Sohn-Rethel sought to derive Kantian categories from the exchange-relation
Evidence
In a 1965 letter to Lucien Goldmann, who had never heard of Sohn-Rethel, Adorno writes that the latter ‘has been working for many a long year on a problem with which he is downright obsessed: the derivation of the Western tradition’s epistemological categories from the exchange-relation’. … After describing this work as ‘the quite energetic and manifold attempt to push further certain approaches from the reification chapter from History and Class Consciousness into a Marxian epistemology’, Adorno notes: ‘Just now, Sohn-Rethel submitted to me his most recent draft from the complex [the lecture ‘Warenform und Denkform’ (‘Commodity-Form andThought-Form’)];181tomorrowhewillvisitmehere’.182Thecorrespondence between Adorno and Sohn-Rethel during this time suggests that the former never read the draft in question. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 326
Categorization
- XREF: Picks up the well-known ‘Sohn-Rethel thesis’ connecting commodity-form and thought-form from History and Class Consciousness’s reification chapter. — connects to: The Kantian ego is a product of material economic conditions, not a transcendental given — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 79; Kant’s categorical imperative is refuted by historical particularity — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 234; Aristotelian hexis and Kantian imagination prefigure the Aufhebung structure — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 1007 (+6 more)
Broader Connections
- Sohn-Rethel traces idealist theory’s logical autonomy to the primal break of exploitation
#expands(0.90) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 313 - Marx derives superstructures from the phenomenal forms of exchange relations
#expands(0.85) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 520 - The sphere of exchange generates capitalism’s spontaneous commonsense and bourgeois theory
#expands(0.85) - Durkheim and Mauss argued cognitive categories derive from social relations
#expands(0.75) - Formal equality in exchange masks how the class relation is constituted
#expands(0.72) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1363 - Durkheim’s sociology inherits the neo-Kantian tradition and divides into two projects
#expands(0.72) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 354