4/22/ 2026 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Questions:

1. Vagabond/Peasant → What is the relation between the two

2. (614): “But the parody of imperialism was necessary” –What is the historiagraphical status of the appeals to necessity? Not just here, but throughout

3. (615): What does Marx mean by cause and effect in the context of Napoleon protecting material power?

4. (606): “But the revolution is thorough-going…” What does Marx mean by purgatory here, and what kind of method does Marx understand revolution to be?

5. Is “The Eighteenth Brumaire” historical materialism? How, why?

6. (597): “Society now seems to have fallen back behind its point of departure…” Again, how do passages like this instantiate a historical materialist method?

7. What relationship should the social revolutionary have to the past (597)?

Discussion:

On the social revolution drawing from the future question, maybe Marx is building on his initial reference to Hegel. The “phrase” and “content” meaning can be made visible in the Napoleanism of the past revolution, also maybe “form” distinction. 

• The proletarian revolution, as Marx envisages it, is perhaps more about the content of the revolution, rather than the form?

• So, is Marx, in saying that the content goes beyond the phrase, that there isn’t self-consciousness?

• The first french revolution conceived of itself as a Republican revolution, and thus was not aware of itself as a class revolution. For Marx, the form of this initial revolution in late 1700s was a class revolution, a revolution championed by the bourgeoisie as political dominance. 

• But, is Marx attributing full self-consciousness to the current (1848) revolutions? 

• (601) First full paragraph, seems that Marx is saying that class consciousness is stirring, but it is appropriated by bourgeois, leading to ever decreasing significance of results.

• “Bonapartism” = ideals or an ideology promulgated by the first Bonaparte (The Uncle) to exploit land.

On revolution:

• This text is interesting for many reasons, one being that revolutions cannot be “willed” or “forced” if certain conditions are not available. Revolution needs “real” ground, so this is against a “hyper-revolutionary” will to arms. Reality will impose itself, which isn’t just a question of consciousness.

• Emphasis on material conditions for revolution to take hold, otherwise there are so many partial or continuous revolutions that snowball. 

• C.P. the context of Russia that couldn’t bring about socialism in the same way that the material conditions prevented the realization of socialist possibilities 

• Okay, so what is the “scope” of “revolution,” for Marx?

• Is he just talking about the “flow of history,” or Proletarian revolution here?

• It seems that Marx is describing an “accelerationist point,” in reading the revolutions that proceed in the nineteenth century

• In another text by Marx, he describes the bourgeois dictatorship showing its ugly face in the sense of an executive power that mobilizes resistance.

• So, the preparatory work isn’t being done necessarily by a proletarian class, but instead by a determinism? (page 606) 

• Related to this historiographic question, what is the perspective of the social critic here? When Marx suggests that the content goes beyond the phrase, then how does one recognize or see it as such? 

• Marx is arguing that past revolutions understood themselves this way (as republican, etc), and there wasn’t a self-awareness of class struggle, but isn’t he just saying that the working class needs to detach from an antiquated Republic form and seize the means of production.

• But how does all that content emerge without being “phrased?”

• Now that there are social revolutions that go beyond the phrasing of political revolutions, where does the “social content come from? Is the content even articulable? It seems that Marx is setting up a temporal challenge: that this content is an epistemological problem. How do we articulate what we are trying to bring about if it has not already been brought about?

• Something cannot be so ontologically new that it cannot be seen as such, as what is being asked about. 

Status of the Peasantry:

• Not a class, not able to represent themselves, but in need of representation

• In need of authority 

• On the peasant/vagabond connection, seems to be a pretty sharp distinction from Foucault here on punitive society

• Nothing really changed after bourgeois revolution, but for Foucault there was massive change at the level of the microphysics of power through the figuration of the vagabond

• On Foucault’s account, the disciplinization of the vagabond IS a social revolution, so it’s telling that Marx accounts for the peasantry and lumpenproletariat in an entirely historically impotent way

• Normative versus descriptive stakes of situating the peasantry for Marxist’s account

On the Method:

• So what is the motor of this historical account? Doesn’e seem to be the will or consciousness of individual actors?

• “Men make their own history” shows that there is a sense of agency, but that historical conditions create concrete action. The problem seems to be in the crux between the two?

• (595): Marx as doing a critique and a warning, “and just when they seem engaged…” Marx is giving an account of fragments at play that would be overlooked in a history? –Possible view

• If Marx is arguing that agency is deterministically structured, then the futural conclusion can’t just help itself to an agency that doesn’t exist or has been possible in the past.

• Marx does seem to indicate a revolutionary point of departure, but we aren’t clear on what this means.

Marx, "Wage Labour and Capital"

 Questions

1. What processes are entailed by/within "the cost of reproduction"? (p. 206)

2. The universal accessibility of new means of production (p. 213): is this "universality" partial in the context of copyright laws?

3. What is included in "greater division of labor"? (pp. 212-213). What does it entail? What is its relationship to machinery/technology?

4. What does Marx mean by "totality"? (p. 207)

5. How are the laboring class and capitalist class defined? 

6. Compared to "Estranged Labor," in which Marx offers an argument about alienation, on what basis is Marx arguing here? Immiseration? 

Marx seems to anticipate Arendt's work/labor distinction on pp. 204-205: "But the exercise of labour power, labour, is the worker's own life-activity, the manifestation of his own life ..."

What does Marx mean by labor-time? Labor time is the expression of labor's exchange value, but the reality is the labor power.

Reproduction is unpaid. The worker must buy food to reproduce "him"self but, he is not necessarily the one cooking. 

The value of labor-power is the socially average cost of subsistence/reproduction it takes to (re)produce a worker.

Why is this work italicized so much.

Is "totality" an ontological or methodological claim? Mode of production = means of production + relations of production. The latter changes based on transformations in the former. 

Are the "laws" of capitalism mechanistic? sociological? economic? 

Why does Marx's explanans here shift from his earlier works? How does this better illuminate the explanandums of immiseration.

Laboring class = those who sell their labor-power in return for wages. Capital as accumulated labor? Capital as the means to exchange for labor power? 

Capital is determined in the process of production. The brute fact of having a steam engine, for example, does not make it capital until employed as such.

Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts – "Estranged Labor"

 Questions

1. What is dialectical relation between property as the product of alienation and the means by which labor alienates itself?

2. What is the relation of labor to/as life activity with Arendt's distinction of labor and work (77)?

3. Animals reproductive labor seems to be immediate. Does this mean that there is a distortion of human temporality in/through alienated labor?

4. What is species-being? How is it related to the universal?

5. What is a contradiction for Marx (79; 81)?

6. What is man's "essential nature" for Marx and what does he mean by the "objective world"?

Spring Term Readings Marx

 

WEEK	TEXT(S)	PAGES
2	“Estranged Labour” from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844  **Optional: “Wages of Labour” from the EPM	pp. 69-84 (optional: pp. 19-34)
3	“Wage Labour and Capital” (1847) in The Marx and Engels Reader	pp. 203-217
4	“The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (1852), in The Marx-Engels Reader	pp. 594-617
5	Selections from the Grundrisse (1857-1858) on the labor process and the famous “Fragments on Machines” in The Marx and Engels Reader	pp. 278-285
6	Capital, vol. 1 (1867), Preface to the First Edition & ch. 1, “The Commodity,” secs. 1-2	pp. 89-93, 125-137
7	Capital, vol. 1 (1867), ch. 6, “The Sale and Purchase of Labour-Power”	pp. 270-280
8	Capital, vol. 1 (1867), ch. 7, “The Labour Process and the Valorization Process”	pp. 283-306
9	Capital, vol. 1 (1867), ch. 10, “The Working Day,” secs. 1-4	pp. 340-366
10	Capital, vol. 1 (1867), ch. 10, “The Working Day,” secs. 5-6 **Optional: sec. 7	pp. 367-410 (optional: pp. 411-416)
11	TBD	TBD

Arendt, The Human Condition, sec. 42-45

5 March 2026

Questions:

1. Life/happiness—is Arendt ambivalent about these? What’s the positive account of each?
2. Is Arendt theorizing biopower? [Biopolitics (labor?) vs. anatomopolitics (work?)] If so, how might we mark/note the difference from other views of biopolitical resistance?
3. Homo faber vis-a-vis Bergson?
4. How do we respond? Art (pg. 323)? Science (pg. 324)?
5. Relations between thought vs. contemplation vs. ideas?
6. Questions of method—what’s Arendt’s methodology? How do we characterize this as history? “Not a history of ideas” (313). How does it contrast with genealogy?
7. Life vs. action: increasing concern with life as constitutive of the social corresponds to decreasing possibilities for action for Arendt.

Discussion:

• General conclusions about how Arendt ends things
• Ought we interpret Arendt in line with a quasi-Heideggerian soft determinism? Or is she more Hegelian (i.e., determinations only clear and appear necessary in retrospect)? Vita activa as Heideggerian calculative thinking vs. vita contemplativa as Heideggerian meditative thinking. Is Arendt giving an account of the emergence of these Heideggerian categories?
• The methodological question: why did upsweep in labor have to correspond to decrease in work and action? What needs to be the case in Arendt’s account, in her methodology, for these conclusions to follow?
• Who is able to choose to perform labor/work/action vs. who is consigned to them?
• What’s the motor driving the historical processes she’s tracing? Not contradiction (as in Hegel), but what is it?
• What’s the relationship between the behavior of the strands (labor, work, action)? What holds them in balance? When their balance is interrupted, in what way is this interruption a result of facts about how the behavior of each relates to that of the others?
• If this isn’t a history of ideas (pg. 313), then what is it? A history of concepts? [Concepts as indexes of forms of life, not a thin sense of “concept” here.]
• Challenge for pragmatism—how to respond? Pragmatist instrumental reasoning emerging as a result of the historical processes inhering between labor/work/action.
• We can imagine Arendt asking: can pragmatism think a conception of action that's irreducible to work?
• How central is instrumental reasoning to the critique Arendt is making? Is her primary concern the subsumption of reason into instrumental reasoning at the expense of other non-means-ends forms of rationality?

• How might constructing phenomenological examples of each (labor, work, action) help clarify in what ways they can be analytically separated?
• Action as parasitic on work and labor
• Are labor, work, and action points of view? Orientations one can or may take up? Or are some deeds just action, some deeds just work, etc.?
• What would it look like to practice action in a way that’s irreducible to an instrumentalized, "work" sense of action?

Arendt – The Human Conditions – sec. 37-41

Questions

1. What is the role/understanding of faith under Arendt? (pp. 270-271).

2. Arendt and the telescope – relationship to homo faber / making of knowledge + what this says about work/labor more broadly?

3. What is the significance of the telescope's "changing the world view;" what is the distinction between ideas/events and the introduction of the telescope as a transformative vector of modernity (p. 274).

4. What is the relationship between modern conception of reason and the detachment from the senses, and how are we to make sense of this in relationship to the telescope?

5. Notes reversal between the order of the vita activa and the vita contemplativa (p.289), but what exactly is involved in this reversal?

6. Tracking what she is doing with the Cartesian doubt (p. 282-283)... If Cartesianism is an introspection into the (structures of the) mind and its reification as process, what is the role of doubt in relation to modernity as fabrication.

7. How is the loss of contemplation, revelation of truth and—especially—wonder related to the loss of politics that is at the core of the book?

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Discussion

The loss of wonder and the loss of politics is connected to the loss of commons sense (that is world-directed) in favor of introspection and the primacy of the structures of the mind. 

Rationalism and empiricism as doing the same thing in relation to the Archimedean point of view.

What do we think of her reading of the hypothesis–experiment as a circle related to the subjectivism diagnosed as the core of the modern age?

Close to Foucault: tracking a change of perception and episteme? A different subjectivity emerging here especially when she notes that modern science "puts man back once more—and now even more forcefully—into the prison of his own mind" (288). Her focus is on natural science while Foucault is on social/human sciences...

Irony: it is the instruments that makes this worldview and it is not reason who produces it (even if it reaches the conclusions earlier).

The telescope is a creation of "non-practical search for useless knowledge" (289), so it is not a creation of contemplation but is its destruction. The doing of the telescope is not practical, so here action gets detached from practice (vs a pragmatist view). Here there might be a connection with Hans Blumenberg's reading of curiosity as a driving force of modernity in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age.

The problem seems ot be the hierarchy of vita contemplativa and vita activa and therefore the reversal but not the distinction because she does not think there should be a vindication of one over the other.

The Life of the Mind could be useful here as a place with Arendt thinks of thinking as a legitimate and separate sphere but without domination and recognizing the loss of the world. This is taken up by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's biography Hannah Arendt, For the Love of the World.

Preservation and the autonomy of the spheres and not only about relation between them. Very worried about the merging of spheres.

Connection here with her debate with Carl Schmitt: there is a validity to the desire of recovering the autonomy and legitimacy of the political but without such operation leading to domination, dictatorship, sovereign decision but to a plurality, common world and sense.

Descartes: detachment of practical concern and the world and into introspection. He erases the possibility (and experience) of the eternal as it was for the vita contemplativa and turns to immortality. Interesting here to refer how she reads Kierkegaard as bringing the Cartesian doubt into the heart of religion and therefore debasing religion by modernizing it from within.

Collapse into narcissism and solipsism but in this case Narcissus does not recognize that the image is himself. Science does not know that it only discovers itself, but has lost the world. 

Resonance to what Foucault does: when 2+2=4 becomes the paradigm of knowledge, then our common sense is deeply impoverished, thinned-out, suffocated. We, again, have lost the world by absorbing it into consciousness—we loss the uniqueness of the object, its sensible specificity (similar to Adorno)—and as the Archimedean point moves into the subject itself (p. 284).

When this happens and labor is elevated over work and everything has its expiration date (nothing lasts) there is no disorientation, no fixity of things.. This has been seen as the conservative element in her thought: tradition as providing the stability, a reference point, something that allows us to be part of the common human world. 

Wonder also connection to an individual, to the brand-new, and unique and that cannot be repeated: that which is born.

Interesting that when introspection is talked about without the senses, this sounds like a really good model to understand AI. Of course it "thinks" but that is a thought devoid from the world and the human condition. 

She describes Descartes as the natural consequence of the telescope. How are we to understand this? Is there a Heideggerean technological determinism here?

Another shift: speculum. It also helps us see what we could not before and that is, in some sense, perception. And there is an activation of perception; as she says, it is also the intervention into appearance. It is a way to de-alienate this distance...

Telescope seems to give us a great power but it also makes you so very small – inside to the cosmos – so its a reaction formation to then say: what matters is the mind of man (Descartes). It also opens up all the doubts of our senses that leads the to the radicality of never-ending doubt... 

Arendt, The Human Condition, Sections 31, 31, (33 and 34), 35 and 36

 Arendt, The Human Condition, Sections 31, 31, (33 and 34), 35 and 36

Questions:

1. How or why are faculties of forgiving and promising contingent upon or tied to plurality? Why is forgiving (or promising?) unpredictable? (p.g 237)

2. Sect. 31→ Ruling others and ruling oneself, how or in what ways can the care of the self, governmentality, and pastoral power in Foucault be connected to Arendt’s discussion of ruling or action as “rule”? Especially in her reading of “ruling” as making in Plato?

3. Relation of ruling to fabrication (of city-state)?

4. Critique of idea theory in politics, what is the relation to the critique of the mathematization of science?

5. What is the relationship between mathematization critique and Arendt's concern with worldlessness, or alienation? Are these two separate points? Concern with modern science and earth alienation? 

6. Section 31→ The substitution of acting for making: How should we understand Arendt’s critique of Aristotle and her celebration of the polis as the exemplary of the realm of action? Contradiction or no?

7. Tracking the decoupling of ruling and beginning in “archein,” what is this?

8. (256): Is there something we can say in regard to a transition from sovereign to biopower in Arendt’s account of the stages of alienation (family/ home to society and state)

• Do we want to invite the pragmatist discussion?

• Nope

• Status of forgiveness as disclosive and possible for Arendt: interesting that Arendt says that no one can forgive himself, and the dependency of others as ontological (plurality) for the possibility of action

• Comparing to Nietzsche and promising

• Moving to a discussion of freedom: (237), Arendt sees forgiveness as essential for freedom, how?

• Domination and freedom, domination becomes ubiquitous in the modern age, wherein the wanting to overcome plurality and action result in arbitrary domination of all others.

• (259): Return of the notion of the idea, Arendt seems to have an issue with “idea” as distinct from event, which are never unprecedented. Why is that?

• Having an idea is never unprecedented? 

• Very hard to get a grasp on this, especially because what Arendt means by “idea” may or may not be what she is attributing to Plato’s sense of “idea,” but again, how would we agree to this premise that ideas are never unprecedented?

• Maybe it’s not that deep… Maybe idea means something that “comes and goes” but isn’t acted upon, doesn’t enter the realm of objectivity until it is instantiated in an event or deed.

• Comparing and contrasting Arendt and Foucault. Arendt seems so interested in redemption given the mourning or nostalgia for a political action that has been foreclosed, so this book could not be written today.

• How did this become our present?

• Both Foucault and Arendt as tracking how deep and layered our present has become. 

• If Arendt is trying to uncover the piles of sediment to see what has been lost, then Foucault is looking is looking at the cloth that was doing the covering.

• Wondering if we can still have principles and rules, and still have indeterminacy for Arendt, or unpredictability (essential for action, or tantamount to it).