Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 9, Page 1302-1328, November 2022. Robinson Crusoe is a mythic character who lives not only in the popular imaginary but through the history of political and social thought. Defoe’s protagonist lives marooned on his island, isolated and apart from society. The narrative is a perfect naturalisation of the ‘bourgeois’ world, dependent on an ontology of the self-sufficient individual. This article analyses this lineage in the social contract theory of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. Later, (...) Hegel used the novel to illustrate his dialectic of mastery/servitude. Challenging the atomism of the state of nature, Hegel’s theory of recognition gives an account of positive freedom, where the individual is formed in and through social interdependence. This sociality is continued by Marx, who satirises Defoe's novel in his value-form critique of political economy. The value-form provides insight into Robinson's island labour and Marx's difference with Locke's labour theory of value. For Marx, the myth of ‘natural man’ hides the domination of capitalist development and Robinson Crusoe reflects the internalisation of the abstract rationality of commodity society. However, Marx's immanent critique of the novel points to a radical idea of social life and freedom. (shrink)

To make ‘philosophy worldly’ often requires an act of translation. In This Life, Martin Hägglund argues for the relevance of Marx to our contemporary lives. By way of a lively and sophisticated dialogue between philosophical interlocutors – including Hegel and Marx – Hägglund offers a compelling account of the relation between time, value and freedom. This Life translates current issues in academic philosophy into a popular register that does not reduce the complexity of the issues but shows what is at (...) stake for our own lives. Hägglund provides a synthesis of Robert B. Pippin’s normative reading of Hegel and the value-form critical theory of Moishe Postone’s Marxism. Further, Hägglund’s vision of freedom outflanks the political limitations of Pippin’s Hegel and Postone’s Marx while retaining the power of their analyses. I assess his interpretation of Hegel and critically examine the concept of value operative in This Life, and frame this question in terms of value-form theory. (shrink)

The playful discussion of 'horsemanship' that opens Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesie has been variously interpreted as a straightforward anecdote about the chivalric arts, or an oblique rhetorical flourish, or something in between. This essay suggests a new context for Sidney's exordium by focusing primarily on its affiliation to the genre of the 'Art of Poetry'. In Horace's Ars poetica and other classical, scholastic and Renaissance treatises, horse–men and other unnatural hybrids embody the tension between decorum and poetic liberty. (...) Three major traditions inform this trope: by the Renaissance the centaur could be an allegory of reason's struggle with the passions, an emblem of the poetic imagination, or a figure for compositional hybridity associated, especially, with Lucianic satire. Reading Sidney in the light of these traditions, finally, this essay explores aspects of the centaur's significance in the Defence and the Arcadia, and suggests that this kind of attention to metaphor might provide a bridge between critical and creative modes of Renaissance poetic thought. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between Marx’s Capital, Georg Lukács and Critical Theory through the prism of value-form theory. Marx’s theorisation of value understands commodities as expressions of the historical form of social relations defined by capital. Products of human labour become values in capitalist production, defined by the abstract quality of undifferentiated quantities of labour-power, exchangeable through the universal character of the market. The social form of this process, Marx identifies as processing a fetish quality, where humans take on (...) the thing-like character of commodities. The impact of this theorisation on Critical Theory has been considerable, beginning with Lukács’ concept of reification. In Part I, I examine the challenge to Lukács’ interpretation of Marx’s Capital made by Gillian Rose. She draws attention to a misidentification of reification in Marx, suggesting a strong conceptual distinction between commodity-fetishism and reification. In their conceptual flattening, Rose contends that Lukács and Critical Theory generalised Marx’s value-form theory, losing its speculative character. I argue that despite Rose’s suggestion remaining unfulfilled, she helps illuminate important tensions between Marx’s value theory and Critical Theory. This comparison allows in Part II for the beginning level of a speculative approach to Marx’s Capital to be advanced. (shrink)