ABSTRACT
More than a hundred and fifty years ago the then young Karl Marx committed to paper a paradox which has since been quoted a thousand times over. Philosophers, he wrote, have only interpreted the world in various ways, yet the point is to change it. Radical universalism is not a term used by Marx. Nonetheless, it sums up the major structural features of the “materialist conception of history” on the one hand and of the “critique of political economy” on the other from the vantage point of the paradoxical Thesis Eleven. Universal means, first, the same thing as it meant for Hegel. There is one universal history; all concrete histories are particularistic; particularistic histories matter only insofar as they contribute to the development of history as universal. Radical universalism became history altogether in the glorious year of 1989.
