Critical Management Studies Seminar w. A/Prof Charles Barbour

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Partisans of the Absolute State: Revolutionary Republicanism, Institutional Warfare, and the Young Hegelian Movement
Charles Barbour, Western Sydney University

Monday 8 April, 4:15pm
Linkway, 4th floor John Medley Building, University of Melbourne, Parkville campus -- and on Zoom (register here)

This paper introduces my current research into Young Hegelianism. Throughout most of the twentieth century, Marx’s and Engels’s scathing judgment of this amorphous group of thinkers and activists was generally accepted as history’s judgment of them. They were thus characterised the way Marx and Engels characterised them in works like The Holy Familyand The German Ideology – abstract, idealistic, conceited, overly concerned with theology, incapable of effecting real political change, and possessed of an Olympian disdain for the masses. More recent scholarship has finally managed to dismantle this interpretation, and a better sense of who they were, what they were attempting to accomplish, and how their thought informed that of Marx and Engels is beginning to take shape. In particular, we now have a much clearer understanding their relationship to two things that have always vexed Marx scholars as well: institutions, on the one hand, and republicanism, on the other. The aim of the paper is less to defend a particular thesis than it is to provide a sense of the political, aesthetic, and theological atmosphere in which the Young Hegelians operated. In a larger sense it seeks to contribute to a history of political failures and of enthusiasms that were effectively crushed, but that maintained a subterranean afterlife, nevertheless.

Charles Barbour is Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts and a School-based Member of the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. His research spans contemporary political theory, philosophies of technology, and the intellectual history of the nineteenth century, especially the young Marx and his contemporaries.