The volume begins with what is in common to contemporary phenomenological historians and historiographers. That is the understandings that temporality is the core of human judgment conditioning in its forms how we consciously attend and judge phenomena. For every phenomenological historian or historiographer, all history is an event, a span of time. This time span is not external to the individual, rather forms the content and structure of every judgment of the person. It is the logic used by the individual to structure the phenomenon attended. Rather than the phenomenon being seen as something solely external, it is understood by phenomenologists as also of our immediate awareness and thought. Thus, the phenomenological method discerns all judgment as based upon one's span of attention of inner or outer phenomena.. There is an intentionality to attention. One intends one's own foci. Attention is the temporal duration of that intending. The volume offers a text that enables contemporary historians, graduate students, and even undergraduates who are well taught, to understand both the history of phenomenology as a method of inquiry, and the contemporary practice of phenomenological historical and historiographical thought.

This translation of Max Adler 's Die Staatsauffassung des Marxismus introduces English readers to an important and distinctive perspective on Marx 's theory of the state, formed through Adler 's experience of the tumultuous interwar period. Adler 's central target of critique is the notion of the law as the neutral arbiter of democratic society -- a notion which, Adler contends, collapses in the face of an adequate understanding of the ruling class in capitalist society. Beyond providing an important historical survey of arguments over the nature of law and democracy that were conducted between the two World Wars, The Marxist Conception of the State offers contemporary readers a primer for comprehending any truly democratic future state might entail.

Every nation develops a narrative structure for thinking about history generated by its own historical experience. In this study, the German and Austrian German "historias"-the way the narratives of factual significance are structured as the "story" of the events-are shown in their sameness from the late 1600s to the present. Herodotus spoke of "historia" in our evidence of Western thought, by which he meant both "inquiry" and "story." The "story" of how the one and the many in the society become differs in each national culture. While the interpretations of historical reality among historical thinkers in each period of modernism may differ within a national culture of a time, the narrative structure is shared by each thinker of that society, learned in their public and self-education within the society's normative template. This "historia" shapes the emphases of how meaning is articulated among the historians of a society-in this book, Germany and Austria-regardless of their guiding ideas. The author argues that these societies can become more open to what has occurred in the historical thought that guides them if they see the constriction and oversights generated by the narrative style of their traditional historia.

Marxism and Phenomenology: The Dialectical Horizons of Critique, edited by Bryan Smyth and Richard Westerman, offers new perspectives on the possibility of a philosophical outlook that combines Marxism and phenomenology in the critique of capitalism. Although Marxism's focus on impersonal social structures and phenomenology's concern with lived experience can make these traditions appear conceptually incompatible, the potential critical force of a theoretical reconciliation inspired several attempts in the twentieth century to articulate a phenomenological Marxism. Updating and extending this approach, the contributors to this volume identify and develop new and previously overlooked connections between the traditions, offering new perspectives on Marx, Husserl, and Heidegger; exploring themes such as alienation, reification, and ecology; and examining the intersection of Marxism and phenomenology in figures such as Michel Henry, Walter Benjamin, and Frantz Fanon. These glimpses of a productive reconciliation of the respective strengths of phenomenology and Marxism offer promising possibilities for illuminating and resolving the increasingly intense social crises of capitalism in the twenty-first century.

Cognition and Temporality: The Genesis of Historical Thought in Perception and Reasoning argues that both verbal grammar and figural grammar have their cognitive basis in twelve characteristic forms of judgment, distributed among individuals in human populations throughout history. These twelve logical forms are context-free and language-free foundations in our attentional awareness and shape all verbal and figural statements. Moreover, these types of historical judgment are psychogenetic inheritances in a population, and each serves a distinct problem-solving function in the human species. Through analysis of verbal and figural statements, Mark E. Blum contends, the researcher can find evidence of these forms of judgment and in turn analyze how the event to which those statements attend is formally constructed by that judgment. This construction guides how the event is assessed, approached, and engaged in the process of problem-solving. Artists and aestheticians in the early twentieth century-including Wassily Kandinsky, Stephen C. Pepper, and Andrew Paul Ushenko-have all posited an inherited attentional perspective in individuals, manifested in the logical correspondence between their distinctive verbal and figural grammars. Cognition and Temporality elaborates these claims, arguing that while the styles of well-known writers and artists are conditioned by the public styles of a particular time period, variations in personal style manifest one's inherited form of judgment and the characteristic grammars that express that form. Through rigorous visual and stylistic analysis, this book demonstrates the expression of these forms among notable painters, historians, and writers across history. The result is a wide-ranging and provocative contribution to phenomenology, aesthetic philosophy, and cultural history.

In the brilliant world of Vienna at the turn of the century four men -- Karl Renner, Otto Bauer, Max Adler, and Friedrich Adler -- sought to develop political and economic resolutions to the racial and cultural tensions that were beginning to strain the bonds of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In this highly original study of these Austro-Marxists, Mark E. Blum uses the insights of depth psychology to trace the roots of their political philosophy in their family and social backgrounds. The Austro-Marxists 1890--1918 is the first book to offer a systematic examination of the thought and milieu of these four thinkers. The only major work on the subject in English, it is a significant contribution to the history of European socialism and, in particular, to the development of Marxist thought outside Russia.

Franz Kafka is among the most significant 20th century voices to examine the absurdity and terror posed for the individual by what his contemporary Max Weber termed "the iron cage" of society. Ferdinand Toennies had defined the problem of finding community within society for Kafka and his peers in his 1887 book Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. Kafka took up this issue by focusing upon the "social discourse" of human relationships. In this book, Mark E. Blum examines Kafka's three novels, Amerika, The Trial, and The Castle, in their exploration of how community is formed or eroded in the interpersonal relations of its protagonists. Critical literature has recognized Kafka's ability to narrate the gestural moment of alienation or communion. This "social discourse" was augmented, however, by a dimension virtually no commentator has recognized-Kafka's conversation with past and present authors. Kafka encoded authors and their texts representing every century of the evolution of modernism and its societal problems, from Bunyan and Defoe, through Pope and Lessing, to Fontane and Thomas Mann. The inter-textual conversation Kafka conducted can enable us to appreciate the profound human problem of realizing community within society. Cultural historians as well as literary critics will be enriched by the evidence of these encoded cultural conversations. Kafka's "Imperial Messenger" may finally be heard in the full history of his emanations. Kafka encoded not only past authors, but painters as well. Kafka had been known as a graphic artist in his youth, and was informed by expressionism and cubism as he matured. Kafka's encodings of literature as well as fine art are not solely of the work to which he refers, but the community of authors or painters and their success or failure of community. Kafka's encodings were meant as an extra-textual readings for astute readers, but also as a lesson to his fellow authors whom he held accountable in his correspondence as cultural messengers.

During the first half of the twentieth century, Austrian socialist thinkers - chief among them Otto Bauer, Rudolf Hilferding, Karl Renner, and Max Adler - emerged from and helped transform Austrian Social Democracy into one of Europe's best organized and most effective political and social movements. Through its expertly selected and introduced original documents this wide-ranging volume offers English readers the most thorough effort to date to provide a representative sampling of the Austro-Marxists' key theoretical ideas.