This paper argues that the Marxist theory of the proletariat in many ways projects a romanticized self-description or 'false shadow' of its revolutionary spokesmen, and hence more proximately describes the missionary complex and Bohemian life-style of marginalized political intellectuals than a 'really existing' working class. This 'mistaken iden tity play' between spokespersons and their favourite sociological con stituency, which is already alluded to in various historical left-wing and right-wing 'farewells to the proletariat', is more systematically criti cized in recent reassessments (...) by, for example, Bahro, Gouldner, Gorz, or Bauman. Next to its psychological and sociological infrastructure, classical proletarian standpoint theory has also attracted critical atten tion because of its suggestive epistemological linkage between the con dition of estrangement and claims for scientific objectivity. This connection is reasserted by recent feminist and postcolonial standpoint epistemologies - which, however, also tend to repeat the logic of classi cal Marxism's metonymic 'identity play'. The paper concludes with a defence\of the idea of 'situated knowledges', which wishes to preserve the classical liaison between objectivity, distanciation and marginality, while simultaneously rendering it more reflexive in critical confron tation with the ubiquitous 'spokesperson problem'. (shrink)

This article revises received wisdom about the Durkheimian school of sociology and its relationship to Marxism by analyzing the work of Célestin Bouglé, one of the most influential and least examined sociologists of the Durkheimian tradition. Like other better-known Durkheimians of his generation such as Marcel Mauss and Maurice Halbwachs, Bouglé engaged Durkheimian sociology with Marxian and other German traditions of social thought. In the process he also paid an important debt to the French socialists that Marx and so many (...) French Marxists have denigrated as ‘utopian’, especially Saint-Simon, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Charles Fourier. In fact, the concerns of Bouglé’s political sociology and Durkheimian sociology more generally are indissociable from the politics of Third Republic France. (shrink)

En Algunas reflexiones sobre la filosofía del hitlerismo y frente al ascenso del nazismo en Europa, Levinas convoca a la civilización europea, en particular a las tradiciones judía, cristiana, liberal y marxista, a enfrentarse con el surgimiento de la filosofía elemental del hitlerismo. En este breve artículo, el filósofo exhorta a dichas tradiciones a remontarse a sus fuentes, intuición y decisión originarias, en especial, al “espíritu de libertad” que las anima y a su concepción del destino humano. Sin embargo, las (...) reflexiones levinasianas dieron lugar a un debate metodológico-político sobre cómo interpretar esta apelación a un “espíritu” o “sentimiento” compartido por las tradiciones europeas de Occidente, así como sobre el significado que adquiere la contraparte elemental y amenazante del hitlerismo. El presente artículo tiene como objetivo indagar algunos aspectos de este debate metodológico- político suscitado por los escritos de Levinas de entreguerras. (shrink)