July 25

Tracie Matysik (U Texas, Austin)

How Spinoza Became a Dialectical Materialist: A Tale of German Social Democracy

Abstract: In this paper I will treat Spinoza’s integration into dialectical materialism – how he was claimed for the project and also the challenges he posed to those involved. To do so, I will zero in on the period in the last decades of the nineteenth century when the concept of “dialectical materialism” was being explicitly formulated and debated. There is a historical question about who first formulated the term, with the leading contenders being Joseph Dietzgen, an itinerant German tanner by day and lay philosopher by night; Friedrich Engels himself; and Georgie Plekhanov, the so-called “father of Russian Marxism.” My interest here is not in refining the chronology, but rather in taking note of the traces of Spinoza that swirled in the mix. The question is: what did the explicitly Spinozist variant – or variants – of dialectical materialism look like in this era of classical Marxism?  The answer, neither straight-forward nor singular, revolved not only around the problem of teleology, as one might expect, but also around questions of knowledge and of the status of the human and humanism in Marxism.    

Tracie Matysik teaches and researches in the field of modern European intellectual history at the University of Texas at Austin. At present she is completing a book entitled "When Spinoza Met Marx:  Socialist Experiments in Non-Humanist Activity (under contract with University of Chicago Press). She is the author of Reforming the Moral Subject: Ethics and Sexuality in Central Europe, 1890-1930 (Cornell University Press), and is co-editor of German Modernities from Wilhelm to Weimar: A Contest of Futures (Bloomsbury Press, 2016). In 2016 she became co-editor of the journal Modern Intellectual History. 

A recording of the session will be made available for some time following the event.

(The “Downloads” page is password-protected, and the password is available to all members of the Spinoza and EMP Workshop email list.)

The Workshop thanks The Johns Hopkins Philological Society for its sponsorship of this co-organized event.