ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses here the work of Lucien Goldmann, at present removed from both the sociological canon and the curriculum, but once acclaimed by Alasdair MacIntyre as an original philosopher of great powers untimely death in 1970 robbed us of the finest and most intelligent Marxist of the age. His genetic structuralism is rooted in Immanuel Kant, Hegel, Marx, the young Lukcs and Piaget rather than in Spinoza and Levi-Strauss. Goldmann's approach to Kant and his heritage is sharply differentiated from his appropriation by the Marburg neo-Kantians. Lucien Goldmann's linked studies of Jansenism, The Hidden God and Racine, together bestow us with one of the most valuable scholarly analyses of the sociology of literature. Goldmann not only shows how Pascal and Racine break with earlier thinkers, such as Aquinas and Descartes, but illuminates how they are linked to wider social groups in so doing.
