Category: Blogs
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Gopal Balakrishnan: The Political Geopolitics of Separation
Evaluating European intellectuals who aligned with or sympathized toward fascism presents unavoidable challenges. Figures such as Heidegger, De Man, Céline, Jünger, Gentile, Croce, Della Volpe, and Pound each represent complex cases that resist straightforward judgment. Yet, none pose a more intricate dilemma than Carl Schmitt. His shifting political stances and his unusual relationship to conservative…
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Gopal Balakrishnan: The Age of Identity?
Over the past twenty-five years, the diminishing force of the radical agendas from the 1968 generation has fostered a cautious intellectual environment. Many scholars have grown wary of broad, ambitious theories about history and society. Within this retreat from sweeping narratives, the German academic landscape has maintained distinctive tendencies. One such tendency is the evolution…
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Gopal Balakrishnan: The Abolitionist Part 1
The question of whether an early and a late Marx can be distinguished has often seemed of limited importance today. In current discussions, most attention is directed toward his later economic writings, while his earlier works receive less notice. The earlier phase, often linked with philosophical concerns, once attracted those interested in the relation between…
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The Historical Materialism of the Early Marx
Despite the absence of any conception of feudalism, Marx tells the story of the rise of European civil society beginning with the political secession of towns from the jurisdiction of lords ensconced in armed castles. Within these merchant-artisan towns, the emergence of an opposition of mental to manual labor within the guild system set the…
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A German Revolution?
Even before the defeats of the revolutions of 1848, they recognized that the mutually advantageous arrangements between the middle class and an old regime which it sought to reform to its specifications, would make a bourgeois revolution in Germany dependent upon wider political upheavals across Europe- more specifically another revolutionary breakthrough in France bringing a…
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Marx’s Early Critique of Political Economy
Political economy had supplanted philosophy and theology as the primary object of critique. Presupposing an equilibrium of supply and demand, economists sought to explain the economy-wide pattern of relative prices-exchange values-by the same law which governed the class distribution of revenues between landlords, capitalists, and wage laborers. Following Engels, Marx concluded that they were unable…
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Marx on the Jewish Question
While in their own idiosyncratic way, some Young Hegelians briefly came to see themselves as Jacobins, the view that Germany was a belated nation condemned to undergo a derivative, ‘catch-up’ revolution was an anathema to them. One could say that they were patriots of a coming two-fold Franco-German republic. While they scorned the mythical Gothic…
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The Hegelians
Image Source: Unsplash The development of Hegel’s later philosophy of law must be situated in the context of Prussia’s ‘revolution from above’. After a crushing defeat at Jena in 1806, a group of loyalist officers and bureaucrats initiated a project of sweeping administrative reforms, establishing a new military order, a new university system, an opening…
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The Critique of Liberalism
Image Source: Unsplash The Right-Wing Backlash to Mass Democracy In the tumultuous European aftermath of the First World War, the breakthroughs of mass democracy confronted a right-wing backlash that came to adopt anti-status quo pretentions historically identified with the left. The spectacle of industrial warfare was felt to have possessed a higher world-historical significance, cruelly…
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Gopal Balakrishnan: Writer and Independent Scholar & Author
To Know More About Gopal Balakrishnan, click the links below: https://gopalbalakrishnan1.medium.com https://bsky.app/profile/gopalbalakrishnan.bsky.social