Lexington Books
Pages: 424
Trim: 5½ x 8½
978-0-7391-0559-7 • Paperback • February 2003 • $64.99 • (£50.00)
Raya Dunayevskaya, who died in June 1987, was the founder of Marxist Humanism in the United States. Philosophy and Revolution is the second work of what the author called her "trilogy of revolution." These works represent the development of her 1953 breakthrough on Hegel's Absolute Idea, when she saw within the Absolute Idea a movement from practice as a well as a movement from theory. She perceived this unity as a vision of a new human society.
Part 1 Why Hegel? Why Now? The Ceaseless Movement of Ideas and of History
Chapter 2 The Phenomenology of Mind, or Experiences of Consciousness
Chapter 3 The Science of Logic, or Attitudes to Objectivity
Chapter 4 The Philosophy of Mind: A Movement from Practice
Chapter 5 A New Continent of Thought: Marx's Historical Materialism and Its Inseparability from the Hegelian Dialetic
Chapter 6 The 1840s: Birth of Historical Materialism
Chapter 7 The 1850s: The Grundrisse, Then and Now: 1. "Progressive Epochs of Social Formations" 2. The "Automaton" and the Worker
Chapter 8 The Adventures of the Commodity as Fetish
Chapter 9 The Shock of Recognition and the Philosophic Ambivalence of Lenin
Part 10 Alternatives
Chapter 11 On the Eve of World War II: Depression in the Economy and in Thought
Chapter 12 Leon Trotsky as Theoretician
Chapter 13 The Theory of Permanent Revolution
Chapter 14 The Nature of the Russian Economy, or Making a Fixed Particular into a New Universal
Chapter 15 Leadership, Leadership
Chapter 16 The Thought of Mao Tse-tung
Chapter 17 Discontinuities and Continuities: 1. The Sino-Soviet Conflict 2. That Crucial Year 1965 and "The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution," 1966-69
Chapter 18 From Contradiction to Contradiction to Contradiction
Chapter 19 Alienation and Revolution: 1. Hong Kong Interview 2. Sheng Wu-lien: The Challenge from the Left
Chapter 20 Jean-Paul Sartre: Outsider Looking In
Chapter 21 "The Progressive-Regressive Method"
Chapter 22 The Dialectic and the Fetish
Part 23 Economic Reality and the Dialectics of Liberation
Chapter 24 The African Revolutions and the World Economy
Chapter 25 Neocolonialism and the Totality of the World Crisis
Chapter 26 New Human Relations or Tragedies Like Biafra?
Chapter 27 State Capitalism and the East European Revolts
Chapter 28 The Movement from Practice Is Itself a Form of Theory
Chapter 29 Theory and Theory
Chapter 30 Once Again, Praxis and the Quest for Universality
Chapter 31 New Passions and New Forces: The Black Dimension, the Anti-Vietnam War Youth, Rank-and-File Labor, Women's Liberation
Lukacs and Korsch had proposed a similar, Hegelian reading. Yet a notable difference separates Dunayevskaya from these earlier positions. Their interpretation had limited the revolutionary impact of hegel's thought to the socio-political order. Dunayevskaya aims at a total liberation of the human person . . . . She assumes within her theory of class struggle issues as diverse as feminism [and] black liberation. . . .
— Louis Dupre, Yale University
There a few better guides to grasping Marx's philosophy and his theory of revolution (and the internal relation between the two) than Raya Dunayevskaya. And when one adds the impressive insights on how to apply both in the present period, it is evident tha tthis is a work that no serious radical— scholar or layman/woman— can afford to miss.
— Bertell Ollman, New York University
Dunayevskaya . . . has discovered a concept of freedom in Hegel that engages us to see freedom as a self-determination that is a free release rather than a movement of becoming other. . . . Should feminists bother with Hegel? Dunayevskaya's voice returns us to an affirmative response. While Hegel used his own analysis to affirm the subordination of women, there is still much in his analysis of the pathway to freedom, especially in the Logic, that is not exclusively male but which helps us to reflect on a truly human freedom.
— Patricia Altenbernd Johnson, University of Dayton
This insight goes far beyond those of participatory action research, and in some ways even beyond those of Paulo Freire. For those of us who lived through the 1960s and saw (and took part in) the renewal of sociology, economics, political science, philosophy, and other fields by the movements of that period, her analysis rings true.
— Contemporary Sociology
For everyone who is seriously interested in the forces which form and deform the present and the future, this book is to be most warmly recommended.
— Erich Fromm, from the Foeword to the German Edition