Adventures of the Symbolic ― Post-marxism and Radical Democracy

Marxism's collapse in the twentieth century profoundly altered the style and substance of Western European radical thought. To build a more robust form of democratic theory and action, prominent theorists moved to reject revolution, abandon class for more fragmented models of social action, and elevate the political over the social. Acknowledging the constructedness of society and politics, they chose the "symbolic" as a concept powerful enough to reinvent leftist thought outside a Marxist framework. Following Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Adventures of the Dialectic, which reassessed philosophical Marxism at mid century, Warren Breckman critically revisits these thrilling experiments in the aftermath of Marxism.

The post-Marxist idea of the symbolic is dynamic and complex, uncannily echoing the early German Romantics, who first advanced a modern conception of symbolism and the symbolic. Hegel and Marx denounced the Romantics for their otherworldly and nebulous posture, yet post-Marxist thinkers appreciated the rich potential of the ambiguities and paradoxes the Romantics first recognized. Mapping different ideas of the symbolic among contemporary thinkers, Breckman traces a fascinating reflection of Romantic themes and resonances, and he explores in depth the effort to reconcile a radical and democratic political agenda with a politics that does not privilege materialist understandings of the social. Engaging with the work of Claude Levi-Strauss, Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, Marcel Gauchet, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Slavoj iek, Breckman uniquely situates these important theorists within two hundred years of European thought and extends their profound relevance to today's political activism.

Warren Breckman is professor of modern European intellectual history at the University of Pennsylvania. He has been a member of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study (2001-2002) and a visiting scholar at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris (1998) and he has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung, the Mellon Foundation, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He is the author ofMarx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory: Dethroning the Self andEuropean Romanticism: A Brief History with Documents. He is also executive coeditor of theJournal of the History of Ideas.