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Renowned Marxist scholar Michael Löwy offers an indispensable
assessment of an enduringly fascinating revolutionary. Vibrant,
insightful, and wide-ranging, Löwy’s essays illuminate the
heroic, tough-minded idealist and martyr, Rosa Luxemburg. Active in
the labor and socialist movements of Germany, Poland, and Russia,
Luxemburg had international standing as an original and
sharp-minded theorist during her life and remains one of the most
admired and studied revolutionaries in the Marxist tradition. Löwy
follows Luxemburg in blending diverse intellectual
disciplines—philosophy, history, political science, sociology,
anthropology, and economics—to make sense of global realities in
her time and our own. Luxemburg’s creative intellectual endeavors
were shaped by her genuine devotion to the free development of all
people, and her fierce opposition to all forms of tyranny and
authoritarianism. These commitments guided her analyses of
exploitation and mass struggle, the dynamics of trade unions and of
bureaucracy, the origins and impacts of economic crisis, the nature
of war and imperialism, and the interconnections of reform and
revolution. In accessible and stimulating prose, Löwy explores
Luxemburg’s many political and theoretical contributions, as well
as her links to revolutionaries including Karl Marx, Vladimir
Lenin, Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukács, José Carlos Mariátegui,
and Leon Trotsky. Through Löwy’s expansive engagement with
Luxemburg‘s political trajectory and influence, we are able to
see her wrestle with political problems that remain relevant today.
The philosophical and political development that converted Georg
Lukács from a distinguished representative of Central European
aesthetic vitalism into a major Marxist theorist and Communist
militant has long remained an enigma. In this this now classic
study, Michael Löwy for the first time traced and explained the
extraordinary mutation that occurred in Lukács's thought between
1909 and 1929. Utilizing many as yet unpublished sources, Löwy
meticulously reconstructed the complex itinerary of Lukács's
thinking as he gradually moved towards his decisive encounter with
Bolshevism. The religious convictions of the early Lukács, the
peculiar spell exercised on him and on Max Weber by Dostoyevskyan
images of pre-revolutionary Russia, the nature of his friendships
with Ernst Bloch and Thomas Mann, were amongst the discoveries of
the book. Then, in a fascinating case-study in the sociology of
ideas, Löwy showed how the same philosophical problematic of
Lebensphilosophie dominated the intelligentsias of both Germany and
Hungary in the pre-war period, yet how the different configurations
of social forces in each country bent its political destiny into
opposite directions. The famous works produced by Lukács during
and after the Hungarian Commune-Tactics and Ethics, History and
Class Consciousness and Lenin-were analysed and assessed. A
concluding chapter discussed Lukács's eventual ambiguous
settlement with Stalinism in the thirties, and its coda of renewed
radicalism in the final years of his life. In this new edition,
Löwy has added a substantial new introduction which reassess the
nature of Lukacs's thought in the light of newly published texts
and debates.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, there appeared in
Central Europe a generation of Jewish intellectuals whose work was
to transform modern culture. Drawing at once on the traditions of
German Romanticism and Jewish messianism, their thought was
organized around the cabalistic idea of the "tikkoun": redemption.
Redemption and Utopia uses the concept of "elective affinity" to
explain the surprising community of spirit that existed between
redemptive messianic religious thought and the wide variety of
radical secular utopian beliefs held by this important group of
intellectuals. The author outlines the circumstances that produced
this unusual combination of religious and non-religious thought and
illuminates the common assumptions that united such seemingly
disparate figures as Martin Buber, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin and
Georg Lukács.
Franz Kafka: Subversive Dreamer is an attempt to identify and
properly contextualize the social critique in Kafka’s biography
and work that links father-son antagonisms, heterodox Jewish
religious thinking, and anti-authoritarian or anarchist protest
against the rising power of bureaucratic modernity. The book
proceeds chronologically, starting with biographical facts often
neglected or denied relating to Kafka’s relations with the
Anarchist circles in Prague, followed by an analysis of the three
great unfinished novels—Amerika, The Trial, The Castle—as well
as some of his most important short stories. Fragments, parables,
correspondence, and his diaries are also used in order to better
understand the major literary works. Löwy’s book grapples with
the critical and subversive dimension of Kafka’s writings, which
is often hidden or masked by the fabulistic character of the work.
Löwy’s reading has already generated controversy because of its
distance from the usual canon of literary criticism about the
Prague writer, but the book has been well received in its original
French edition and has been translated into Spanish, Italian,
Portuguese, Greek, and Turkish.
Revolutionary critic of the philosophy of progress, nostalgic of
the past yet dreaming of the future, romantic partisan of
materialism - Walter Benjamin is in every sense of the word an
"unclassifiable" philosopher. His essay "On the Concept of History"
was written in a state of urgency, as he attempted to escape the
Gestapo in 1940, before finally committing suicide. In this
scrupulous, clear and fascinating examination of this essay,
Michael Löwy argues that it remains one of the most important
philosophical and political writings of the twentieth century.
Looking in detail at Benjamin's celebrated but often mysterious
text, and restoring the philosophical, theological and political
context, Löwy highlights the complex relationship between
redemption and revolution in Benjamin's philosophy of history.
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