were twelve common passions which resulted in 810 types of character, so the ideal phalanx would have exactly 1620 people. One day there would be six million of these, loosely ruled by a world "omniarch", or (later) a World Congress of Phalanxes. He had a touching concern for the sexually rejected; jilted suitors would be led away by a corps of ''fairies'' who would soon cure them of their lovesickness, and visitors could consult the card-index of ''personality types'' for suitable partners for casual sex. He also defended homosexuality as a personal preference for some people.

Fourier was also a supporter of women's rights in a time period where influences like Jean-Jacques Rousseau were prevalent. Fourier believed that all important jobs should be open to women on the basis of skill and aptitude rather than closed on account of gender. He spoke of women as individuals, not as half the human couple. Fourier saw that “traditional” marriage could potentially hurt woman's rights as human beings and thus never married.

Fourier's concern was to liberate every human individual, man, woman, and child, in two senses: Education and the liberation of human passion.

On Education, Fourier felt that "civilized" parents and teachers saw children as little idlers. Fourier felt that this way of thinking was wrong. He felt that children as early as age two and three were very industrious. He listed the dominant tastes in all children to include, but not limited to:

#Rummaging or inclination to handle everything, examine everything, look through everything, to constantly change occupations; #Industrial commotion, taste for noisy occupations; #Aping or imitative mania. #Industrial miniature, a taste for miniature workshops. #Progressive attraction of the weak toward the strong.

Fourier was deeply disturbed by the disorder of his time and wanted to stabilize the course of events which surrounded him. Fourier saw his fellow human beings living in a world full of strife, chaos, and disorder.

Fourier is best remembered for his writings on a new world order based on unity of action and harmonious collaboration. He is also known for certain Utopian pronouncements, such as that the seas would lose their salinity and turn to lemonade, and a coincidental view of climate change, that the North Pole would be milder than the Mediterranean in a future phase of Perfect Harmony.

Influence

The influence of Fourier's ideas in French politics was carried forward into the 1848 Revolution and the Paris Commune by followers such as Victor Considérant.

Numerous references to Fourierism appear in Dostoevsky's political novel ''The Possessed'' first published in 1872. In it Fourierism is used by the revolutionary faithful as something of an insult to their brethren and those within the circle are quick to defend themselves from being labeled a Fourierist. Whether this is because it is a foreign ideology or because they believe it to be archaic is never made entirely clear.

Fourier's ideas also took root in America, with his followers starting phalanxes throughout the country, including one of the most famous, Utopia, Ohio.

Kent Bromley, in his preface to Peter Kropotkin's book ''The Conquest of Bread'', considered Fourier to be the founder of the libertarian branch of socialist thought, as opposed to the authoritarian socialist ideas of Babeuf and Buonarroti.

In the mid-20th century, Fourier's influence began to rise again among writers reappraising socialist ideas outside the Marxist mainstream. After the Surrealists had broken with the French Communist Party, André Breton returned to Fourier, writing ''Ode à Charles Fourier'' in 1947.

Walter Benjamin considered Fourier crucial enough to devote an entire "konvolut" of his massive, projected book on the Paris arcades, the ''Passagenwerk'', to Fourier's thought and influence. He writes: "To have instituted play as the canon of a labor no longer rooted in exploitation is one of the great merits of Fourier," and notes that "Only in the summery middle of the nineteenth century, only under its sun, can one conceive of Fourier's fantasy materialized."

In 1969, the Situationists quoted and adapted Fourier's ''Avis aux civilisés relativement à la prochaine métamorphose sociale'' in their text ''Avis aux civilisés relativement à l'autogestion généralisée''.

Fourier's work has significantly influenced the writings of Gustav Wyneken, Guy Davenport (in his work of fiction ''Apples and Pears''), Peter Lamborn Wilson, and Paul Goodman.

In Whit Stillman's film ''Metropolitan'', idealist Tom describes himself as a Fourierist, and debates the success of social experiment Brook Farm with another of the characters.

David Harvey, in the appendix to his book ''Spaces of Hope'', offers a personal utopian vision of the future much like Fourier's ideas.

Nathaniel Hawthorne in chapter 7 of his novel The Blithedale Romance gently mocks Fourier saying

Writers of the post-left anarchy tendency have praised the writings of Fourier. Bob Black in his work ''The Abolition of Work'' advocates Fourier´s idea of attractive work as a solution to his criticisms of work conditions in contemporary society. Hakim Bey manifested that Fourier "lived at the same time as De Sade & (William) Blake, & deserves to be remembered as their equal or even superior. Those other two apostles of freedom & desire had no political disciples, but in the middle of the 19th century literally hundreds of communes (phalansteries) were founded on fourierist principles".

See also

Alphadelphia Association

Brook Farm

Alphonse Toussenel - A disciple of Fourier

Society of the Friends of Truth

Bibliography

Fourier's works

Fourier, Charles. ''Théorie des quatre mouvements et des destinées générales'' (Theory of the four movements and the general destinies), appeared anonymously in Lyon in 1808.

Fourier, Charles. ''Oeuvres complètes de Charles Fourier''. 12 vols. Paris: Anthropos, 1966-1968.

Jones, Gareth Stedman, and Ian Patterson, eds. ''Fourier: The Theory of the Four Movements''. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.

Fourier, Charles. ''Design for Utopia: Selected Writings''. Studies in the Libertarian and Utopian Tradition. New York: Schocken, 1971. ISBN 0-8052-0303-6

On Fourier and his works

pp. 213–255 pg. 59

On Fourierism and his posthumous influence

Barthes, Roland ''Sade Fourier Loyola''. Paris: Seuil, 1971.

Brock, William H. Phalanx on a Hill: Responses to Fourierism in the Transcendentalist Circle. Diss., Loyola U Chicago, 1996.

Desroche, Henri. ''La Société festive. Du fouriérisme écrit au fouriérismes pratiqués''. Paris: Seuil, 1975.

Engels, Frederick. ''Anti-Dühring''. 25:1-309. Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works [MECW]. 46 vols. to date. Moscow: Progress, 1975.

Notes

External links

The Lemonade Ocean & Modern Times

''Selections from the Works of Fourier'' a 1901 collection

Charles Fourier Archive at marxists.org

Category:1772 births Category:1837 deaths Category:People from Besançon Category:19th-century philosophers Category:French feminists Category:French philosophers Category:French socialists Category:Free love advocates Category:Male feminists Category:Philosophy of sexuality Category:Utopian socialists Category:Utopists Category:Founders of utopian communities Category:Burials at Montmartre Cemetery, Paris

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Coordinates	32°30′20″N45°49′29″N
region	Western Philosophers
era	20th-century philosophy
color	#B0C4DE
name	Walter Benjamin
birth date	July 15, 1892
birth place	Berlin, German Empire
death date	September 26, 1940
death place	Portbou, Catalonia, Spain
school tradition	Western Marxism
main interests	Literary theory, Aesthetics, Technology, Epistemology, Philosophy of language, Philosophy of history
influences	AdornoBachofenBaudelaireBrechtKierkegaardLukácsMarxNietzscheProustSchmittScholem
influenced	AdornoAgambenArendtDerridaMerquiorScholemSontagTaussigCalassoŽižekLöwyBhabha}}

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (, 15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940) was a German-Jewish intellectual, who functioned variously as a literary critic, philosopher, sociologist, translator, radio broadcaster and essayist. His work, combining elements of historical materialism, German idealism and Jewish mysticism, has made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory and Western Marxism, and has sometimes been associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. As a literary critic, among his major works are essays on Goethe's novel ''Elective Affinities''; the work of Franz Kafka and Karl Kraus; translation theory; the stories of Nikolai Leskov; the work of Marcel Proust and perhaps most significantly, the poetry of Charles Baudelaire. He also made major translations into German of the ''Tableaux Parisiens'' section of Baudelaire's ''Les Fleurs du mal'' and parts of Proust's ''À la recherche du temps perdu''.

His turn to Marxism in the 1930s was partly due to the influence of Bertolt Brecht, whose critical aesthetics developed epic theatre and its ''Verfremdungseffekt'' (defamiliarisation, alienation). An earlier influence was friend Gershom Scholem, founder of the academic study of the Kabbalah and of Jewish mysticism.

Influenced by the Swiss anthropologist Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815–87), Walter Benjamin coined the term “auratic perception”, denoting the aesthetic faculty by means of which civilization may recover an appreciation of myth. Benjamin's work is often cited in academic and literary studies, especially the essays "The Task of the Translator" (1923) and "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936).

Life

Walter Benjamin and his younger brother, Georg (1895–1942), and younger sister, Dora (1901–46), were born to a wealthy business family of assimilated Jews in the Berlin of the German Empire (1871–1918). The patriarch, Emil Benjamin, was a banker in Paris who relocated from France to Germany, where he worked as an antiques trader in Berlin; he later married Pauline Schönflies. In 1902, ten-year-old Walter was enrolled to the Kaiser Friedrich School in Charlottenburg; he completed his secondary school studies ten years later. Personally, Walter Benjamin was a boy of fragile health, so, in 1905, the family sent him to boarding school in the Thuringian countryside, for two years; in 1907, returned to Berlin, his schooling resumed at the Kaiser Friedrich School.

In 1912, at the age of twenty, he enrolled at the Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg, but, at summer semester's end, returned to Berlin, then matriculated into the Humboldt University of Berlin, to continue studying philosophy. Elected president of the ''Freie Studentenschaft'' (Free Students Association), Benjamin wrote essays arguing for educational and general cultural change. When not re-elected as student association president, he returned to Freiburg University, and studied, with particular attention to the lectures of Heinrich Rickert; in that time he travelled to France and Italy.

In 1914, as Germany and France fought each other in the First World War (1914–18), the intellectual Walter Benjamin began faithfully translating the works of the 19th-century French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–67). The next year, 1915, he moved to Munich, and continued his schooling at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where he met Rainer Maria Rilke and Gershom Scholem; the latter became a friend. In that year, Benjamin wrote about the 18th-century Romantic German poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843).

In 1917 he transferred to the University of Bern; there, he met Ernst Bloch, and Dora Sophie Pollak (née Kellner) (1890–1964), whom he later married, and they had a son, Stefan Rafael (1918–72). In 1919 Benjamin earned his doctoral degree ''cum laude'' with the dissertation essay ''Begriff der Kunstkritik in der Deutschen Romantik'' (The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism). Later, unable to support himself and family, the Benjamins returned to Berlin, and resided with his parents; in 1921, he published the essay ''Kritik der Gewalt'' (The Critique of Violence).

In 1923, when the ''Institut für Sozialforschung'' (Institute for Social Research) was founded, and later became home to the Frankfurt School, he published ''Charles Baudelaire, Tableaux Parisiens''. In that time he became acquainted with Theodor Adorno and befriended Georg Lukács, whose ''The Theory of the Novel'' (1920) much influenced him. Meanwhile, the inflation in the Weimar Republic, consequent to the First World War, made it difficult for the businessman Emil Benjamin to continue supporting his intellectual son's family, Walter, Dora, and Stefan. At year's end of 1923, his best friend, Gershom Scholem, emigrated to Palestine, a country ruled under the British Mandate of Palestine; despite repeated invitations, he failed to persuade Walter Benjamin (and family) to leave the Continent for the Middle East.

In 1924, Hugo von Hoffmansthal, in the ''Neue Deutsche Beiträge'' magazine, published ''Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften'' (Goethe’s Elective Affinities), by Walter Benjamin, about Goethe’s third novel, ''Die Wahlverwandtschaften'' (1809). Later that year, Benjamin and Ernst Bloch resided in the Italian island of Capri; Benjamin wrote ''Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiel'' (The Origin of German Tragic Drama), as an ''habilitation'' dissertation meant to qualify him as a tenured university professor in Germany. He also read, at Bloch’s suggestion, ''History and Class Consciousness'' (1923), by Georg Lukács. In the event, he also met the Latvian Bolshevik and actress Asja Lācis, then residing in Moscow; she became his lover and was a lasting intellectual influence upon him.

A year later, in 1925, the Goethe University Frankfurt, at Franfurt am main, rejected ''The Origin of German Tragic Drama'' as Benjamin’s qualification for the ''habilitation'' teaching credential; he was not to be an academic instructor. Working with Franz Hessel (1880–1941), he translated the first volumes of ''À la Recherche du Temps Perdu'' (In Search of Lost Time), by Marcel Proust. The next year, 1926, he began writing for the German newspapers ''Frankfurter Zeitung'' (The Frankfurt Times) and ''Die Literarische Welt'' (The Literary World), that paid enough for him to reside in Paris for some months. In December 1926 (the year his father, Emil Benjamin, died), Walter Benjamin went to Moscow to meet Asja Lācis, and found her ill, in a sanatorium.

In 1927, he began ''Das Passagen-Werk'' (The Arcades Project), his incompleted ''magnum opus'', a study of 19th-century Parisian life. The same year, he saw Gershom Scholem in Berlin, for the last time, and considered emigrating from Continental Europe (Germany) to Palestine. In 1928, he and Dora separated, then divorced two years later, in 1930; he published ''Einbahnstraße'' (One-Way Street), and a revision of his ''habilitation'' dissertation ''Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels'' (The Origin of German Tragic Drama). In 1929 Berlin, Asja Lācis, then assistant to Bertolt Brecht, socially presented the intellectuals to each other. In that time, he also briefly embarked upon an academic career, as an instructor at the University of Heidelberg.

In 1932, during the turmoil preceding Adolf Hitler’s assumption of the office of Chancellor of Germany, Walter Benjamin left Germany for the Spanish island of Ibiza, there residing some months; he then moved to Nice, where he considered killing himself. Perceiving the socio-political and cultural significance of the Reichstag fire (27 February 1933) as the ''de facto'' Nazi assumption of full power in Germany, then manifest with the subsequent persecution of the Jews, he moved to Paris, but, before doing so, he sought shelter in Svendborg, at Bertold Brecht's house, and at Sanremo, where his ex-wife Dora lived.

As he ran out of money, Benjamin collaborated with Max Horkheimer, and received funds from the Institute for Social Research, later going permanently into exile. In Paris, he met other German artists and intellectuals refuged there from Germany; he befriended Hannah Arendt, novelist Hermann Hesse, and composer Kurt Weill. In 1936, ''L'Œuvre d'Art à l'Époque de sa Reproductibilité Technique'' (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction) was first published, in French, by Max Horkheimer in the ''Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung'' journal of the Institute for Social Research.

In 1937 Benjamin worked on ''Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire'' (The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire), met Georges Bataille (to whom he later entrusted the ''Arcades Project'' manuscript), and joined the College of Sociology. In 1938 he paid a last visit to Bertolt Brecht, who was exiled to Denmark. Meanwhile, the Nazi Régime stripped German Jews of their German citizenship; now a stateless man, the French government arrested and for three months incarcerated Walter Benjamin in a prison camp near Nevers, in central Burgundy.

Returning to Paris in January 1940, he wrote ''Über den Begriff der Geschichte'' (Theses on the Philosophy of History). As the Wehrmacht defeated the French defence, on 13 June, Benjamin and his sister fled Paris to the town of Lourdes, just a day before the Germans entered Paris (14 June 1940), with orders to arrest him at his flat. In August, he obtained a travel visa to the US, that Max Horkheimer had negotiated for him. In eluding the Gestapo, Benjamin planned to travel to the US from neutral Portugal, which he expected to reach by traversing Gen. Franco’s fascist Spain, then ostensibly a neutral country.

The historical record indicates he safely crossed the French-Spanish border and arrived at the coastal town of Portbou, in Catalonia. Yet, the Franco government had cancelled all transit visas and ordered the Spanish police to return such persons to France, including the Jewish refugee group Benjamin had joined. Expecting repatriation to Nazi hands, Walter Benjamin killed himself with an overdose of morphine tablets on the night of 25 September 1940, yet the official Portbou register records 26 September 1940 as the official date of death.

Works

The most important of Walter Benjamin’s works are:

''Zur Kritik der Gewalt'' (Critique of Violence, 1921).

''Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften'' (Goethe’s Elective Affinities, 1922).

''Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels'' (Origin of German Tragic Drama, 1928).

''Einbahnstraße'' (One Way Street, 1928).

"Karl Kraus" (1931 in the Frankfurter Zeitung).

''Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit'' (''The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'', 1936).

''Berliner Kindheit um 1900'' (Berlin Childhood around 1900, 1950).

''Über den Begriff der Geschichte'' (On the Concept of History / Theses on the Philosophy of History), 1940.

''Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire'' (The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire, 1938).

Walter Benjamin corresponded much with Theodor Adorno and Bertolt Brecht, and was occasionally funded by the Frankfurt School under the direction of Adorno and Horkheimer, even from their New York City residence. The competing influences — Brecht’s Marxism, Adorno’s critical theory, Gerschom Scholem’s Jewish mysticism — were central to his work, although their philosophic differences remained unresolved. Moreover, the critic Paul de Man argued that the intellectual range of Benjamin’s writings flows dynamically among those three intellectual traditions, deriving a critique via juxtaposition; the exemplar synthesis is "On the Concept of History" (''Theses on the Philosophy of History'').

The ninth thesis in the essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History” presents:

''The Origin of German Tragic Drama''

''Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels'' (The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 1928), is a critical study of German baroque drama, as well as the political and cultural climate of Germany during the Counter-Reformation (1545–1648). Benjamin presented the work to the University of Frankfurt in 1925 as the (post-doctoral) dissertation meant to earn him the ''Habilitation'' (qualification) to become a university instructor in Germany.

Professor Schultz of University of Frankfurt found ''The Origin of German Tragic Drama'' inappropriate for his ''Germanistik'' department (Department of German Language and Literature), and passed it to the Department of Aesthetics (philosophy of art), the readers of which likewise dismissed Benjamin's work. The faculty, among them Max Horkheimer, recommended that Benjamin withdraw ''Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels'' as a ''Habilitation'' dissertation to avoid formal rejection and public embarrassment. He heeded the advice, and three years later, in 1928, he published ''The Origin of German Tragic Drama'' as a book.

The Arcades Project

The ''Passagenwerk'' (Arcades Project, 1927–40), was Walter Benjamin’s final, incomplete book about Parisian city life in the 19th century, especially about the ''Passages couverts de Paris'' the covered passages that extended the culture of ''flânerie'' (idling and people-watching) when inclement weather made ''flânerie'' infeasible in the boulevards and streets proper.

Writing style

Susan Sontag said that in Walter Benjamin’s writing, sentences did not originate ordinarily, do not progress into one another, and delineate no obvious line of reasoning, as if each sentence “had to say everything, before the inward gaze of total concentration dissolved the subject before his eyes”, a “freeze-frame baroque” style of writing and cogitation. “His major essays seem to end just in time, before they self-destruct”. The difficulty of Benjamin's writing style is essential to his philosophical project. Fascinated by notions of reference and constellation, his goal in later works was to use intertexts to reveal aspects of the past that cannot, and should not, be understood within greater, monolithic constructs of historical understanding.

Walter Benjamin’s writings identify him as a modernist for whom the philosophic merges with the literary: logical philosophic reasoning cannot account for all experience, especially not for self-representation via art. He presented his stylistic concerns in ''The Task of the Translator'', wherein he posits that a literary translation, by definition, produces deformations and misunderstandings of the original text. Moreover, in the deformed text, otherwise hidden aspects of the original, source-language text are elucidated, while previously obvious aspects become unreadable. Such translational mortification of the source text is productive; when placed in a specific constellation of works and ideas, newly revealed affinities, between historical objects, appear and are productive of philosophical truth.

Death

Benjamin committed suicide in Portbou at the French–Spanish border while attempting to escape from the Nazis. The people he was with were told by the Spanish police that they would be deported back to France, which would have hampered Benjamin's plans to get to the United States. While staying in the ''Hotel de Francia,'' he apparently took some morphine pills and died on the night of 25/26 September 1940.

The fact that he was buried in the consecrated section of a Roman Catholic cemetery would indicate that his death was not announced as a suicide. The other persons in his party were allowed passage the next day, and safely reached Lisbon on 30 September. A manuscript of Benjamin's "On the Concept of History" was passed to Theodor Adorno by Hannah Arendt, who crossed the French-Spanish border at Portbou a few months later, and was subsequently published by the Institute for Social Research (temporarily relocated to New York) in 1942.

A completed manuscript, which Benjamin had carried in his suitcase, disappeared after his death and has not been recovered. Some critics speculate that it was his ''Arcades Project'' in a final form; this is very unlikely as the author's plans for the work had changed in the wake of Adorno's criticisms in 1938, and it seems clear that the work was flowing over its containing limits in his last years. As the last finished piece of work from Benjamin, the ''Theses on the Philosophy of History'' (noted above) is often cited; Adorno claimed this had been written in the spring of 1940, weeks before the Germans invaded France.

While this is not completely certain, it is clearly one of his last works, and the final paragraph, about the Jewish quest for the Messiah provides a harrowing final point to Benjamin's work, with its themes of culture, destruction, Jewish heritage and the fight between humanity and nihilism. He brings up the interdiction, in some varieties of Judaism, to try to determine the year when the Messiah would come into the world, and points out that this did not make Jews indifferent to the future "for every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter."

Legacy

Since the publication of ''Schriften'' (Writings, 1955), fifteen years after his death, the work of Walter Benjamin, especially the essay ''The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'' (1936), is of seminal importance to academics in the humanities disciplines.

See also

Gertrud Kolmar

Angelus Novus

Profane illumination

References

Further reading

Primary literature

''The Arcades Project'', Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-00802-2

''Berlin Childhood Around 1900'', Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-02222-X

''Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet In The Era Of High Capitalism''. ISBN 0-902308-94-7

''The Complete Correspondence, 1928-1940'', Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-15427-4

''The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940''. ISBN 0-226-04237-5

''The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem''. ISBN 0-674-17415-1

''Illuminations''. ISBN 0-8052-0241-2

''Moscow Diary'', Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-58744-8

''One Way Street and Other Writings''. ISBN 0-86091-836-X

''Reflections''. ISBN 0-8052-0802-X

''On Hashish'', Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-02221-1

''The Origin of German Tragic Drama''. ISBN 0-86091-837-8

''Understanding Brecht''. ISBN 0-902308-99-8

''Selected Writings'' in four volumes Harvard University Press:

* Volume 1, 1913-1926, ISBN 0-674-94585-9

* Volume 2, 1927-1934, ISBN 0-674-94586-7

* Volume 3, 1935-1938, ISBN 0-674-00896-0

* Volume 4, 1938-1940, ISBN 0-674-01076-0

''The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire'', Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-02287-4,

''The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media'', Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-02445-1

''Walter Benjamin's Archive: Images, Texts, Signs''. Edited by Ursula Marx, Gudrun Schwarz, Michael Schwarz, Erdmut Wizisla. ISBN 978-1-84467-196-0

Secondary literature

Adorno, Theodor. (1967). ''Prisms (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought).'' London: Neville Spearman Ltd. [reprinted by MIT Press, Cambridge, 1981. ISBN 978-0-262-01064-1 (cloth) -- ISBN 978-0-262-51025-7 (paper)]

Victor Malsey, Uwe Raseh, Peter Rautmann, Nicolas Schalz, Rosi Huhn, ''Passages. D'après Walter Benjamin'' / ''Passagen. Nach Walter Benjamin''. Mainz: Herman Schmidt, 1992. ISBN 3-87439-251-1

Benjamin, Andrew and Peter Osborne, eds. (1993). ''Walter Benjamin's Philosophy: Destruction and Experience.'' London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-08368-3 (cloth) -- ISBN 978-0-415-08369-0 (paper) [reprinted by Clinamen Press, Manchester, 2000. ISBN 978-1-903083-08-6 (paper)]

Buck-Morss, Susan. (1991). ''The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project.'' Cambridge: The MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-02268-2 (cloth) -- ISBN 978-0-262-52164-2 (paper)

Betancourt, Alex. (2008). ''Walter Benjamin and Sigmund Freud: Between Theory and Politics''. Saarbrücken, Germany: VDM Verlag. ISBN 978-3-8364-3854-4

Derrida, Jacques. (2001). "Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority'," in ''Acts of Religion,'' Gil Anidjar, ed. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-92400-9 (cloth) -- ISBN 978-0-415-92401-6

de Man, Paul. (1986). "'Conclusions': Walter Benjamin's 'Task of the Translator'," in ''The Resistance to Theory''. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. pp. 73–105. ISBN 0-8166-1294-3

Ferris, David S., ed. (1996). ''Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions.'' Stanford: Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-2569-9 (cloth) -- ISBN 978-0-8047-2570-5 (paper)

__________. (2004). ''The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin.'' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-79329-7 (cloth) ISBN 0-521-79724-1 (paper)

Jacobs, Carol. (1999). ''In the Language of Walter Benjamin''. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. ISBN 978-0-8018-6031-7 (cloth) -- ISBN 978-0-8018-6669-2 (paper)

Jennings, Michael. (1987). ''Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin's Theory of Literary Criticism.'' Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0-8014-2006-1 (cloth)

Jacobson, Eric. (2003). ''Metaphysics of the Profane: The Political Theology of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem.'' New York: Columbia University Press, ISBN 978-0-231-12657-1, S. 352ff.

Kermode, Frank. "Every Kind of Intelligence; Benjamin," ''New York Times.'' 30 July 1978.

Kirst-Gundersen, Karoline. ''Walter Benjamin's Theory of Narrative.'' Dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1989

Leslie, Esther. (2000). ''Walter Benjamin, Overpowering Conformism.'' London: Pluto Press. ISBN 978-0-7453-1573-7 (cloth) -- ISBN 978-0-7453-1568-3 (paper)

Lindner, Burkhardt, ed. (2006). ''Benjamin-Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung'' Stuttgart: Metzler. ISBN 978-3-476-01985-1 (paper)

Löwy, Michael. (2005). ''Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin's ‘On the Concept of History.’'' Trans. Chris Turner. London and New York: Verso.

Menke, Bettine. (2010). ''Das Trauerspiel-Buch. Der Souverän – das Trauerspiel – Konstellationen – Ruinen.'' Bielefeld: transcript-Verlag. ISBN 978-3-89942-634-2.

Missac, Pierre (1996). ''Walter Benjamin's Passages.'' Cambridge: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-13305-0 (cloth) -- ISBN 978-0-262-63175-4(paper)

Perret, Catherine "Walter Benjamin sans destin", Ed. La Différence, Paris, 1992, rééd. revue et augmentée d'une préface, Bruxelles, éd. La Lettre volée, 2007.

Perrier, Florent, ed., Palmier, Jean-Michel (Author), Marc Jimenez (Preface). (2006) ''Walter Benjamin. Le chiffonnier, l'Ange et le Petit Bossu.'' Paris: Klincksieck. ISBN 978-2-252-03591-7

Pignotti, Sandro (2009): ''Walter Benjamin - Judentum und Literatur. Tradition, Ursprung, Lehre mit einer kurzen Geschichte des Zionismus.'' Rombach, Freiburg ISBN 978-3-7930-9547-7

Plate, S. Brent (2004) ''Walter Benjamin, Religion and Aesthetics''. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-96992-5

Roberts, Julian (1982). ''Walter Benjamin''. London: Macmillan.

Rudel, Tilla (2006) : ''Walter Benjamin L’Ange assassiné'', éd. Menges - Place Des Victoires, 2006

Scheurmann, Ingrid, ed., Scheurmann, Konrad ed., Unseld, Siegfried (Author), Menninghaus, Winfried (Author), Timothy Nevill (Translator) (1993). ''For Walter Benjamin - Documentation, Essays and a Sketch including: New Documents on Walter Benjamin's Death.'' Bonn: AsKI e.V. ISBN 3-930370-00-X

Scheurmann, Ingrid / Scheurmann, Konrad (1995). ''Dani Karavan - Hommage an Walter Benjamin. Der Gedenkort 'Passagen' in Portbou. Homage to Walter Benjamin. 'Passages' Place of Remembrance at Portbou.'' Mainz: Zabern. ISBN 3-8053-1865-0

Scheurmann, Konrad (1994) ''Passages Dani Karavan: An Environment in Remembrance of Walter Benjamin Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.'' Bonn: AsKI e.V. ISBN 3-930370-01-8

Schiavoni, Giulio. (2001). ''Walter Benjamin: Il figlio della felicità. Un percorso biografico e concettuale.'' Turin: Giulio Einaudi Editore. ISBN 88-06-15729-9

Scholem, Gershom. (2003). ''Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship.'' Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: New York Review Books. ISBN 1-59017-032-6

Steinberg, Michael P., ed. (1996). ''Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History.'' Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0-8014-3135-7 (cloth) -- ISBN 978-0-8014-8257-1 (paper)

Steiner, Uwe. (2010). ''Walter Benjamin: An Introduction to his Work and Thought.'' Trans. Michael Winkler. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-2267-7221-9

Taussig, Michael. (2006). Walter Benjamin's Grave Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226790046.

Weber, Samuel. (2008). ''Benjamin's -abilities.'' Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-02837-6 (cloth) -- ISBN 0-674-04606-4 (paper)

Witte, Bernd. (1996). ''Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography''. New York: Verso. ISBN 978-1-85984-967-5

Wizisla, Erdmut. 2009. ''Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht — The Story of a Friendship''. Translated by Christine Shuttleworth. London / New Haven: Libris / Yale University Press. ISBN 978-1-870352-78-9 [Contains a complete translation of the newly discovered Minutes of the meetings around the putative journal ''Krise und Kritik'' (1931)].

Wolin, Richard, ''Telos'' 43, ''An Aesthetic of Redemption: Benjamin's Path to Trauerspiel''. New York: Telos Press Ltd., Spring 1980. (Telos Press).

Wolin, Richard, ''Telos'' 53, ''The Benjamin-Congress: Frankfurt (July 13, 1982)''. New York: Telos Press Ltd., Fall 1982. (Telos Press).

External links

Walter Benjamin, at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The Internationale Walter Benjamin Gesellschaft. ''In English and German.'' (Defunct)

Walter Benjamin at Marxists.org

Fragments of the Passagenwerk: The Arcades Project, Giles Peaker

Protocols to the Experiments on Hashish, Opium and Mescaline Translated by Scott J. Thompson, copyright March 25, 1997

From 'Rausch' to Rebellion An introductory essay by Scott J. Thompson

Paris, capitale du XIXe siècle In French

Walter Benjamin Research Syndicate

"Walter Benjamin for Historians", ''American Historical Review,'' Vol. 106, No. 5. December 2001.

''Who Killed Walter Benjamin?'', a documentary film about the circumstances of Benjamin's death by David Mauas

''Paris, capital of 19th century'', an essay/experimental film about the Passagen-Werk by Benjamin Bardou, France, 2010, 10'

''The Mysterious Death of Walter Benjamin'', Stephen Schwartz, The Weekly Standard, Volume 006, Issue 37, 11 June 2001

Through the Trapdoor: review of ''The Narrow Foothold'' by Carina Birman describes Benjamin's final days

The Arcades Project or The Rhetoric of Hypertext, Heather Marcelle Crickenberger

The Dialectics of Allegoresis: Historical Materialism in Benjamin's ''Illuminations'', John Parker

Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project - The Passagenwerk

Category:1892 births Category:1940 deaths Category:People from Berlin Category:20th-century philosophers Category:Philosophers of language Category:Continental philosophers Category:Frankfurt School Category:German philosophers Category:Jewish philosophers Category:German-language philosophers Category:German Jews Category:German literary critics Category:Marxist theorists Category:Political philosophers Category:German Marxists Category:Marxist writers Category:Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich alumni Category:University of Freiburg alumni Category:Humboldt University of Berlin alumni Category:Bibliophiles Category:Book and manuscript collectors Category:Translation scholars Category:People from the Province of Brandenburg Category:German Literary theorists Category:Franz Kafka scholars Category:Urban theorists Category:Philosophers who committed suicide

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Coordinates	32°30′20″N45°49′29″N
region	Western Philosophy
Era	20th / 21st-century philosophy
Color	#B0C4DE |
name	Murray Bookchin
Birth date	January 14, 1921
Birth place	New York City, New York
Death date
Death place	Burlington, Vermont
School tradition	founder of social ecology and Communalism
Main interests	Social ecology, Communalism, libertarian municipalism, social hierarchy, dialectics, post-scarcity anarchism, libertarian socialism, ethics, environmental sustainability, conservationism, history of popular revolutionary movements
Influences	Aristotle, Baruch Spinoza, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Peter Kropotkin, Hans Jonas, Denis Diderot, Frankfurt School
Notable ideas	social ecology, Communalism, libertarian municipalism, dialectical naturalism| }}

Murray Bookchin (January 14, 1921 – July 30, 2006) was an American libertarian socialist author, orator, and philosopher. A pioneer in the ecology movement, Bookchin was the founder of the social ecology movement within anarchist, libertarian socialist and ecological thought. He was the author of two dozen books on politics, philosophy, history, and urban affairs as well as ecology. In the late 1990s he became disenchanted with political Anarchism and founded his own libertarian socialist ideology called Communalism.

Bookchin was an anti-capitalist and vocal advocate of the decentralisation of society along ecological and democratic lines. His writings on libertarian municipalism, a theory of face-to-face, assembly democracy, had an influence on the Green movement and anti-capitalist direct action groups such as Reclaim the Streets.

Life and writings

Bookchin was born in New York City to the Russian Jewish immigrants Nathan Bookchin and Rose (Kaluskaya) Bookchin. He grew up in the Bronx, where his grandmother, Zeitel, a Socialist Revolutionary, imbued him with Russian populist ideas. After her death in 1930, he joined the Young Pioneers, the Communist youth organization (for children 9 to 14) and the Young Communist League (for older children) in 1935. He attended the Workers School near Union Square, where he studied Marxism. In the late 1930s he broke with Stalinism and gravitated toward Trotskyism, joining the Socialist Workers Party. In the early 1940s he worked in a foundry in Bayonne, New Jersey where he was an organizer and shop steward for the United Electrical Workers as well as a recruiter for the SWP. Within the SWP he adhered to the Goldman-Morrow faction, which broke away after the war ended. He was an auto-worker and UAW member at the time of the great General Motors strike of 1945-46. With the failure of the proletariat to fulfil the revolutionary role in which Marxism had cast it, Bookchin realized that the working class was not a revolutionary force and broke with Marxism-Leninism.

From 1947 he collaborated with a fellow lapsed Trotskyist, the German expatriate Josef Weber, in New York in the Movement for a Democracy of Content, a group of 20 or so post-Trotskyists who collectively edited the periodical ''Contemporary Issues''. Now that scientific socialism (aka Marxism) had failed, CI embraced utopianism. CI-ers believed that previous attempts to create utopia had foundered on the necessity of toil and drudery; but now modern technology had obviated the need for human toil—a liberatory development. To achieve this "post-scarcity" society, Bookchin developed a theory of ecological decentralism. The CI magazine published Bookchin's first articles, including the pathbreaking "The Problem of Chemicals in Food" (1952). In 1958 Bookchin defined himself as an anarchist, seeing parallels between anarchism and ecology. His first book, ''Our Synthetic Environment,'' was published under the pseudonym Lewis Herber in 1962, a few months before Rachel Carson's ''Silent Spring''. The book described a broad range of environmental ills but received little attention because of its political radicalism.

In 1964 Bookchin joined the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, and protested racism at the 1964 World's Fair. 1964-67, while living on Manhattan's Lower East Side, he cofounded and was the principal figure in the New York Federation of Anarchists. His groundbreaking essay "Ecology and Revolutionary Thought" introduced ecology as a concept in radical politics. In 1968 he founded another group that published the influential ''Anarchos'' magazine, which published that and other innovative essays on post-scarcity and on ecological technologies like solar and wind energy, and on decentralization and miniaturization. Lecturing throughout the United States, he helped popularize the concept of ecology to the counterculture. His widely republished 1969 essay ''Listen, Marxist!'' warned Students for a Democratic Society (in vain) against an impending takeover by a Marxist group. "Once again the dead are walking in our midst," he wrote, "ironically, draped in the name of Marx, the man who tried to bury the dead of the nineteenth century. So the revolution of our own day can do nothing better than parody, in turn, the October Revolution of 1917 and the civil war of 1918-1920, with its 'class line,' its Bolshevik Party, its 'proletarian dictatorship,' its puritanical morality, and even its slogan, 'soviet power.'" These and other influential 1960s essays are anthologized in ''Post Scarcity Anarchism'' (1971)

In 1969-70 he taught at Alternate U, a countercultural radical school based on Fourteenth Street in Manhattan. He was hired by Goddard College in the fall of 1973 to lecture on technology; his very popular lectures led to a teaching position and to the creation of the Social Ecology Studies program in 1974 and the Institute for Social Ecology soon thereafter, of which he became the director. In 1974 he was hired by Ramapo College in Mahwah, New Jersey, where he quickly became a full professor. The ISE was a hub for experimentation and study of appropriate technology in the 1970s. In 1977-78 he was a member of the Spruce Mountain Affinity Group of the Clamshell Alliance. Also in 1977 he published ''The Spanish Anarchists'', a history of the Spanish anarchist movement up to the revolution of 1936. During this period, Bookchin forged some ties with the nascent libertarian movement. "He spoke at a Libertarian Party convention and contributed to a newsletter edited by Karl Hess. In 1976 he told a Libertarian activist that 'If I were a voting man, I'd vote for MacBride' — LP nominee Roger MacBride, that is."

In 1980 he resigned as ISE director, and upon his retirement from Ramapo in early 1983, he moved to Burlington, Vermont. There, while continuing to write, he put his political ideas into practice by working with groups that opposed a wood chip plant, a trash incinerator, a condo development on the Lake Champlain waterfront, and a luxury marina. To foster face-to-face democracy, he helped create Burlington's neighborhood assemblies. In 1982 his book ''The Ecology of Freedom'' had a profound impact on the emerging ecology movement, both in the United States and abroad. His lectures in Germany influenced some of the founders of the German Greens. He was a principal figure in the Burlington Greens in 1986-90, an ecology group that ran candidates for city council on a program to create neighborhood democracy. In ''From Urbanization to Cities'' (originally published in 1986 as ''The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship''), Bookchin traced the democratic traditions that influenced his political philosophy and defined the implementation of the libertarian municipalism concept. A few years later ''The Politics of Social Ecology'', written by his partner of 20 years, Janet Biehl, briefly summarized these ideas.

In 1987, as the keynote speaker at the first gathering of the U.S. Greens in Amherst, Massachusetts, Bookchin initiated a critique of deep ecology, indicting it for misanthropy, neo-Malthusianism, biocentricism, and irrationalism. A high-profile deep ecologist Dave Foreman of Earth First! had recently said that famine in Ethiopia represented "nature taking its course," nature self-correcting for human "overpopulation."

In 1995 Bookchin lamented the decline of American anarchism into primitivism, anti-technologism, neo-situationism, individual self-expression, and "ad hoc adventurism," at the expense of forming a social movement. Bookchin "describe[d] himself as a 'social anarchist' because he look[ed] forward to a (gentle) societal revolution [and] lit out after those whom he term[ed] 'lifestyle anarchists.'" The publication of "Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism" in 1995, criticizing this tendency, was startling to anarchists. Thereafter Bookchin concluded that American anarchism was essentially individualistic and broke with anarchism publicly in 1999. He placed his ideas into a new political ideology: Communalism (spelled with a capital "C" to differentiate it from other forms of communalism), a form of libertarian socialism that retains his ideas about assembly democracy and the necessity of decentralization of settlement, power/money/influence, agriculture, manufacturing, etc.

In addition to his political writings, Bookchin wrote extensively on philosophy, calling his ideas ''dialectical naturalism''. The dialectical writings of Hegel, which articulate a developmental philosophy of change and growth, seemed to him to lend themselves to an organic, even ecological approach. Although Hegel "exercised a considerable influence" on Bookchin, he was not, in any sense, a Hegelian. His later philosophical writings emphasize humanism, rationality, and the ideals of the Enlightenment. His last major published work was ''The Third Revolution'', a four-volume history of the libertarian movements in European and American revolutions.

He continued to teach at the ISE until 2004. Bookchin died of congestive heart failure on July 30, 2006, at his home in Burlington at the age of 85.

Thought

Social ecology

In the essay “What is Social Ecology?” Bookchin summarizes the meaning of social ecology as follows:

Social ecology is based on the conviction that nearly all of our present ecological problems originate in deep-seated social problems. It follows, from this view, that these ecological problems cannot be understood, let alone solved, without a careful understanding of our existing society and the irrationalities that dominate it. To make this point more concrete: economic, ethnic, cultural, and gender conflicts, among many others, lie at the core of the most serious ecological dislocations we face today—apart, to be sure, from those that are produced by natural catastrophes.

.

Libertarian municipalism

Starting in the 1970s, Bookchin argued that the arena for libertarian social change should be the municipal level. In a 2001 interview he summarized his views this way: "The overriding problem is to change the structure of society so that people gain power. The best arena to do that is the municipality — the city, town, and village — where we have an opportunity to create a face-to-face democracy." In 1980 Bookchin used the term "libertarian municipalism", to describe a system in which libertarian institutions of directly democratic assemblies would oppose and replace the state with a confederation of free municipalities. Libertarian municipalism intends to create a situation in which the two powers—the municipal confederations and the nation-state—cannot coexist. Its supporters—Communalists—believe it to be the means to achieve a rational society, and its structure becomes the organization of society.

Selected bibliography

Books

''Our Synthetic Environment'' (1962)

''Post-Scarcity Anarchism'' (1971 and 2004) ISBN 1-904859-06-2.

''The Limits of the City'' (1973) ISBN 0-06-091013-5.

''The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years'' (1977 and 1998) ISBN 1-873176-04-X.

''Toward an Ecological Society'' (1980) ISBN 0-919618-98-7.

''The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy'' (1982 and 2005) ISBN 1-904859-26-7.

''The Modern Crisis'' (1986) ISBN 0-86571-083-X.

''The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship'' (1987 and 1992) ISBN 978-0871567062

''Remaking Society'' (1990 and 1998) ISBN 0921689020

''The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism'' (1990 and 1996) Montreal: Black Rose Books ISBN 978-1551640198

''To Remember Spain'' (1994) ISBN 1-873176-87-2

''Re-Enchanting Humanity'' (1995) ISBN 0-304-32843-X.

''The Third Revolution. Popular Movements in the Revolutionary Era'' (1996–2003) London and New York: Continuum. ISBN 0-304-33594-0. (4 Volumes)

''Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm'' (1997) ISBN 1-873176-83-X.

''The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism'' (1997, by Janet Biehl) Montreal: Black Rose Books. ISBN 1-55164-100-3.

''Anarchism, Marxism and the Future of the Left. Interviews and Essays, 1993-1998'' (1999) Edinburgh and San Francisco: A.K. Press. ISBN 1-873176-35-X.

''Social Ecology and Communalism'', with Eirik Eiglad, AK Press, 2007

Articles

" Beyond Neo-Marxism ". ''TELOS'' 36 (Summer 1978). New York: Telos Press

Notes

Further reading

Biehl, Janet, ''The Murray Bookchin Reader'' (Cassell, 1997) ISBN 0-304-33874-5.

Janet Biehl, "Mumford Gutkind Bookchin: The Emergence of Eco-Decentralism" (New Compass, 2011) ISBN 978-8293064107

Marshall, P. (1992), "Murray Bookchin and the Ecology of Freedom", p. 602-622 in, ''Demanding The Impossible''. Fontana Press. ISBN 0-00-686245-4.

Selva Varengo, ''La rivoluzione ecologica. Il pensiero libertario di Murray Bookchin'' (2007) Milano: Zero in condotta. ISBN 9788895950006.

E. Castano, ''Ecologia e potere. Un saggio su Murray Bookchin'', Mimesis, Milano 2011 ISBN 978-88-5750-501-5.

Damian F. White 'Bookchin - A Critical Appraisal'. Pluto Press (UK/Europe), University of Michigan Press. ISBN 9780745319650 (HBK); 9780745319643 (pbk).

Andrew Light, ed., ''Social Ecology after Bookchin'' (Guilfor, 1998) ISBN 1-57230-379-4.

External links

Murray Bookchin Archive at ''Anarchy Archives''

''Libertarian Communist Library'' Murray Bookchin holdings

Institute for Social Ecology (ISE)

''Communalism'': A Social Ecology Journal

''Left Green Perspectives'' (formerly Green Perspectives) - A Social Ecology Publication

'The Prehistory of Post-Scarcity Anarchism: Josef Weber and the Movement for a Democracy of Content (1947–1964)' by Marcel van der Linden, ''Anarchist Studies'', vol. 9, no. 2, (2001).

"Bookchin's Originality: A Reply to Marcel van der Linden" by Janet Biehl (2008)

"Bookchin Breaks with Anarchism" by Janet Biehl (2007)

Murray Bookchin: Requiem for a Pugilist

Ecology & Ideology (.mp3 file)

Social Ecology London. English study/action group exploring Bookchin's ideas.

Democratic Alternative. Scandinavian communalist organization based on Bookchin's ideas. In Svenska, Norsk, Espanol, English.

My Graphics About Murray Bookchin: blog and archive of comic strip stories about Bookchin's life maintained by Janet Biehl.

Being a Bookchinite by Chuck Morse. An account of Bookchin as a revolutionist, written by a former student and collaborator.

The Inclusive Democracy project and Social Ecology by Takis Fotopoulos, "The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy", vol.1, no.3, (May 2005)

Murray Bookchin Page Daily Bleed's Anarchist Encyclopedia

Black, Bob. Anarchy After Leftism (C.A.L. Press, 1997). A reply to ''Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism''.

Category:1921 births Category:2006 deaths Category:Anarchist communists Category:Green anarchists Category:People from New York City Category:American people of Russian-Jewish descent Category:American anti-war activists Category:American environmentalists Category:American historians Category:American socialists Category:American atheists Category:American non-fiction environmental writers Category:American philosophers Category:American political philosophers Category:American political writers Category:Anarchist academics Category:Cardiovascular disease deaths in Vermont Category:Jewish anarchists Category:Jewish American historians Category:American Trotskyists Category:Social ecology Category:Green thinkers Category:Historians of anarchism Category:People from Burlington, Vermont Category:Libertarian socialists Category:Libertarian theorists Category:American anarchists Category:American activists

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Coordinates	32°30′20″N45°49′29″N
{{infobox philosopher | region	Western Philosophy
era	20th century philosophy
color	#B0C4DE | name Herbert Marcuse
birth date	July 19, 1898
birth place	Berlin, German Empire
death date	July 29, 1979
death place	Starnberg, West Germany
school tradition	Frankfurt School, Marxism, critical theory
main interests	Social theory, socialism, industrialism, technology
influences	Machiavelli, Rousseau, Hobbes, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, Lukács, Friedrich Schiller
influenced	Norman O. Brown, Angela Davis, Andrew Feenberg, Jürgen Habermas, Abbie Hoffman, Gad Horowitz, Douglas Kellner, William Leiss, John Zerzan, Bob Black|
notable ideas	totally administered society, technological rationality, the Great Refusal, one-dimensional man, New Reality Principle, libidinal Work Relations, work as free Play, repressive tolerance }}

Herbert Marcuse () (July 19, 1898 – July 29, 1979) was a German Jewish philosopher, sociologist, and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Celebrated as the "Father of the New Left," his best known works are ''Eros and Civilization'', ''One-Dimensional Man'' and ''The Aesthetic Dimension''.

Early life

Herbert Marcuse was born in Berlin to Carl Marcuse and Gertrud Kreslawsky and raised in a Jewish family. In 1916 he was drafted into the German Army, but only worked in horse stables in Berlin during World War I. He then became a member of a Soldiers' Council that participated in the aborted socialist Spartacist uprising. He completed his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Freiburg in 1922 on the German Künstlerroman after which he moved back to Berlin, where he worked in publishing. In 1924 he married Sophie Wertheim, a mathematician. He returned to Freiburg in 1928 to study with Edmund Husserl and write a Habilitation with Martin Heidegger, which was published in 1932 as ''Hegel's Ontology and Theory of Historicity.'' This study was written in the context of the Hegel renaissance that was taking place in Europe with an emphasis on Hegel's ontology of life and history, idealist theory of spirit and dialectic. With his academic career blocked by the rise of the Third Reich, in 1933 Marcuse joined the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research.

In 1933, Marcuse published his first major review, of Marx's ''Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.'' In this review, Marcuse revised the interpretation of Marxism, from the standpoint of the works of the early Marx. This review helped the world see that Marcuse was becoming one of the most promising theorists of his generation.

While a member of the Institute of Societal Research, Marcuse developed a model for critical social theory, created a theory of the new stage of state and monopoly capitalism, described the relationships between philosophy, social theory, and cultural criticism, and provided an analysis and critique of German fascism. Marcuse worked closely with critical theorists while at the Institute.

United States

After emigrating from Germany in 1933, in 1934, Marcuse immigrated to the United States, where he became a citizen in 1940. Although he never returned to Germany to live, he remained one of the major theorists associated with the Frankfurt School, along with Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno (among others). In 1940 he published ''Reason and Revolution'', a dialectical work studying G. W. F. Hegel and Karl Marx.

During World War II Marcuse first worked for the U.S. Office of War Information (OWI) on anti-Nazi propaganda projects. In 1943 he transferred to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. His work for the OSS involved research on Nazi Germany and denazification. After the dissolution of the OSS in 1945, Marcuse was employed by the US Department of State as head of the Central European section, retiring after the death of his first wife in 1951.

In 1952 he began a teaching career as a political theorist, first at Columbia University, then at Harvard University, then at Brandeis University from 1958 to 1965, where he taught philosophy and politics, and finally (by then he was past the usual retirement age), at the University of California, San Diego. He was a friend and collaborator of the political sociologist Barrington Moore, Jr. and of the political philosopher Robert Paul Wolff, and also a friend of the Columbia University sociology professor C. Wright Mills, one of the founders of the New Left movement.

In the post-war period, Marcuse was the most explicitly political and left-wing member of the Frankfurt School, continuing to identify himself as a Marxist, a socialist, and a Hegelian.

Marcuse's critiques of capitalist society (especially his 1955 synthesis of Marx and Freud, ''Eros and Civilization'', and his 1964 book ''One-Dimensional Man'') resonated with the concerns of the student movement in the 1960s. Because of his willingness to speak at student protests, Marcuse soon became known as "the father of the New Left in the United States", a term he strongly disliked and disavowed. His work heavily influenced intellectual discourse on popular culture and scholarly popular culture studies. He had many speaking engagements in the US and Europe in the late 1960s and 1970s. He became a close friend and inspirer of the French philosopher André Gorz.

Marcuse defended the arrested East German dissident Rudolf Bahro (author of ''Die Alternative: Zur Kritik des real existierenden Sozialismus'' [trans., ''The Alternative in Eastern Europe'']), discussing in a 1979 essay Bahro's theories of "change from within" .

Jesuit Fr. James Chevedden made a written complaint to the Superior General of the Jesuit Order, Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, regarding the promotion of the ideology of the Marxist philosopher, Herbert Marcuse at the 1998 California Jesuit Province Social Pastoral Conference.

The New Left and radical politics

Many radical scholars and activists were influenced by Marcuse, such as Angela Davis, Abbie Hoffman, Rudi Dutschke, and Robert M. Young. (See the List of Scholars and Activists link, below.) Among those who critiqued him from the left were Marxist-humanist Raya Dunayevskaya, and fellow German emigre Paul Mattick, both of whom subjected ''One-Dimensional Man'' to a Marxist critique. Marcuse's 1965 essay "Repressive Tolerance", in which he claimed capitalist democracies can have totalitarian aspects, has been criticized by conservatives. Marcuse argues that genuine tolerance does not tolerate support for "repression", since doing so ensures that marginalized voices will remain unheard. He characterizes tolerance of repressive speech as "inauthentic." Instead, he advocates a form of tolerance that is intolerant of right wing political movements:

''"Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left."''

''"Surely, no government can be expected to foster its own subversion, but in a democracy such a right is vested in the people (i.e. in the majority of the people). This means that the ways should not be blocked on which a subversive majority could develop, and if they are blocked by organized repression and indoctrination, their reopening may require apparently undemocratic means. They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc"''

Marcuse later expressed his radical ideas through three pieces of writing. He wrote ''An Essay on Liberation'' in 1969 celebrating liberation movements such as those in Vietnam, which inspired many radicals. In 1972 he wrote ''Counterrevolution and Revolt'', which argues that the hopes of the 1960s were facing a counterrevolution from the right.

After Brandeis denied the renewal of his teaching contract in 1965, Marcuse devoted the rest of his life to teaching, writing and giving lectures around the world. His efforts brought him attention from the media, which claimed that he openly advocated violence, although he often clarified that only "violence of defense" could be appropriate, not "violence of aggression." He continued to promote Marxian theory, with some of his students helping to spread his ideas. He published his final work ''The Aesthetic Dimension'' in 1979 on the role of high art in the process of what he termed "emancipation" from bourgeois society.

Marriage and death

|thumb|right|Grave in the Dorotheenstädtischer cemetery, Berlin, where Marcuse's ashes were buried in 2003.

Marcuse married three times. His first wife was mathematician Sophie Wertman (1901–1951), with whom he had a son, Peter (born 1928). Herbert's second marriage was to Inge Neumann (1910–1972), the widow of his close friend Franz Neumann (1900–1954). His third wife was Erica Sherover (1938–1988), a former graduate student and forty years his junior, whom he married in 1976. His son Peter Marcuse is currently professor emeritus of Urban Planning at Columbia University. His granddaughter is the novelist Irene Marcuse and his grandson, Harold Marcuse, is currently a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Ten days after his eighty-first birthday, Marcuse died on July 29, 1979, after having suffered a stroke during a visit to Germany. He had spoken at the Frankfurt ''Römerberggespräche'', and was on his way to the Max-Planck-Institute for the Study of the Scientific-Technical World in Starnberg, on invitation from second-generation Frankfurt School theorist Jürgen Habermas. In 2003, after his ashes were rediscovered in the USA, he was buried in the Dorotheenstädtischer cemetery, Berlin.

Marcuse and capitalism

Marcuse’s analysis of capitalism derives partially from one of Karl Marx’s main concepts: Objectification., which under capitalism becomes Alienation. Marx believed that capitalism was exploiting humans; that the objects produced by laborers became alienated and thus ultimately dehumanized them to functional objects. Marcuse took this belief and expanded it. He argued that capitalism and industrialization pushed laborers so hard that they began to see themselves as extensions of the objects they were producing. At the beginning of ''One-Dimensional Man'' Marcuse writes, “The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment,” meaning that under capitalism (in consumer society) humans become extensions of the commodities that they create, thus making commodities extensions of people's minds and bodies and calling into question the notion of alienation.

Marcuse's early "Heideggerian Marxism"

During his years in Freiburg, Marcuse wrote a series of essays that explored the possibility of synthesizing Marxism and Heidegger's fundamental ontology, as begun in the latter's work "Being and Time" (1927). Though he eventually came to distance himself from Heidegger's thought, it has been suggested by thinkers such as Juergen Habermas that an understanding of Marcuse's later thinking demands an appreciation of his early Heideggerian influence.

Notable works

''Reason and Revolution'' (1941) Presents the Hegelian Perspective along with a critique of Marxism and positivist philosophy. ''Eros and Civilization'' (1955) The use of Freud's ideas on life and death to critique how modern culture changes and isolates desire. ''One-Dimensional Man'' (1964) Marcuse's concerns about modern capitalism restricting the possibility of opposition. He believed that the industrialization was creating a one-dimensional way of thought and behavior which decreased opposition towards capitalism.

Bibliography

Books

''Hegel's Ontology and Theory of Historicity'' (1932) - originally written in German ISBN 978-0262631259

''A Study on Authority'' (1936) - originally written in German ISBN 978-1844672097

''Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory'' (1941) ISBN 978-1573927185

''Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud'' (1955) ISBN 978-0415186636

''Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis'' (1958) ISBN 978-1153554497

''One-Dimensional Man'' (1964) ISBN 978-0807014172

''Negations: Essays in Critical Theory'' (1968) ISBN 978-1906948047

''An Essay on Liberation'' (1969) ISBN 978-0807005958

''Counterrevolution and Revolt'' (1972) ISBN 978-0807015339

''The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics'' (1978) ISBN 978-0807015193

Essays

''Repressive Tolerance'' (1965)

''On the Problem of the Dialectic''. ''Telos'' 27 (Spring 1976). New York: Telos Press.

''An Essay on Liberation'' (1969) ISBN 0140214275

See also

Neo-Marxism

Freudo-Marxism

Theodor Adorno

Walter Benjamin

Erich Fromm

Wilhelm Reich

André Gorz

Jürgen Habermas

Max Horkheimer

Georg Lukács

C. Wright Mills

Sigmund Freud

Gerhard Stapelfeldt

G. W. F. Hegel

William Friedrich

Further reading

John Abromeit and W. Mark Cobb, eds. (2004) ''Herbert Marcuse: A Critical Reader'', New York, London: Routledge.

Harold Bleich (1977) ''The Philosophy of Herbert Marcuse'', Washington, D.C.: University Press of America.

Paul Breines (1970) ''Critical Interruptions: New Left Perspectives on Herbert Marcuse'', New York: Herder and Herder.

Alfred C. Fred (1985) ''Science and Revenge of Nature: Marcuse and Habermas'', Gainesville: University of Florida Press.

Christian Fuchs (2005). ''Emanzipation! Technik und Politik bei Herbert Marcuse''. Aachen: Shaker. ISBN 3-8322-3999-5.

Christian Fuchs (2005). ''Herbert Marcuse interkulturell gelesen''. Interkulturelle Bibliothek Vol. 15. Nordhausen: Bautz. ISBN 3-88309-175-8.

Douglas Kellner (1984). ''Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism''. London: Macmillan. ISBN 9780520052956.

Herbert Marcuse (1998) ''Technology, War and Fascism'', London: Routeledge.

Alain Martineau (1986). ''Herbert Marcuse’s Utopia'', Harvest House, Montreal. ISBN 0-88772-027-7.

References

External links

Comprehensive 'Official' Herbert Marcuse Website, by one of Marcuse's grandsons, with full bibliographies of primary and secondary works, and full texts of many important works

http://www.marcusesociety.org International Herbert Marcuse Society website

"Herbert Marcuse (on-line) Archive" at the Marxists Internet Archive

Herbert Marcuse Archive, by Herbert Marcuse Association

"Marcuse: professor behind 1960s rebellion", at worldsocialism.org

"Illuminations: The Critical Theory Project" (detailed biography and essays, by Douglas Kellner).

Herbert's Hippopotamus: Marcuse and Revolution in Paradise, biographic documentary on Google video

Bernard Stiegler, "Spirit, Capitalism, and Superego"

"Herbert Marcuse Biography Indonesian" at aprillins.com

Luther Blissett feat. Herbert Marcuse - Rupture, music video

Category:1898 births Category:1979 deaths Category:20th-century philosophers Category:University of Freiburg alumni Category:Frankfurt School Category:German philosophers Category:German sociologists Category:German atheists Category:American atheists Category:American socialists Category:Columbia University alumni Category:Harvard University alumni Category:Marxist theorists Category:American sociologists Category:American Marxists Category:German Marxists Category:Revolution theorists Category:Jewish philosophers Category:Jewish sociologists Category:Atheist philosophers Category:Jewish atheists Category:German Jews Category:Naturalized citizens of the United States Category:Critics of work and the work ethic Category:German emigrants to the United States Category:People from Berlin Category:People from the Province of Brandenburg Category:Brandeis University faculty Category:University of California, San Diego faculty Category:New Left

ar:هربرت ماركوز an:Herbert Marcuse bg:Херберт Маркузе ca:Herbert Marcuse cs:Herbert Marcuse da:Herbert Marcuse de:Herbert Marcuse et:Herbert Marcuse el:Χέρμπερτ Μαρκούζε es:Herbert Marcuse eo:Herbert Marcuse fa:هربرت مارکوزه fr:Herbert Marcuse gl:Herbert Marcuse ko:헤르베르트 마르쿠제 hr:Herbert Marcuse io:Herbert Marcuse id:Herbert Marcuse it:Herbert Marcuse he:הרברט מרקוזה kk:Маркузе Герберт la:Herbertus Marcuse lv:Herberts Markūze lt:Herbert Marcuse hu:Herbert Marcuse nl:Herbert Marcuse ja:ヘルベルト・マルクーゼ no:Herbert Marcuse oc:Herbert Marcuse pms:Herbert Marcuse pl:Herbert Marcuse pt:Herbert Marcuse ro:Herbert Marcuse ru:Маркузе, Герберт sc:Herbert Marcuse sk:Herbert Marcuse sl:Herbert Marcuse sr:Херберт Маркузе sh:Herbert Marcuse fi:Herbert Marcuse sv:Herbert Marcuse tr:Herbert Marcuse uk:Герберт Маркузе vi:Herbert Marcuse yo:Herbert Marcuse zh:赫伯特·马尔库塞

Jonathan French Beecher (born 1937) is a historian who has taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz since the early 1970s. He specializes in French history and European intellectual history, including Russian. He received his B.A. and his Ph.D from Harvard University and also was a student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris for two years.

He authored a biography on the utopian socialist Charles Fourier. He has also written a biography of Victor Considérant.

References

External links

Profile from the University of California, Santa Cruz Department of History

Official website

Category:1937 births Category:Living people Category:American historians Category:Historians of France Category:University of California, Santa Cruz faculty Category:Harvard University alumni Category:Guggenheim Fellows