Die russische Revolution von 1917 prägte die europäische politische Ordnung seit Beginn des 'kurzen' 20. Jahrhunderts und ist als dessen zentrales Ereignis gefeiert und verdammt worden. Sie wurde nicht nur als ein Ereignis der Weltgeschichte, sondern auch als Idee begriffen, die den intellektuellen Kosmos der Moderne neu strukturiert hat. Eine 'Philosophie der Revolution' ist entstanden, die den Sinn dieses Ereignisses zu bestimmen suchte, sei es als 'Sprung ins Reich der Freiheit' oder als 'Weg in die Knechtschaft'. Der zeitliche Abstand von einem Jahrhundert wird im vorliegenden Band als Anlass genommen, das Verhältnis von russischer Revolution und Philosophie einer komplexen Analyse zu unterziehen. Die Autoren befassen sich sowohl mit zeitgenössischen Deutungen der Revolution, als auch mit deren internationaler Wahrnehmung durch europäische Intellektuelle. Sie diskutieren zudem die Bedeutung der Revolution für das politische und kulturelle Selbstverständnis des heutigen Russland.

What impact did Bolshevist rule have on Emma Goldmans’s perception of the Russian Revolutions of 1917 and why did she change her mind, going from defending the Russian Revolution to becoming a crusader against Bolshevism? The Russian Revolution changed the world and determined the history of the 20th century as the French Revolution had determined the history of the 19th century. Left-wing intellectuals around the world greeted the February Revolution with enthusiasm as their hope for a new world and social order and the end of capitalism seemed close. However, the joy did not last long as the ideals of February 1917 were replaced by the realities of October 1917 and Lenin crushed the revolution during the following Civil War. Emma Goldman, a famous Russian-born American anarchist was one of the intellectuals, whose admiration for the revolution turned into frustration about its corruption. Emma Goldman and the Russian Revolution discusses her evolving perception of the revolution between 1917 and the early 1920s. The analysis of such an intellectual transformation process, provides a case study of intellectual and revolutionary history alike, adding a closer reading to the research about the famous American anarchist, Emma Goldman, her transnational life and her role as a revolutionary intellectual.

Explores the biographical and textual evidence of Russia's importance in shaping the writer Rainer Maria Rilke's aesthetic perception. During Rilke's two trips to Russia at the turn the century, he made connections with a number of important artists, including Leo Tolstoy and Nikolai Leskov, and the author traces the impact of these meetings and other experiences in Russia upon Rilke's writing. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Christoph Henning writes a concise history of misreadings of Marx in the 20th century. Focussing on German philosophy from Heidegger to Habermas, he also addresses the influence of Rawls and Neopragmatism, subsequently scrutinizing a previous history of Marx-interpretations that had served as the premises upon which these later works were based. Henning sketches a historical trajectory in which a theory of socialist politics enters the fields of economics, sociology, critical theory and theology, before finally – overloaded with intellectually dead freight – entering into philosophy. In so doing, he takes a hermeneutic approach to how misreadings in a specific field proliferate into further misreadings across a variety of fields, leading to an accumulation of questionable preconceptions. With the recent resurgence of interest in Marx, Henning's historical recursions make evident where and how academic Anti-Marxism had previously got it wrong. English translation of Philosophie nach Marx. 100 Jahre Marxrezeption und die normative Sozialphilosophie der Gegenwart in der Kritik, Transcript-Verlag, Bielefeld, 2005.

The term 'Frankfurt School' is used widely, but sometimes loosely, to describe both a group of intellectuals and a specific social theory. Focusing on the formative and most radical years of the Frankfurt School, during the 1930s, this study concentrates on the Frankfurt School's most original contributions made to the work on a 'critical theory of society' by the philosophers Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, the psychologist Erich Fromm, and the aesthetician Theodor W. Adorno. Phil Slater traces the extent, and ultimate limits, of the Frankfurt School's professed relation to the Marxian critique of political economy. In considering the extent of the relation to revolutionary praxis, he discusses the socio-economic and political history of Weimar Germany in its descent into fascism, and considers the work of such people as Karl Korsch, Wilhelm Reich, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, which directs a great deal of critical light on the Frankfurt School. While pinpointing the ultimate limitations of the Frankfurt School's frame of reference, Phil Slater also looks at the role their work played (largely against their wishes) in the emergence of the student anti-authoritarian movement in the 1960s. He shows that, in particular, the analysis of psychic and cultural manipulation was central to the young rebels' theoretical armour, but that even here, the lack of economic class analysis seriously restricts the critical edge of the Frankfurt School's theory. His conclusion is that the only way forward is to rescue the most radical roots of the Frankfurt School's work, and to recast these in the context of a practical theory of economic and political emancipation.

In Russian historiography, the Moscow School’s paradigm shift from political and legal history to social and economic history was markedly driven by Pavel Miliukov (1859-1943), the late leader of the Constitutional Democrats and foreign minister of the Provisional Government. Russian Historiography from 1880 to 1905 develops a narrative of historical sociology’s advancement through the Moscow School under Miliukov’s influence and provides a window into his decision making as a political figure who based his leadership not on public opinion but on the effectiveness of historical processes.