When Spinoza Met Marx: Experiments in Nonhumanist Activity

Explores concepts that bring together the thinking of Spinoza and Marx.

Karl Marx was a fiery revolutionary theorist who heralded the imminent demise of capitalism, while Spinoza was a contemplative philosopher who preached rational understanding and voiced skepticism about open rebellion. Spinoza criticized all teleological ideas as anthropomorphic fantasies, while Marxism came to be associated expressly with teleological historical development. Yet socialists of the German nineteenth-century were consistently drawn to Spinoza as their philosophical guide. Tracie Matysik shows how the metaphorical meeting of Spinoza and Marx arose out of an intellectual conundrum about the meaning of activity. How is it, exactly, that humans can be fully determined creatures and also able to change their world? To address this paradox, many revolutionary theorists came to think of activity in the sense of Spinoza-as relating. Matysik follows these Spinozist-socialist intellectual experiments as they unfolded across the nineteenth century, drawing lessons from them that may be meaningful for the contemporary world.