20th Century Hegelians Kojeve, Luckas, Zizek

[jacobin1949]

Anyone want to discuss some of the works of 20th century Hegelians.
Alexandre Kojève, György Lukács, and Slavoj Žižek. All of them are pretty interesting both in their biography and philosophy. Kojeve is the right-wing Marxist who founded the NeoCon movement. All 3 of them call themselves "Stalinists", yet have strange definitions of what it means to be Stalinist.

Anyway instead of rehashing old 19th century debates lets discuss some more modern hegelians.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Good luck -- you will need to be fluent in Martian to succeed.

[jacobin1949]

Alexandre Kojève played an important role in the development of the master-slave dialectic. Hes what you would call a conservative Marxist, and his theory of The End of History heavily influenced both Fukuyama and Strauss, who laid the theoretical foundations of American neoconservatism.

Luckas laid the foundations of Eurocommunism, and his ideas are influential in many of the parties of the former Third International. Luckas attempted to extract the Hegelian influence from Marx.

By understanding these works you have a better appreciation of how Marx combined German idealism, British economism, and French materialism, all under the influence of Hegel's dialectic

It also give a understanding of the NeoCon philosophy, but they seem to be falling into the dustbin of history so perhaps that is pointless.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

But, we have already established that Marx waved goodbye to all this mysticism:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/nti-dialectics-made-t67725/index.html

[gilhyle]

Zizek has been discussed a good bit elsewhere on this board. The bit I have read has rarely been truly interesting. His writin seems to me essentially eclectic, creating an appearance of substance by switching between approaches, one moment Frankfurt school, next moment Lacanian, next moment leninist, next moment post Baudrillard, then back to the beginning.

Kojeve has had huge influence but it was part of the process of the revival and then fetishisation of 'marxist humanism'. As a scholar of Hegel, he is very much surpassed by a contemporary Jean Hyppolite. To have regard for Kojeve, you have to stop in the 1844 position, seeing the process of labour as a dynamic primarily determining and transforming human consciousness, rather than determining primarily material human life.....its an old debate.

Lukacs is quite another story. To my mind closer to Schelling than to Hegel. His roots were in the romantic nationalism of an oppressed nation, his interests in the workers movement was as the agent that could be used to achieve the social purgative he desired. Consequently, his relationship to the workers movement was always from the outside, that of a 'realpolitik' manipulator Thats why he became a stalinist - not because he was convinced but because Judas-like he saw that as a necessary step He turned to eurocommunism in the belief that Stalinism had been correct, but just needed to move on to the next stage.

To me Hitory and Class Consciousness is one of the most over-rated books in the Marxist cannon. His later Ontology of Social Being seems to me a somewhat neglected work Like Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason, it seems to have been a serious attempt to articulate a range of concepts that would amount to a dialectical framework. What I have read is not satisfactory, but I have never really assessed it properly. (His work on literary criticism is often interesting, but its fundamental attachment to naturalism is deeply oppressive.)