The Nineteenth Century · School
Marxism
Explained history through material production and class struggle; philosophy's task is not to interpret the world but to change it.
Representative figures · 10
Ludwig Feuerbach费尔巴哈
'God is the projection of the human essence': the secret of theology is anthropology. He stood Hegel on his head and prepared the ground for Marx.
Karl Marx马克思
The philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it. History is driven by modes of production, and capitalism breeds its own gravediggers in its contradictions.
Friedrich Engels恩格斯
Marx's collaborator, financier and literary executor, who extended dialectic to nature and brought the origins of family and state into historical materialism.
Walter Benjamin本雅明
Art in the age of mechanical reproduction, the fading aura, the flâneur of the arcades, brushing history against the grain: critic, translator and untimely thinker, who took his own life in flight.
Max Horkheimer霍克海默
Founder of critical theory and organiser of the Frankfurt School: Enlightenment turns into its opposite, reason becomes instrumental, and critical theory keeps hope for emancipation alive.
Herbert Marcuse马尔库塞
One-dimensional man, repressive desublimation, the Great Refusal: joining Freud with Marx, he became the mentor of the student movement of 1968, one of its 'three Ms'.
Theodor W. Adorno阿多诺
Negative dialectics and the critique of the culture industry: the whole is the false, to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, and philosophy's task is to speak for the non-identical. He was also Schoenberg's pupil and a composer.
Jean-Paul Sartre萨特
Existence precedes essence, we are condemned to be free, hell is other people: he made existentialism a generation's way of life, refused the Nobel Prize, and moved from the café to the street.
Alain Badiou巴迪欧
Mathematics is ontology; event, truth and the subject's fidelity: with set theory he rebuilt a Platonism, insisting on truth and the communist Idea when 'postmodernity' had declared truth finished.
Slavoj Žižek齐泽克
Lacan plus Hegel plus Hollywood: ideology is the fantasy we act out knowingly, enjoyment is the core of politics, and with jokes, films and obscenities he brought German idealism back into the public square.