Alfred Sohn-Rethel

Alfred Sohn-Rethel (January 4, 1899–April 6, 1990) was a Marxist economist and philosopher especially interested in epistemology. He also wrote about the relationship of German industry with national socialism.

Life

Born in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris, Sohn-Rethel came from a family of painters and his father was a painter too. His mother came from the Oppenheim family and had influential relations with big business.

His family did not want him to become a painter too. Therefore he grew up with his uncle, the steel industrialist Ernst Poensgen. On Christmas 1915 he expressed a wish for a copy of Karl Marx "Capital" as a present. He received one and studied it intensively. Sohn-Rethel received his doctorate with the Austrian Marxist Emil Lederer in 1928. In his thesis he criticized the theory of marginal utility as a petitio principii because it implies the notion of number implicitly.

His theoretical concerns are close to the Frankfurt School. In 1924 he had met Adorno and Kracauer on the island of Capri. Since 1920 he was a friend of the philosopher Ernst Bloch and in 1921 he met Walter Benjamin. He stayed in contact with different members of the Frankfurt School but they never established a close working relationship because Horkeimer was afraid of social theory becoming too speculative.

Thanks to Poensgen he found a job as research assistant at the Mitteleuropäischer Wirtschaftstag (MWT). The MWT was a lobbying organization of the leading export industries. From 1931 to 1936 he worked 'in the cave of the lion' and watched and analyzed power politics from a very close distance. At the some time he had contacts with socialist resistance groups like "Neu beginnen" or "Der rote Stosstrupp". In 1937 he emigrated via Switzerland and Paris to England. He wrote economic analyses for a circle close to Churchill which were used against Chamberlain's appeasement policy.

After the second world war Sohn-Rethel could not really continue his theoretical work for a long time. He made a living teaching French. He joined the communist party and despite his disillusionment he was a member until 1972. The 68 movement created a new interest in his work. At the funeral of Adorno he met the editor Unseld who encouraged him to crystallize his ideas in his major work "Intellectual and manual labor". In 1978 Sohn-Rethel managed to get a job at Bremen University. He died in Bremen in 1990.

Theory

Sohn-Rethel's life long project was the combination of the epistemology of Kant with Marx' Critique of political economy. When people exchange commodities they abstract from the specific goods. Only the value of these goods is important. This abstraction is called 'real abstraction' because it takes place without a conscious effort, whether anybody is aware of it or not is of no importance. Sohn-Rethel believed this type of abstraction to be the real basis of formal and abstract thinking. All of Kant's categories such as space, time, quality, substance, accident, movement and so forth are implicit in the act of exchange. Readers of Marx will not be entirely surprised by such a genealogy, since Marx himself suggested that the ideas of freedom and equality, at least as we know them so far, are rooted in the exchange of commodities.

The second domain where Sohn-Rethel made important contributions was the study of the economic policies which favored the rise of German fascism. He insisted on the difference between different factions of capitalists, the more prospering industries close to Brüning and the less successful industries close to the Harzburger Front (Hugenberg, Hitler) namely coal, construction and steel - with the exception of Krupp. The endorsement of the compromise between industry and big agrarians at the shareholders' meeting of the IG Farben in 1932 paved the way for the dictatorship, according to Sohn-Rethel.

Works

*"Intellectual and manual labour : a critique of epistemology" , Atlantic Highlands, N.J : Humanities Press, 1977
*"Economy and class structure of German fascism", London, CSE Books, 1978