The concept of ‘world visions’, first elaborated in the early work of Georg Lukàcs, is used here as a tool whereby the similarities between Pascal’s Pensées and Kant’s critical philosophy are contrasted with the rationalism of Descartes and the empiricism of Hume. For Lucien Goldmann, a leading exponent of the most fruitful method of applying Marxist ideas to literary and philosophical problems, the ‘tragic vision’ marked an important phase in the development of European thought from rationalism and empiricism to (...) the dialectical philosophy of Hegel, Marx and Lukàcs. The book is not a collection of isolated essays on Kant, Pascal, Racine, the status of the legal nobility in seventeenth-century France and the exact nature of the religious movement known as Jansenism, but an attempt to formulate, by an examination of these different topics, a general approach to the problems of philosophy, of literary criticism, and of the relationship between thought and action in human society. (shrink)

Until the issue of Altheim's book Roemische Religionsgeschichte there was little doubt about the correctness of Wissowa's view that the two groups of the diindigetes and the di novensides combined with each other represent the whole of theRoman pantheon, the di indigetes being the old, indigenous deities of the Roman people, inherited so to speak from the days of Romulus, the di novensides the new deities, imported in historical times from foreign peoples. This view has now been abandoned, owing to (...) Altheim's arguments. Besides this, Altheim and later C. Koch have proved that the proximity of the expressions divi novensiles and di indigetes in Livy's report about the devotio of P. Decius Mus does not in itself justify the conclusion that the di indigetes and the di novensides are linked together in such a manner that the solution of the problem of one group involves that of the other. Hence the questions arise, first, what is the nature of the di novensides or of the di indigetes, and whether either of these questions has been satisfactorily answered; secondly, is it possible to establish any relationship between these two groups of deities, and can such a relation be usedas a starting-point from which to investigate the nature of the other group? In choosing this line of research it seems to me that an attempt to solve the problem of the novensides rather than that of the indigetes promises greater success. I shall, therefore, treat the di novensides in the first part of this paper. (shrink)

In recent years, we have been observing the phenomenon of an emerging scientific field: _digital transformation research_ (DTR). Due to the diversity and complexity of its object of research digital, transformation is not effectively researchable if confined to the boundaries of individual disciplines. In the light of Scientific/Intellectual Movement theory (Frickel and Gross 2005 ), we wonder how interdisciplinarity could and should be mobilized to further advance the development of the field of DTR. To answer this question, we (a) need (...) to understand how interdisciplinarity is conceived and (b) how it is considered in research practice by researchers in the emerging field. This is important, as scientists’ application of interdisciplinarity will highly influence an emerging field, shape its growth, consolidation as well as its academic establishment. We conducted six group discussions with 26 researchers from different disciplines and career levels (PhD students, postdocs, professors). The discussions were studied with a structuring qualitative content analysis. The results reflect the vagueness of the concept of interdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity is largely conceived as multidisciplinarity. Further, the interviewees mentioned more challenges than opportunities when it comes to interdisciplinary DTR. The present study widens the scientific understanding about how researchers of different career levels perceive, learn, and practice interdisciplinarity in DTR. It further provides valuable indications of how interdisciplinary research in an emerging field can be profitably shaped for practice. (shrink)

En proposant une étude de la méthode en sciences humaines, l'auteur met en lumière le problème des idéologies, problème au centre de toute étude sociologique qui s'efforce de saisir les aspects essentiels de la vie. Le second écrit offre une brève analyse sur l'oeuvre littéraire située à la jonction du structuralisme et de l'idéologie marxiste.

Auditory scene analysis is an elementary aspect of music perception, yet only little research has scrutinized auditory scene analysis under realistic musical conditions with diverse samples of listeners. This study probed the ability of younger normal-hearing listeners and older hearing-aid users in tracking individual musical voices or lines in JS Bach's The Art of the Fugue. Five-second excerpts with homogeneous or heterogenous instrumentation of 2–4 musical voices were presented from spatially separated loudspeakers and preceded by a short cue for signaling (...) the target voice. Listeners tracked the cued voice and detected whether an amplitude modulation was imposed on the cued voice or a distractor voice. Results indicated superior performance of young normal-hearing listeners compared to older hearing-aid users. Performance was generally better in conditions with fewer voices. For young normal-hearing listeners, there was interaction between the number of voices and the instrumentation: performance degraded less drastically with an increase in the number of voices for timbrally heterogeneous mixtures compared to homogeneous mixtures. Older hearing-aid users generally showed smaller effects of the number of voices and instrumentation, but no interaction between the two factors. Moreover, tracking performance of older hearing aid users did not differ when these participants did or did not wear hearing aids. These results shed light on the role of timbral differentiation in musical scene analysis and suggest reduced musical scene analysis abilities of older hearing-impaired listeners in a realistic musical scenario. (shrink)

This book discusses the relationship between democracy and the financial order from various legal perspectives. Each of the nine contributions adopts a unique perspective on the legal and political challenges brought to the fore by the Global Financial Crisis. This crisis and the ensuing sovereign debt crisis in Europe are only the latest in a long series of financial crises around the globe in recent decades. By their very existence, but also as a result of the political turmoil they have (...) created, these financial crises testify to the well-known tensions between democracy and a market-based economic and financial order. However, what is missing in this debate is an analysis of the role of law for reconciling democracy with a market-based financial order. To fill this lacuna, the book focuses on the controversy surrounding the concept of law, thereby adding another variable to the debate on the relation between democracy and capitalism. Each chapter addresses the concept of law from a particular theoretical angle, be it a full-grown legal theory or an approach in political economy that has a particular view of the law. (shrink)

En proposant une étude de la méthode en sciences humaines, l'auteur met en lumière le problème des idéologies, problème au centre de toute étude sociologique qui s'efforce de saisir les aspects essentiels de la vie. Le second écrit offre une brève analyse sur l'oeuvre littéraire située à la jonction du structuralisme et de l'idéologie marxiste.

The following essay was originally written in 1960, in response to a commission from a German publisher, as the chapter on 'The Enlightenment and Christianity' in a projected history of Christian thought.

Diversity and psychological health issues at the workplace are pressing issues in today’s organizations. However, research linking the two fields is scant. To bridge this gap, drawing from team faultline research, social categorization theory, and the job-demands resources model, we propose that perceiving one’s team as fragmented into subgroups increases strain. We further argue that this relationship is mediated by task conflict and relationship conflict and that it is moderated by psychological empowerment and task interdependence. Multilevel structural equation models on (...) a two-wave sample consisting of 536 participants from 107 work teams across various industries and work contexts partially supported the hypotheses: Task conflict did indeed mediate the positive relationships between perceived subgroups and emotional exhaustion while relationship conflict did not; effects on stress symptoms were absent. Moreover, contrary to our expectations, neither empowerment, nor task interdependence moderated the mediation. Results indicate that team diversity can constitute a job demand that can affect psychological health. Focusing on the mediating role of task conflict, we offer a preliminary process model to guide future research at the crossroads of diversity and psychological health at work. (shrink)

Pone de relieve la función correctiva del Estructuralismo Genético dentro del ámbito del estructuralismo abstracto y doctrinario. Las fuentes de la teoría goldmanniana, concretadas en Hegel, Marx, Freud, Lukacs y Piaget, son reinterpretadas en un triple plano: el histórico-sociológico, el psicológico y el epistemológico.

Goldmann's "tragic vision" is shown to be founded on an antinomy between the demands of philosophy and those of sociology. To overcome this antinomy, he would need to formulate a 'second' antinomy, between philosophy and politics. This would permit him to think the political nature of modern democracy, rather than reduce it--like the Marxists--to the demands of a social class called the "bourgeoisie." The root of Goldmann's problem is shown to lie in his reading of Kant.

In The Wager of Lucien Goldmann, Mitchell Cohen provides the first full-length study of this major figure of postwar French intellectual life and champion of socialist humanism. While many Parisian leftists staunchly upheld Marxism's "scientificity" in the 1950s and 1960s, Lucien Goldmann insisted that Marxism was by then in severe crisis and had to reinvent itself radically if it were to survive. He rejected the traditional Marxist view of the proletariat and contested the structuralist and antihumanist theorizing that (...) infected French left-wing circles in the tumultuous 1960s. Highly regarded by thinkers as diverse as Jean Piaget and Alasdair MacIntyre, Goldmann is shown here as a socialist who, unlike many others of his time, refused to portray his aspirations for humanity’s future as an inexorable unfolding of history’s laws. He saw these aspirations instead as a wager akin to Pascal’s in the existence of God. “Risk,” Goldmann wrote in his classic study of Pascal and Racine, The Hidden God, “possibility of failure, hope of success, and the synthesis of the three in a faith which is a wager are the essential constituent elements of the human condition.” In The Wager of Lucien Goldmann, Cohen retrieves Goldmann’s achievement—his “genetic structuralist” method, his sociology of literature, his libertarian socialist politics. Originally published in 1994. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

In this paper, I first argue that Lucien Goldmann’s attempt to confront Heidegger and Lukács, though it deserves to be revitalized, remains ultimately insuficient. Second, I propose that a more fruitful reading of Heidegger and Lukács should be based on three aspects: first, Lukács’ concept of social totality should be related to Heidegger’s concept of world. Second, the more meaningful way to confront Lukács and Heidegger on the level of praxis is not the everyday dealings with ready-to-hand things, but, (...) instead, the second division of Being and Time in which a political concept of subjectivity and action comes to the forefront. Third, a proper approach to Heidegger’s and Lukács’ philosophies should be based on their respective appropriation of the concept of categories. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Wager of Lucien Goldmann: Tragedy, Dialectics and a Hidden GodDavid WetselThe Wager of Lucien Goldmann: Tragedy, Dialectics and a Hidden God, by Mitchell Cohen; xi & 351 pp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994, $35.00.Students of Pascal’s Pensées for the most part know Lucien Goldmann because of his 1959 landmark study, The Hidden God. Still controversial after thirty-five years, Goldmann’s theories concerning the Pensées (...) have never been accepted by mainstream Pascal scholarship. Jean Mesnard, France’s leading expert on Pascal, wrote in 1976 that “Goldmann’s Pascal is perhaps tragic, but he is most certainly a Molinist.” Mesnard, however, went on to acknowledge that no other critic before Goldmann had recognized the extent to which Pascal occupies a permanent place in the history of ideas. “To criticize Goldmann,” Mesnard went so far to say, “risks making Pascal less powerful.”Most pascalisants have erroneously assumed that Goldmann’s reading of Pascal represented nothing more than the imposition of Marxist theory upon the text of the Pensées. Among the revelations of Mitchell Cohen’s new study is that, to the contrary, Pascal represents one of the essential formative influences on Goldmann himself: “By the time he returned to Paris after the war, Goldmann was thoroughly conversant with Pascal’s oeuvre.... The appeal to him of Pascal was natural; Pascal was both a believer and a scientist.... [Goldmann] stated that were he to rewrite [Kant] he would assert that ‘Pascal was the first’ in the history of dialectical thought” (p. 48).Students of Pascal will be particularly fascinated by Cohen’s revealing analysis of Goldmann’s The Hidden God in the first section of chapter six of his study. Cohen’s account of Goldmann’s Towards a Sociology of the Novel (1964) and of his essays on Genet will likewise fascinate students of literature. However, The Wager of Lucien Goldmann goes far beyond those questions with which Goldmann’s name has been most closely associated in literary circles. The product of a painstaking excavation of Goldmann’s philosophical development, Cohen’s book recaptures a period of postwar Parisian intellectual life which drew to an end only with the events of 1968 and which has been obscured in recent years by postmodernism.A critic both of existentialism and of structuralism, Goldmann is portrayed by Cohen as the leading representative of Western Marxist humanism. Rejecting both the doctrine of Marxism’s “scientificity” and the traditional Marxist vision of the proletariat, Goldmann insisted upon Marxism’s need to reinvent itself. Specialists in Marx, Hegel, Heidegger, and particularly Lukács will appreciate Cohen’s careful explanations of Goldmann’s links to these key thinkers. Perhaps most fascinating is his account of the debate between Goldmann and the “anti-humanists”: “When the humanist Goldmann ‘transcended’ liberalism, he did so in the specifically Hegelian sense of negating and preserving at once, absorbing what was vital into socialism, while annulling [End Page 409] its abstractions. After all, he conceived socialist humanism as the culmination and not the annulment of Western culture...” (p. 290).This study, which I recommend to all students of modern France as well as to my fellow pascalisants, is, of course, not essentially meant to be a biography. Yet one sometimes finds oneself yearning for a more intimate portrait of Goldmann the man. Once he leaves his native Romania in the early 1930s, he seems to become the classical Parisian academic intellectual with no real personality of his own. Yet Cohen manages at least to neutralize Julia Kristeva’s parody of Goldmann in The Samurai, her roman à clef about French intellectuals in the 1960s, as quoted by Cohen: “Graying, pot-bellied, smiling, with his shirt open and of course no tie, he addressed everyone by the familiar tu and was always ripping up existentialism and lauding dialectical reason (as overhauled by Pascal), alienation, and the New Novel.”David WetselArizona State UniversityCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

La correspondance d’Yvon Bourdet conservée à l’Imec contient d’importants développements sur l’austromarxisme. Ceux publiés ici appartiennent à une série de lettres échangées avec Lucien Goldmann au seuil des années 1960, où sont discutés la question du kantisme « rouge », les pensées d’Otto Bauer et surtout de Max Adler, ainsi que le rapport entre Lukács et l’austromarxisme. Mots-clés : austromarxisme, kantisme rouge, Lucien Goldmann, Yvon Bourdet, Georg Lukács.

Taking ‘the idea of the tragic’ as a point of departure, this article articulates an approach to sociology and social theory from the perspective of a ‘tragic vision’. In arguing for the relevance of ‘tragic thought’ for the analysis of contemporary crises, it suggests that ‘the tragic’ must be understood as a reflection of the long tail of the formation of a particular secular, modern ‘ethico-onto-epistemology’. In making this case, the article provides an ‘interpretive genealogy’ of tragic ethics in social (...) thought, detailing the thought of Lucien Goldmann and Georg Lukács, and putting it in dialogue with contemporary posthumanist theory. It concludes by drawing on recent debates in the latter involving the place of ‘critique’ in contemporary social science, teasing out some implications for thinking about individual action and responsibility. (shrink)

This is much more than a sensitive study of Pascal and Racine. Using Lukács concept of a world vision—"the psychic expression of the relationship between certain human groups and their social or physical environment"-Goldmann applies a dialectical method to the interpretation of what he calls "the tragic vision." This is a coherent world vision expressed in the works of Pascal, Racine, Kant, and the Jansenists. Goldmann argues that this coherent vision supersedes rationalism and empiricism and is at the (...) same time the forerunner of the dialectical vision of Hegel and Marx. The work is rich in insights and provides an excellent occasion for evaluating Marxist interpretation at its best.—-R. J. B. (shrink)

El presente artículo recuerda momentos cruciales de una historia del sujeto que va de Jacques Lacan a Alain Badiou. Tras la división y la subversión lacaniana del sujeto, se revisan reacciones que intentan revertirla en varios autores. Estas reacciones se contrastan con la idea badiouana de la escisión del sujeto entre el esplacio y el fuera-de-lugar. La absolutización estructuralista del esplacio estructural se ilustra con la acción de la estructura de Jacques-Alain Miller, se aproxima al argumento de las estructuras que (...) descienden a la calle con el que Lacan defendió la posición estructuralista contra Lucien Goldmann y se explica por la forclusión del sujeto en el estructuralismo, en el sistema capitalista y en la ciencia en general. Con respecto al campo científico, se muestra cómo fue definido primero por la forclusión y luego por la suturación del sujeto en Miller, simultáneamente por la forclusión y la suturación en Lacan, y sólo por la forclusión en Badiou, quien empezará negando y terminará aceptando la existencia de un sujeto de la ciencia, pero diferente del de Lacan y Miller. (shrink)

L’édition de l’ Histoire du marxisme n’aura pas lieu en France. Pourtant le projet que mena à bien Einaudi en Italie au tournant des années 1970-1980 était un projet franco-italien, et même international, impliquant entre autres Eric Hobsbawm et Perry Anderson, qui garderont une rancœur tenace envers leurs homologues français. Cet article retrace, archives et entretiens à l’appui, la généalogie de ce projet avorté, voire, à tout croire, sabordé. La réalité est plus nuancée, et impose de tenir compte des stratégies (...) fluctuantes d’acteurs institutionnels, du monde de l’édition et de l’université, au gré des modes parisiennes, des opportunités culturelles, et des adversités politiques en France et dans l’espace international. Une attention particulière est portée aux dilemmes des acteurs individuels, portant ou bloquant ce projet, d’abord Lucien Goldmann et ses réseaux européens de théoriciens critiques (École de Francfort, gramsciens, humanistes d’Europe de l’Est), puis Pierre Nora, François Furet, Jacques Le Goff avec une équipe d’historiens internationaux, tournée vers les États-Unis, d’Arno Mayer à Moshe Lewin. (shrink)

Wilhem von Humboldt -- Karl Jaspers -- Odo Marquand -- Karl Mannheim -- Lucien Goldmann -- Terry Eagleton.

In 1922, philosopher Jakob Klatzkin and Zionist politician and later president of the World Jewish Congress, Nahum Goldmann founded the Eschkol publishing company in Berlin and began their major work on the Encyclopaedia Judaica. Eschkol was active during the Weimar Republic, where culture and politics were shaped by a Jewish renaissance and by the sustained migration of Jews from Eastern Europe. Most of the publisher’s books and brochures show emblematic historical ruptures and the migration of knowledge to new spaces, (...) languages, and cultures. This article analyzes Eschkol’s publications and cultural agenda from the perspective of a material culture of printed works, and focuses on its textbook program. It concentrates the discussion on the historian Simon Bernfeld and Jakob Klatzkin, two formative scholars of that period. (shrink)

Daniel Bensaïd was a Marxist philosopher and author of an extensive body of works about political strategy. His writings combine a diversity of singular influences, such as Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and Che Guevara on the one hand, and Benjamin, Péguy and Blanqui on the other. In his work, religious heresies, Marranos, moles and emblematic figures of the resistance to oppression such as Joan of Arc meet with the classic figures of Marxism. The non-linear concept of time and messianic reason support (...) a strategic reading of history and an understanding of political commitment, following Goldmann’s interpretation of Pascal’s Wager as a wager of uncertain outcome. (shrink)

Una consecuencia de la crítica formulada por Richard Rorty a la epistemología tradicional es el rechazo al veroteleologismo, esto es, a la tesis según la cual la verdad es el fin o la meta de la investigación. A partir del enfrentamiento con una serie de críticas provenientes tanto desde perspectiva..

This article is a response by the author to the contributions to the Historical Materialism symposium on Allegory and Ideology. The reply is framed in terms of the different theoretical strategies through which the articulation of ‘Marx’ and ‘Freud’ has been carried out, namely the precarious syntheses of Freudo-Marxism, the homological method pioneered by Lucien Goldmann, and the theory of allegorical levels and transcoding explored in Allegory and Ideology. It critically engages with the openings and challenges posed by the (...) various contributions to the symposium, focusing in particular on matters of periodisation, and concluding with a reflection on how a theory of allegorical levels can be complemented by a materialist understanding of the ‘category’. (shrink)

Marcel Broodthaers’s A Film by Charles Baudelaire was produced in lieu of a research paper for a seminar on Baudelaire run by Lucien Goldmann in Brussels during the winter of 1969–70. The film and the seminar serve as points of departure for this article’s pursuit of three interrelated aims: first, to establish specific discursive coordinates for one of the most mystifying aspects of Broodthaers’s work, namely its pervasive and seemingly anachronistic references to nineteenth-century poetic modernism in general and to (...) Baudelaire in particular; second, to take on the figure of the world for Broodthaers, both in his use of the world map in the Baudelaire film and several other works to be discussed and in the question of his stance regarding the world-shaping catastrophe of colonialism; and finally, to investigate the prominence of the concept of reification in Broodthaers’s theoretical lexicon in relation to its first formulation by Georg Lukács, its revival and dissemination by Goldmann, and Aimé Césaire’s account of colonialism’s “reification of the world.”. (shrink)

In January 1968, Lucien Goldmann organized a conference on aesthetic theory in Royaumont, France. Adorno was one of the keynote speakers; I delivered a lecture on Lukács's The Specificity of the Aesthetic, which then was still not well known. Of course, we were immediately entangled in passionate discussions arguing for three different, and apparently irreconcilable, positions. Then something entirely unexpected happened. A young man took the rostrum and spoke with anger and irritation: Lukács, Goldmann and Adorno are all (...) the same. They are members of the Holy Family. By standing for the autonomy of art work, they seek salvation in a celestial image of the world. They are equally old-fashioned, bourgeois and despicable. (shrink)

A revision of George Kennedy's translation of, introdution to, and commentary on Aristotle's On Rhetoric. His translation is most accurate, his general introduction is the most thorough and insightful, and his brief introductions to sections of the work, along with his explanatory footnotes, are the most useful available.

Julia Kristeva was born in 1941 in Bulgaria. She was educated by French nuns, studied literature and worked as a journalist before going to Paris in 1966 to do graduate work with Lucien Goldmann and Roland Barthes. While in Paris she finished her doctorate in French literature, became involved in the influential journal Tel Quel, and began psychoanalytic training. In 1979 she finished her training as a psychoanalyst. Currently, Kristeva is a professor of linguistics as the University of Paris (...) VII and a regular visiting professor at Columbia University. In addition to her work as a practicing psychoanalyst and her theoretical writings, Kristeva is a novelist. (shrink)

Poulantzas began his intellectual career as a scholar of law but eventually shifted his focus onto the theorization of the capitalist state. In his early publications, he explored legal concepts from the perspective of Phenomenology, inspired in particular by the Marxism of Jean-Paul Sartre and Lucien Goldmann. This chapter explores the logic of Poulantzas’s early legal thinking and the shift in his work under the influence of Louis Althusser’s ‘structural’ Marxism, which accompanied his new focus on the state in (...) the mid-to-late 1960s. This shift in his thought permitted Poulantzas a uniquely complex view of the state as a contingent, ‘material condensation’ of class forces. But his new insights were not fully extended to the exploration of legal subjectivities or the law as a site of socio-political contestation, which had been features of his earlier work. (shrink)

This article considers the war against terror in relation to classical tragedy. It uses Heidegger's analysis of Sophocles's play Antigone to argue that human beings are essentially `homeless' and yet our destiny lies in the continual attempt to overcome this homelessness by establishing foundational principles that might bring our journeying to an end. The tragedy of this situation is that the search for foundations and a search for a home invariably bring differing worlds in conflict with each other as their (...) paths to truth collide. Lucien Goldmann's analysis of the tragedy of refusal is also considered in relation to a non-foundational politics that may permit us not only to endure, but actually to affirm our homelessness as an attempt to resist the terror and anabolic militarism that marks the current age. (shrink)

Introduction: What is the critical spirit?--Utopianism, ancient and modern, by M.I. Finley.--Primitive society in its many dimensions, by S. Diamond.--Manicheanism in the Enlightenment, by R.H. Popkin.--Schopenhauer today, by M. Horkheimer.--Beginning in Hegel and today, by K.H. Wolff.--The social history of ideas: Ernst Cassirer and after, by P. Gay.--Policies of violence, from Montesquieu to the Terrorist, by E.V. Walter.--Thirty-nine articles: toward a theory of social theory, by J.R. Seeley.--History as private enterprise, by H. Zinn.--From Socrates to Plato, by H. Meyerhoff.--Rational society (...) and irrational art, by H. Read.--The quest for the Grail; Wagner and Morris, by C.E. Schorske.--Valéry; Monsieur Teste, by L. Goldmann.--History and existentialism in Sartre, by L. Krieger.--German popular biographies; culture's bargain counter, by L. Lowenthal.--The Rechtsstaat as magic wall, by O. Kirchheimer. (shrink)