- Reinhard Opitz
Reinhard Opitz (—
April 3 1986 ) was a Germanleft-wing intellectual andsocial scientist whose best-knownthesis postulates that members of the German middle class had acquired a "falsified"consciousness .A prolific writer and theorist, Opitz, who had a
Ph.D. inphilosophy , spent the greater part of his working life on the fringes of political movements. While the majority of his writings forcefully argue the correctness of finer points in the works ofKarl Marx , his most widely remembered personal contribution to Marxist theory was the "falsified" consciousness position. The completed essay, entitled "On Genesis and Prevention ofFascism ", appeared in the autumn 1974 issue of the leftist German academic publication "Das Argument".Reinhard Opitz died of cancer in
Cologne , where he had lived for twenty years. He was 51 years old.In 1999, thirteen years after his death, Rainer Rilling and Ilina Fach published "Liberalism—Fascism—Integration" (ISBN 3-924684-88-X), a three-volume edition (in German, 1490 pages) of the most relevant pieces Opitz had written and published.
References
[http://www.hausarbeiten.de/faecher/hausarbeit/pot/24644.html Extensive German essay (with an English-language introduction) examining Opitz's legacy and the cogency of his philosophical views on the 30th anniversary of the 1974 publication of "On Genesis and Prevention of Fascism"]
External links
* [http://dispatch.opac.d-nb.de/DB=4.1/REL?PPN=121929183 Reinhard Opitz in the German National Library Catalogue]
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