The concepts and phenomena of civil society, political economy and labour are ambivalent matters in Hegel’s political philosophy. They simultaneously contain productive and destructive potential in the realization of the political community. This article investigates Hegel’s concept of labour against the backdrop of his theory of civil society in order to bring forth the ambiguous role of labour in relation to the ’capitalism’ of civil society. According to Hegel, labour is both economically productive and the activity by which the society and its members can transcend the mere capitalistic dimensions of society. Labour can therefore simultaneously be understood as capitalistic and non-capitalistic in Hegel’s political philosophy. The cultivating dimensions of labour in Hegel’s theory offer a counterpart to the mere capitalistic forms of labour. Labour can therefore be used as a promising platform for the discussion of the relation between economy and culture and for the revitalization of capitalism critique.

This study "Philosophie im Konjunktiv. Nichtidentität als Ort der Möglichkeit des Utopischen in der negativen Dialektik Theodor W. Adornos" (Subjunctive Philosophy. Nonidentity as the Place for the Possibility of the Utopian in the Negative Dialectics of Theodor W. Adorno) deals with Adorno’s utopian thinking and asks on what it depends and on what it is founded. Moreover, the study asks the question wherein the possibility of fundamental societal change can be found and on what it can be founded. This study develops an answer to these questions through the analysis of the concepts of the nonidentity and the nonidentical – central concepts in Negative Dialectics –, which in the theory of Adorno constitute a place at which thinking and human beings are not fully absorbed by and integrated in philosophical and scientific systems or in the structure of society. Within the nonidentical the subsuming identities of philosophy and society are broken up. Therefore, the possibility of the utopian appears in this break of the identical. Here, the emancipation of the nonidentical could be realized: an emancipation, however, which is made possible in the nonidentical. The utopian thinking and the possibility of the utopian on the one hand, and nonidentity and the nonidentical on the other hand, are – this is the main claim of the study – inseparable. In developing this answer the study also tries to solve a certain problem in the discussion of Adorno’s philosophy, namely the difficulty in connecting the critical dimensions of his thinking - which are dominating his work and directed against the tradition of philosophy (and science) and capitalist society - with its utopian motives, through which he is calling for change in different ways. Finally, it is argued that Adornos’s thinking, which attempts to realize the utopian and to transcend reality on the basis of nonidentity, must be understood as a subjunctive philosophy.

Since Georg Lukács and Karl Korsch in the 1920s, Hegelian Marxism has played a prominent role as a radical intellectual tradition in modern political theory. This anthology investigates how these Hegelian Marxists, in different historical, political and intellectual contexts during the last century, have employed Hegel’s philosophy with the aim of developing and renewing Marxist theory.

Besides Lukács and Korsch the volume includes articles dealing with the thoughts of Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Evald Ilyenkov, Lucio Colletti and Slavoj Žižek. The overall purpose is to investigate if, and the degree to which, these thinkers could be interpreted as Hegelian Marxists, and how they use the Hegelian philosophy to better understand their own current society as well as situate themselves in relation to orthodox forms of Marxism. Taken together, the articles can hopefully contribute to an intensification of discussions about the critical and self-criticalphilosophy of Marxism today.