14484 Convivium 25.Indd 167 14/10/13 09:33 168 Renate Holub
TOWARDS A GLOBAL SPACE OF DEMOCRATIC RIGHTS: ON BENJAMIN, GRAMSCI, AND POLANYI1 Renate Holub University of California. Berkeley ABSTRACT In this article, I approach Benjamin, Gramsci, and Polanyi as members of a par- ticular generation in Europe. Since all three of them were born late in the 19th century, they could not but experience a range of world-historical events. These ranged from World War One, the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, and failed attempts at socialist revo- lutions on the European continent to the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany, the expan- sion of European colonialism in the Middle East, the spectacular collapse of the transat- lantic capitalist financial system in October of 1929, and the gradual assumption of shared geopolitical hegemony on the part of the United States and the Soviet Union. By the same token, Benjamin, Gramsci, and Polanyi, as European intellectuals, could not but develop their predominant conceptions of the world in the context of a particular space of intellectual systems [Idealism, Marxism, Utilitarianism, Positivism, Historicism, etc]. While all of these intellectual systems involved epistemological, ontological, and ethical standards, some of them participated in the separation of these three provinces of standards from each other, thereby promoting traditions of philosophic – methodological individualization or specialization of branches of knowledge while others tended to con- tinue to methodologically combine these three provinces to various degrees. Benjamin, Gramsci, and Polanyi thus moved in an intellectual space in which there had emerged multiple contests about the relations between ideas and social practices, on one hand, individuals and collectives, on the other hand.
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