critical theory philosophy and history moishe postone

Congrès Marx International V - Section Philosophie –Capital – Paris-Sorbonne et Nanterre – 3/6 octobre 2007

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Critical Theory, Philosophy, and History

Moishe Postone

Paris, Oct. 5, 2007

As is well-known, Marx concludes his Theses on Feuerbach in 1845 with the

statement that “philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point,

however, is to change it.”1 This famous eleventh thesis raises the issue of the relation of

philosophy to society and, hence, the relation of philosophy and social theory. This

problematic is central to the Theses on Feuerbach, which begin by opposing materialism

and idealism. Whereas materialism, according to Marx, conceives of reality only in the

form of the object, idealism grasps the active, subjective dimension, but does so in a

manner abstracted from sensuous activity.2 Marx does not take the side of materialism

here, but regards the opposition of materialism and idealism as expressing a

subjective/objective dualism that has characterized modern Western philosophy. Marx’s

aim is to overcome the dualism itself – which he claims can only be accomplished by an

approach centered on sensuous human praxis.

In so arguing, Marx is not simply calling for a better philosophical understanding

of the world. His statement that “Feuerbach…does not see…that the abstract individual

which he analyzes belongs to a particular form of society”3 implies that the object of

thought must be understood as historically and socially determinate.

1 Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol.5, p.8. 2 Ibid. p.3. 3 Ibid. p.5.


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Moreover – and this is even more fundamental – not only the object of thought,

but thought itself must be grasped with reference to its context. Consequently, Marx

criticizes “the materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and

upbringing” not only for forgetting the active dimension – “that it is men who change

circumstances” – but also the reflexive dimension – “that the educator must himself be

educated.” The result is that materialist doctrine ends up dividing “society into two parts,

one of which is superior to society.”4 This critique can be read not only as one of avant-

gardist conceptions of politics, but also of any understanding of theory that, explicitly or

implicitly, posits a decontextualized theorist, hovering above and outside of all

determinate contexts as an omniscient spirit.

Overcoming the classical subject/object dualism endemic to modern Western

philosophy, then, requires a form of thought that grasps philosophical problems with

reference to their determinate social/historical context. In other words, the approach

Marx outlines in the Theses on Feuerbach, although still underdetermined, regards critical

social theory as the adequate supersession of philosophy.

This general point emerges more clearly in the German Ideology. In that

manuscript, Marx famously argues that, contrary to the idealism of the Young Hegelians,

“[i]t is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness.”5

Nevertheless, Marx does not simply argue that the Young Hegelians have made a

conceptual error. Instead he claims that their idealist understanding – that consciousness

determines life – must itself be understood with reference to its context: “If in all ideology

men and their relations appear upside-down as in a camera obscure, this phenomenon

arises…from their historical life process...”6

4 Ibid. p.4. 5 Marx and Engels, German Ideology, Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol.5, p.37. 6 Ibid. p.36.


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One task of critical theory, then, is to show that determinate forms of thought are

forms of misrecognition by elucidating their conditions of possibility with reference to

their context. This critique, however, is not and cannot be undertaken from a standpoint

that claims transhistorical validity. Within the framework of this approach, no theory,

including Marx’s, has such validity.

This critique of any conception of transhistorically valid truth, does not, however,

necessarily imply a radical relativism that ultimately is self-undermining. A theory can

show itself to be both a rigorous theory of its context and historically specific if it

reflexively can account for its own conditions of possibility by means of the same

categories with which it grasps that object, i.e., its own context. In this way, it can get

beyond the opposition of universal decontextualized truth and relativism.

In the German Ideology, this approach is still largely programmatic. Marx only

begins to work out the relationship between society and thought. So, for example, in

discussing idealism, he relates its condition of possibility in very general terms to the

division of mental and manual labor.7 He also very generally relates the possibility of

social critique to the contradictory character of society, arguing that “if…theory…comes

into contradiction with the existing relations, this can only occur because existing social

relations have come into contradiction with existing productive forces.”8

Although the notion of contradiction is not well developed here, it should be clear

that it is crucial to the self-reflexive character of the critique. It grounds the possibility

both of social critique as well as of historical transformation. Its significance in Marx’s

work cannot adequately be grasped objectivistically, in terms of the problematic of

economic crises, or subjectivistically, simply in terms of social antagonism.

It is in the Grundrisse and Capital that Marx provides a firm foundation for a

historical/social analysis of forms of thought, consciousness, and subjectivity – that is, for

7 Ibid. p.45. 8 Ibid.


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a critical social theory capable of superseding philosophical thought by convincingly

mediating it and its historical context. He does so by developing a conception of

historically specific social forms.

The Grundrisse, a massive preparatory study for Capital, helps illuminate Marx’s

critique of capitalist modernity. Capital is more difficult to decipher inasmuch as it is

very tightly structured as a critique undertaken from a standpoint immanent to its object

of investigation. For this reason, its critical categories can be misunderstood as

affirmative. Hence, all too frequently, what clearly, in light of the Grundrisse, is the object

of Marx’s critique has been regarded as its standpoint – an issue to which I will return.

In a crucial section of the Grundrisse, titled “[the] method of political economy,”9

Marx wrestles with the question of an adequate point of departure for his critical analysis.

He makes clear that the categories of his analysis should not be understood in narrow

economic terms. Rather, they “express the forms of being [Daseinsformen], the

determinations of existence [Existenzbestimmungen]…of this specific society.”10 As such,

they are, at once, forms of subjectivity and objectivity; they express “what is given, in the

head as well as in reality.”11 That is, Marx’s categories grasp as intrinsically interrelated,

economic, social, and cultural dimensions of capitalist modernity that frequently are

treated as contingently related, as extrinsic to one another. This categorial approach also

contravenes understandings of the relations of social objectivity and subjectivity in terms

of a base/superstructure model.

Moreover, Marx makes very clear that the categories of his critique are historically

specific. Even categories that appear to be transhistorical and that actually do play a role

much earlier historically – such as money and labour – are fully developed and come into

9 Marx, Grundrisse, pp.100-108. 10 Ibid. p.106; translation modified. 11 Ibid.


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their own only in capitalist society.12 As simple, abstract categories, according to Marx,

they are as “modern…as are the relations which create this simple abstraction.”13 That is,

the abstract character of such categories is rooted in the abstract form of the social

relations of capitalism. And it is precisely because of this abstract form that what is

specific to capitalist society can appear to be transhistorical. In other words, Marx now

intrinsically relates forms of thought, including forms of misrecognition, and forms of

social relations.

Marx’s emphasis on the historical specificity of the object of investigation is

intrinsically linked to the issue of the point of departure of his critical analysis. The

historically specific character of the theory is not simply a matter of content, but also of

form; its form should not contravene the historically specific character of the theory. The

theory cannot present itself in a transhistorical form, for example, as a universally valid

‘method’ that simply can be applied to a variety of objects, to which it is related only

contingently. Rather the historical specificity of the theory requires that the concept be

the concept of its object.

The point of departure of the critical analysis, therefore, cannot be grounded in a

Cartesian manner, as a deduction from purportedly indubitable, transhistorically valid,

truths. Rather, the point of departure must be historically specific, the core of a

historically determinate analysis of the historically specific formation that is its context.

Rather than presenting the categories in the order in which they arose historically, critical

analysis must begin with what is most essential to the determinate society it seeks to

grasp.14

If Hegel, in The Science of Logic, was concerned with the problem of the point of

departure for the exposition of a logic that doesn’t presuppose a logic, that is, a grounding

12 Ibid. p.103. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. p.207.


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outside of that which it seeks to demonstrate, Marx was concerned with the problem of a

historically specific point of departure for a critical social theory that is rigorously

immanent, that doesn’t ground itself outside of its object/context.

Such a point of departure can only be rendered plausible immanently – by the

course of its unfolding, whereby each successive unfolded moment retroactively justifies

that which preceded it. And, indeed, this how Capital is structured. The categories of the

beginning – for example, commodity, value, use value, abstract labour, concrete labour –

are only really justified by the subsequent unfolding of the analysis. What appears to be

their transhistorical ‘grounding’ in the first chapter of Capital, in the form of a Cartesian

deduction, should be understood with reference to the framework of Marx’s immanent

mode of presentation, which does not take a standpoint extrinsic to its object.

Understood in this way, what appears to be a transhistorical grounding (of value, for

example) is the way in which the subjective/objective forms present themselves. It is a

metacommentary on thought that remains bound within the limits of the structuring

forms of modern, capitalist society.

The historical specificity of the categories of Marx’s critique also emerges clearly

in another important section of the Grundrisse entitled “Contradiction between the

foundation of bourgeois production (value as measure) and its development.”15 There,

Marx outlines what he regards as the essential core of capitalism and the fundamental

contradiction that generates the historical possibility of a postcapitalist form of social life.

The category of value expresses the social relations that most fundamentally characterize

capitalism as a form of social life, according to Marx. At the same time, it expresses a

determinate form of wealth. As a form of wealth, value generally has been understood of

as a category of the market. Yet Marx’s characterization of value as “the foundation of

15 Ibid. p.704; first emphasis added.


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bourgeois production” calls that into question and suggests it also should be understood

as a category of capitalist production itself.

This implies that the process of production should be seen as intrinsically related

to capitalism, and that Marx’s understanding of capitalism’s fundamental contradiction

should not be thought of as one between industrial production, on the one hand, and the

market and private property, on the other. This requires further examination.

Value as a social form, according to Marx, is constituted by the expenditure of

direct human labour in the process of production, measured temporally. As a category of

the fundamental social relations that constitute capitalism, it expresses that which is, and

remains, the underlying foundation of capitalist production.16 Yet production based on

value generates a dynamic that gives rise to a growing tension between this foundation

and the results of its own historical development. Marx argues that capitalism generates

enormous, ongoing increases in productivity, as a result of which what he calls “real

wealth” comes to depend less on labour time than on the general state of science and on

the progress of technology. A huge gap emerges between direct human labour and the

productive powers developed under capitalism.17

The contrast Marx draws between value and “real wealth” is one between a form

of wealth based on labour time and one that does not depend on immediate labour time

and can be generated by knowledge. It clearly indicates that value does not refer to social

wealth in general, but is a historically specific form of wealth that is intrinsically related to

a historically specific mode of production.

Many arguments regarding Marx's analysis of the uniqueness of labour as the

source of value – supportive as well as critical – overlook his distinction between “real

wealth” and value. The Grundrisse indicates, however, that Marx's “labour theory of

value” is not a theory of the unique properties of labour in general, but an analysis of the

16 Ibid.; emphasis added. 17 Ibid. pp.704-705.


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historical specificity of value as a form of wealth and, hence, implicitly, of the labour that

supposedly constitutes it. Consequently, it is irrelevant to argue for or against Marx’s

theory of value as if it were intended to be a labour theory of (transhistorical) wealth –

that is, as if Marx had written a critical political economy rather than a critique of political

economy.

I am suggesting then, that value, for Marx, is a category that expresses the

historical specificity of the form of wealth and of production characteristic of capitalism,

and is not a normative category for judging capitalism. In the Grundrisse, Marx argues

that, as the mode of production based on value develops, value becomes less and less

adequate as a measure of social wealth; it becomes anachronistic in terms of the potential

of the system of production to which it gives rise. The realization of that potential would

entail the abolition of value.

This historical possibility is not simply quantitative – that ever

greater masses of goods could be produced on the basis of the existing process of

production, and distributed more equitably. The logic of the growing

contradiction between ‘real wealth’ and value also implies the possibility of a

different process of production, one no longer based on direct human labour.18

This section of the Grundrisse makes abundantly clear that, for Marx, overcoming

capitalism involves the abolition of value as the social form of wealth, which, in turn,

entails overcoming the mode of producing developed under capitalism. It entails a

fundamental transformation of the structure of social labour.

Yet, although the course of capitalist development generates the possibility of a

new, liberating, structure of social labour, its general realisation is impossible under

capitalism, according to Marx. Despite value’s growing inadequacy as a measure of social

wealth produced, it is not simply superseded by a new form of wealth. Instead, according

18 Ibid. p.705; second emphasis added.


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to Marx, it remains the necessary structural precondition of capitalist society.19 This is the

basis of capitalism’s fundamental contradiction.

These Grundrisse passages indicate that Marx’s notion of the structural

contradiction in capitalism should not be identified immediately with social antagonism,

such as class conflict, and does not refer most fundamentally to a contradiction between

private appropriation and socialized production, since production itself is moulded by

capitalist relations. Nevertheless, Marx's analysis locates a contradiction between the

actuality of the form of production constituted by value, and its potential – a potential

that grounds the possibility of a new form of production. Far from entailing the

realization of the proletariat, overcoming capitalism would involve the material abolition

of proletarian labour.

This section of the Grundrisse indicates, then, that Marx’s critical theory should be

understood essentially as a critique of labour in capitalism, rather than a critique of

capitalism from the standpoint of labour (as in traditional Marxism). This has far-

reaching implications for comprehending Capital.

At this point I can briefly outline a reading of Capital based on the considerations

developed thus far. As is well known, Capital’s point of departure is the commodity. On

the basis of the Grundrisse, it now is evident that the category of the commodity here does

not refer to commodities as they might exist in many societies. Nor does it express a

(fictitious) historical stage of ‘simple commodity production’ purportedly antecedent to

capitalism. Rather, the category of the commodity here is historically specific. It

designates the most fundamental social form of capitalist society, the form from which

Marx then proceeded to unfold the essential features and dynamic quality of that society.

19 Ibid. p.706.


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The characteristics of that form – that it simultaneously is a value and a use value, for

example – should also be understood as historically specific.20

The commodity form of social relations is constituted by labour, according to

Marx. Hence it necessarily exists in objectified form. Marx’s conception of the historical

specificity of labour in capitalism underlies this description. He maintains that labour in

capitalism has a “double character”: it is both “concrete labour” and “abstract labour.”21

“Concrete labour” refers to the fact that some form of what we consider labouring

activities mediates the interaction of humans with nature in all societies. “Abstract

labour,” however, does not simply refer to labour in general. Rather, it is a historically

specific category signifying that labour in capitalism has a unique social function that is

not intrinsic to labouring activity as such: it serves as a kind of quasi-objective means by

which the products of others are acquired. As such a socially mediating activity, labour

constitutes a new, quasi-objective, form of interdependence, where people’s labour or

labour products function as quasi-objective means of obtaining the products of others. In

serving as such mediations, labour and its products pre-empt that function on the part of

manifest social relations.

Labour in capitalism not only mediates the interaction of humans and nature,

then, but also constitutes a historically specific social mediation, according to Marx.

Hence, its objectifications (commodity, capital) are both concrete labour products and

objectified forms of social mediation. The social relations that most fundamentally

characterize the capitalist form of social life are thus very different from the qualitatively

heterogeneous and overtly social relations, such as kinship relations, which characterize

other forms of social life. The fundamental forms of social relations constitutive of

capitalism are peculiarly quasi-objective and formal, and are characterized by a dualistic

20 Marx, Capital, vol.1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London, 1976), pp.166, 169. 21 Ibid. pp.131-139.


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opposition of an abstract, general, homogenous dimension, and a concrete, particular,

material dimension (both of which appear to be natural, rather than social).

In Marx’s mature works, then, the notion of the essential centrality of labour to

social life is historically specific. It should not be taken to mean that material production

is the most essential dimension of social life in general, or even of capitalism in particular.

Rather, it refers to the historically specific constitution by labour in capitalism of a form

of mediation that fundamentally characterizes that society. Because this mediating

activity is not a characteristic that is intrinsic to labouring activity, however, it does not –

and cannot – appear as such. Instead, when the commodity is analyzed, its historically

specific dimension, value, appears to be constituted by labour in general, without any

further qualifications – the “expenditure of human brains, muscles, nerves, hands, etc.”22

In other words, what is historically specific – the socially mediating function of labour in

capitalism – appears as transhistorical, as socially ontological. This transhistorical form

of appearance of labour’s historically unique socially constituting function in capitalism –

whereby the concrete dimension expresses and veils the abstract dimension – is an initial

determination of what Marx refers to as the fetish forms of capitalism. It underlies all

approaches that transhistoricize the socially constituting role of labour in capitalism,

whether affirmatively (as in classical political economy and traditional Marxism) or

negatively (as in Dialectic of Enlightenment).

The double character of the fundamental forms of capitalism also provides the

basis for a social/historical analysis of philosophical forms of thought that posit an

abstract, ontological essence that exists behind the realm of sensuous appearances. I am

suggesting, in other words, that, with his categorial analysis in Capital, Marx establishes

the foundations for a powerful social/historical theory of knowledge that is non-

functionalist.

22 Ibid. p.135.


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The historically specific form of mediation at the heart of capitalism is constituted

by determinate forms of practice, but becomes quasi-independent of the actors. The

result is a new form of social domination, one that subjects people to increasingly

impersonal “rational” imperatives and constraints that cannot adequately be grasped in

terms of the concrete domination of social groupings such as class or institutional

agencies of the state and/or the economy. Like power as conceptualised by Foucault, this

form of domination has no determinate locus and appears not to be social at all.

However, it is not static, but temporally dynamic. In Capital, Marx treats the historically

dynamic character of capitalism as historically specific, grounded in the form of

impersonal domination intrinsic to the basic structuring forms of that society. In so

doing, he relativises the notion of an intrinsic historical dynamic.

What drives this dynamic is the double character of the underlying social forms of

capitalism. It is crucially important to note in this regard that the distinction Marx makes

in the Grundrisse between value and “real wealth” reappears in the first chapter of Capital

as that between value and “material wealth.”23 Material wealth, which is measured by the

quantity produced, is a function of a number of factors in addition to labour, such as

knowledge, social organization, and natural conditions.24 Value, the dominant form of

wealth in capitalism, is constituted by (socially necessary) human labour-time

expenditure alone, according Marx.25

Their dialectic, of value and use value, becomes historically significant with the

emergence of relative surplus value and gives rise to a very complex non-linear historical

dynamic underlying modern society. On the one hand, this dynamic is characterized by

ongoing transformations of production and, more generally of social life; on the other

hand, this historical dynamic entails the ongoing reconstitution of its own fundamental

23 Ibid. p.134. 24 Ibid. p.130. 25 Ibid. p.129, 130, 136.


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condition as an unchanging feature of social life – namely that social mediation is

ultimately effected by labor and, hence, that living labor remains integral to the process of

production (considered in terms of society as a whole) regardless of the level of

productivity. The historical dynamic of capitalism ceaselessly generates what is new

while regenerating what is the same. This dynamic both generates the possibility of

another organization of social life and yet hinders that possibility from being realized.

Marx grasps this historical dynamic with his category of capital.

The historically specific abstract form of social domination intrinsic to

capitalism’s fundamental forms of social mediation, then, is the domination of people by

time. This form of domination is bound to a historically specific abstract form of

temporality, abstract Newtonian time, which is constituted historically with the

commodity form. The temporality of capital’s dynamic, however, is not only abstract. I

can only mention here that the dialectic of the value and use-value dimensions changes

the determination of what counts as a given unit of time. The unit of (abstract) time is

pushed forward, as it were. The movement here is one of time, and can be termed

historical time. Both abstract time and historical time are constituted historically as

structures of domination.

Within this social universe, people appear doubled. On the one hand, as

commodity owners, they are subjects, free from relations of personal domination, and

equal to all other subjects. On the other hand, they are unfree, constrained by social

forms of domination that appear external and objective. This historically specific double

character of personhood in capitalism can be and has been transhistoricized and

ontologized – for example by Durkheim with his notion of homo duplex. This form of

social relations, as it becomes increasingly general, undermines formal, juridically

recognized, social hierarchy. At the same time, those who are not commodity owners are

not deemed subjects, and tend to fall out of the realm of general human equality.


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This historical dynamic I have outlined is at the heart of capital, which Marx

analyzes as self-valorizing value. Significantly, in introducing the category of capital in

Capital, Marx describes it with the same language that Hegel used in the Phenomenology

with reference to Geist – the self-moving substance that is the subject of its own process.26

In so doing, Marx suggests that a historical Subject in the Hegelian sense does indeed

exist in capitalism. Yet – and this is crucially important – he does not identify that Subject

with the proletariat (as does Lukács) or with humanity. Instead he identifies it with

capital. This implies that the so-called “rational core” of Hegel’s dialectic is precisely its

idealist character. It expresses capitalism’s dynamic structure of social domination that

acquires a quasi-independent existence vis-à-vis the people who constitute it.

In his mature theory then, Marx does not posit an historical meta-subject, such as

the proletariat, which will realize itself in a future socialist society, but provides the basis

for a critique of such a Feuerbachian anthropological inversion. This implies a position

very different from that of theorists like Lukács, for whom the social totality constituted

by labor provides the standpoint of the critique of capitalism, and is to be realized in

socialism. In Capital, the totality and labor constituting it have become the objects of

critique. The contradictions of capital point to the abolition, not the realization of the

Subject.

As an aside, it should be noted that by grounding the contradictory character of

the social formation in the dualistic forms expressed by the categories of the commodity

and capital, Marx implies that structurally based social contradiction is specific to

capitalism. The notion that reality, or social relations in general, are essentially

contradictory and dialectical, appears in light of this analysis to be one that can only be

assumed metaphysically not explained.

26 Ibid. pp.255-256.


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Within this framework, then, History, understood as an immanently driven

directional dynamic, is not a universal category of human social life. Rather, it is a

historically specific feature of capitalist society that can be and has been projected onto all

of human history. Far from viewing history as unequivocally positive, a position that

grounds such a dynamic in the category of capital takes its existence as a manifestation of

heteronomy.

In this evaluation, the critical Marxian position is closer to postructuralism than

it is to orthodox Second International Marxism. Nevertheless, it does not regard

heteronomous history as a narrative, which can simply be dispelled discursively, but as a

structure of domination that must be overcome. From this point of view, any attempt to

rescue human agency by focusing on contingency in ways that bracket the existence of

this structure of domination is – ironically – profoundly disempowering.

I am suggesting, in other words, that the category of capital allows for a position

that can get beyond the classical dualistic opposition of necessity and freedom,

recapitulated as one between a conception of history as necessity – frequently understood

as Hegelian -- and its poststructuralist rejection in the name of contingency (and

presumably agency).

The understanding of capitalism’s complex dynamic I have outlined also allows

for a critical social (rather than technological) analysis of the trajectory of growth and the

structure of production in modern society. Although I cannot elaborate here, in Capital,

Marx examines the form of growth and of production developed under capitalism as

heteronomous forms that, nevertheless, embody emancipatory possibilities that remain

unrealized under capitalism.

Marx's analysis, then, seeks to grasp the course of capitalist development as a

double-sided development of enrichment and impoverishment. It implies that this

development cannot be understood adequately in a one-dimensional fashion, either as


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the progress of knowledge and happiness, or as the ‘progress’ of domination and

destruction. The rapid increase in scientific and technical knowledge under capitalism

does not, therefore, signify linear progress toward emancipation. According to Marx's

analysis, such increased knowledge — itself socially constituted — has led to the

fragmentation and emptying of individual labour and to the increasing control of

humanity by the results of its own objectifying activity; yet it has also increased the

possibility that labour could be individually enriching and that humanity could exert

greater control over its fate. This double-sided development is rooted in the double

character of the structures of capitalist society.

Marx's analysis thus implies a notion of overcoming capitalism that neither

uncritically affirms technological development as the condition of human progress nor

rejects technological progress per se. By indicating that the potential of the system of

production developed under capitalism could be used to transform that system itself, this

analysis overcomes the opposition of these positions and shows that each takes one

moment of a more complex historical development to be the whole. This approach

grasps the opposition of faith in linear progress and its romantic rejection as expressing a

historical antinomy that, in both of its terms, is characteristic of the capitalist epoch.

More generally, Marx’s critical theory argues neither for simply retaining nor abolishing

what was constituted historically in capitalism. Rather, his theory points to the possibility

that what was historically constituted in alienated form could be appropriated and,

thereby, fundamentally transformed.

This possibility is given by the historical emergence of a gap between society as it

is, moulded by capital, and society as it could be, given the possibilities generated by

capitalism itself. This gap, which indicates that the whole is not unitary, opens the space

for critical reflection – not on the basis of what is presumed to be ontological, but on the

basis of a growing contradiction between what is and what could be.


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In other words, the critical theory of capitalism can elucidate its own condition of

possibility by means of the same categories with which it seeks to grasp its object. Unlike

some other critical theories, it does not accord itself a privileged standpoint that,

implicitly, is an exception to what it critically describes.

The thrust of the critique of capitalism is to point toward the possibility of the

overcoming of capitalism’s quasi-automatic historical dynamic – that is, toward the

possibility that people could finally become the subjects of their own history. With the

realization of that possibility, the critical theory would have lost its object, and hence, its

validity.

critical theory philosophy and history moishe postone

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