ABSTRACT

This chapter seeks to contribute, however modestly, to a resurgence or "revival" of political theory, resurgence attentive both to modern and contemporary philosophical developments and to the political agonies of present time. Critical Marxism, as the term is used in this chapter, derives important impulses from the writings of the young Marx which clearly reveal his debt to, and involvement in, the legacy of German philosophical discourse. Drawing on both existential phenomenology and critical Marxism, critical phenomenology as sketched in this chapter aims to combine their strength or merits while avoiding their shortcomings. The characterization of the human condition as "être-au-monde" was meant to accentuate man's precarious and incongruous status in the world. In his Theses on Feuerbach Marx himself rejected a naturalistic brand of humanism that reduces man to a fixed substance among other empirical factors. The dimension of the life-world and pre-predicative "existence" became the focus of exploration in Martin Heidegger's interpretive or hermeneutical phenomenology.