The confession quoted above by way of introduction reveals with tragic sincerity the fatal passion of an overly avid reader, unlimited in curiosity certainly but fully conscious of the demanding finality of the work he had to accomplish: the scientific critique of an international system of social organization, “in which man is a humiliated, enslaved, abandoned and scornful being” (1844). Cultivating poetry and philosophy in a world felt to be unlivable meant becoming an accomplice of those individuals and institutions principally (...) responsible for the barbarity called modern civilization. But to combat this, it was necessary to scour the murky historical horizon issued from a distant past where only great social revolutions marked the stages of a progression seen as ambiguous because realized by means of unspeakable phenomena of regression. Only one revolution took place under the contradictory sign of an emancipation with universal ambitions and of a decline with indelible consequences: the French Revolution. Conclusion as well as beginning, it was studied by Marx as a unique event, both in relation to its antecedents as well as its liberating promises. Although it is true that Marx “never wrote a history of the ancien régime”, a hardly significant remark, it is no less true that he studied and compiled, with the eagerness of a schoolboy enthralled by history, an enormous mass of documentation that can “help understand how (the ancien regime) gave birth to the Revolution”, despite what François Furet might think (Marx et la Révolution française, Paris, 1986, p. 79). Moreover, the author of Das Kapital drew from the revolutionary history of France the inspiration for a “poetry of the future” in which the following vision was designed:“The old bourgeois society, with its classes and its class antagonism, gave way to an association in which the free development of each individual is the condition for the free development of the whole” (1848). (shrink)

Cette édition qui réunit l'ensemble des textes philosophiques écrits par Marx jusqu'en 1848 permettra de redécouvrir sa critique de l'aliénation de la conscience, de la réification du travail, du culte de l'Etat, des abstractions de la philosophie du droit.

En su discurso del 10 de mayo de 1793 sobre la Constitución, Robespierre combina una concepción fiduciaria de los representantes públicos con una defensa de las virtudes de la democracia, el único sistema político en el que los gobernantes, al ser parte del pueblo, tienen los mismos intereses que este. Es esta defensa de la soberanía popular, así como de la primacía del poder legislativo, lo que constituye la esencia de su “economía política popular”, una expresión que toma de Rousseau. (...) Para Robespierre, solamente esta clase de economía es compatible con una República cuyo primer objetivo sea la garantía de los derechos naturales del hombre. In his 10th May 1793 speech on the Constitution, Robespierre combines a fiduciary conception of public representatives with a defence of the virtues of democracy, the only political system in which the rulers, being part of the people, have the same interests as the latter. It is this defence of popular sovereignty, as well as of the primacy of the legislative power, what constitutes the essence of his “popular political economy”, an expression he takes from Rousseau. For Robespierre, only this kind of economy is compatible with a Republic whose first objective is to guarantee the natural rights of man. (shrink)

Republicanism is increasingly attracting more attention from political philosophy. However, a mere hermeneutical approach it is usually used, which tends to neglect the political, social and economic circumstances that shaped this tradition of thought. This article addresses the modern conception of republican freedom with the North American and the French case through the work of two of their most representative figures, Thomas Jefferson and Maximilien Robespierre. The article defends that the political, juridical and economic government – the republican political (...) economy– devised by both, keeps important similarities that the current political philosophy cannot ignore. To illustrate this relationship, it is shown that both thinkers received a deep and similar influence of natural law philosophy and of fiduciary theory when thinking and trying to implement their models of government and their idea of ownership. (shrink)

While many scholars have realized that the Enlightenment period was much more religious than previously thought, the deists are still seen as basically secular figures who believed in a distant and inactive deity. This article shows that the hundred and thirteen French Revolutionary deists who wrote prayers and hymns to God believed in a caring, loving, and active deity. They maintained that God wanted people to be free, and so God actively helped the French Revolution by leading the French armies (...) to victory and revealing enemy plots. The majority of these prayers and hymns were said at government-sponsored religious festivals. It is a mistake, however, to dismiss this religious language as being about sacralizing the new nation. Instead, there were places in the festivals where individuals could express their own religious views. Furthermore, most of these prayers and hymns were written while Maximilien Robespierre was pushing his deist civil religion and labelling irreligious people as enemies of the French republic. However, the same views about God were expressed after his death by the Theophilanthropists. Thus, these deists were not merely echoing the party line while Robespierre was alive, but were expressing their true religious feelings. (shrink)

Les éditions Klincksieck viennent de rééditer Karl Marx, essai de biographie intellectuelle de Maximilien Rubel, paru pour la première fois en 1957. L’ouvrage est issu de la thèse de doctorat de l’auteur, chercheur au CNRS disparu en 1996 et notamment célèbre pour son édition controversée des œuvres de Marx dans la Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. L’importante synthèse du parcours théorique de Marx que l’on trouve dans le livre faisait en son temps partie des travaux universitaires pionniers sur l...

The ArgumentIn the summer of 1783, a trial took place in the French city of Arras. One M. de Vissery, a resident of the nearby village of St. Omer, was appealing a decision by his local aldermen, who required him to remove a lightning rod he had put on his chimney. His young defense lawyer was Maximilien Robespierre, who made a name for himself by winning the case. In preparation, Robespierre and his senior colleague corresponded with natural philosophers and (...) jurisconsultants. Robes- pierre then persuasively resolved the crucial problem, namely, the proper relations of scientific to legal authority. He exploited the empiricist dogma common to contemporary physics and jurisprudence to argue that judges need not defer to scientific experts, but must only consider the facts, which required no expertise. It was a first approximation of an argument Robespierre would make with mounting authority over the next decade. (shrink)

Ces dernières décennies, la relation entre Spinoza et Marx a été abordée par des auteurs comme Louis Althusser, Antonio Negri et Maximilien Rubel. Néanmoins, bien que l'on puisse établir un lien entre les deux au niveau des affinités théoriques, il manque une analyse du rapport entre ces affinités et les références effectives que Marx fait à Spinoza. Nous ne savons pas davantage, jusqu'à maintenant, comment ces références s'articulent avec les objectifs du militantisme philosophique et politique que Marx s'est fixé (...) tout au long de sa vie. La présente étude cherche donc à parcourir les premières oeuvres de Marx de manière à y étudier la présence de Spinoza, et à démontrer simultanément à quels buts cette présence était subordonnée. (shrink)

In the last decades, the relationship between Spinoza and Marx has been addressed by authors such as Louis Althusser, Antonio Negri, and Maximilien Rubel. That said, if a connection between the two can be made at the level of theoretical affinities, an analysis of the correspondence between these affinities and actual references to Spinoza made by Marx is lacking. At this point, we do not know how these references fit (or not) with the philosophical and political objectives Marx set (...) out to achieve throughout his life. The present study, therefore, will review Marx’s first works to examine Spinoza’s presence and simultaneously demonstrate to which goals this presence was subordinated. (shrink)