The Marburg School Since the 1980S

chapter 5 The Marburg School since the 1980s

1 A Premature Farewell

The conflict around the Marburg Gewerkschaftsbuch, the unsavoury conflict with Wolfgang Fritz Haug and Das Argument, as well as other conflicts either forced onto the representatives of the Marburg School or which they allowed themselves to be drawn into did not, however, lead to the retreat their political opponents and some of their intellectual critics may have hoped for. On the contrary: the Marxist Marburg School’s scholarly productivity continued without interruption. In many ways, one could even say it reached a higher level of academic quality than in the preceding period. This contradicts the hypothesis put forward by historians Christoph Hüt- tig and Lutz Raphael that its ‘fixation on an orthodox Marxism and a DKP intellectually emaciated by “Eurocommunist” heresies’1 definitively sealed the fate of Marburg’s ‘Red Bastion’ by the late 1980s. Noteworthy about Hüttig and Raphael’s depiction of the Marburg School as a ‘scientific thought collective’ is that while it describes internal institutional developments, constellations of actors, and the factionalisation of discourse in astonishing detail, the substance of the Marburg School’s scholarly work is itself categorically ignored. Had they refrained from this, they would have been able to conclude that the actors of the Marburg School continued to produce academically respected work well into the 1980s and beyond, continuing in their own work the relationship between theory and praxis the school’s founders established. One example that demonstrates how Marburg’s left-wing social scientists remained remarkably active during the years on which Hüttig and Raphael’s necrology of the School is particularly focused is Frank Deppe’s major study of Machiavelli (1987),2 a truly impressive work in terms of both its substant- ive complexity as well as analytical stringency. Its publication proved that he was not only an expert in trade union research or EU policy, but also a compet- ent scholar of classical political theory who had no reason to shy the academic competition, such as Herfried Münkler’s book on the same topic.3 That said, with few exceptions Deppe’s volume was largely greeted by academic silence.

1 Hüttig and Raphael 1992, p. 24f. 2 Deppe 1987. Published in a new edition in 2014. 3 Münkler 1982. According to a letter sent to the author by Frank Deppe, a debate was held in

Deppe was moved to study Machiavelli by the question as to how the indi- viduation of the state out of the development of bourgeois society could be explained, and what operative status the political dimension takes in this pro- cess. This line of inquiry forced itself onto Deppe insofar as the Marxist state debate dominant at the time, with its abstract derivation procedures and ritu- alised economistic explanations, had reached its limits. At the same time, he was confronted by the irritating fact that Machiavelli’s theories of power and the state were not only adopted as a classic work on the philosophy of the state by representatives of a conservative and even fascist-inclined Neo- Machiavellianism (Georges Sorel, Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto and others) for their own worldview, but were also positively reviewed by a pioneer of West- ern Marxism, Antonio Gramsci, in his depiction of the relationship between the state, politics, and society. In his thematically diverse study incorporating the historical development of the Northern Italian city states as well as the role of Renaissance intellectuals, Deppe focused on Machiavelli’s political theory as an action-oriented political solution to the early bourgeois economic, social, and moral crisis rocking Florence and other cities. He worked out that Machiavelli was above all interested in controlling and integrating the destabil- ising centrifugal forces of competition, egoistic desires, and sectional interests with the aid of what he saw as a morally indifferent, ruthlessly forceful state.4 According to Deppe’s reading, Gramsci invoked Machiavelli because he understood his activist political philosophy as a comprehensive attempt to interpret the crisis of ruling-class hegemony,5 which could only be solved ‘organically’ if a new hegemonic formation replaced the old, exhausted one. The recourse to a ‘new leader’, in Machiavelli’s words the ‘new prince’, was in Deppe’s view merely proof that such a hegemonic force did not yet exist. In light of 1920s and 1930s Italian society at the time, this could only develop as a collective movement – and only under the leadership of a revolutionary Marxist party. Here, Deppe pointed out the limits of Gramsci’s reading of Machiavelli, tracing his mistaken perception of Machiavelli as a revolutionary and an early Jacobin back to a false identification of Northern Italian Renaissance society with the alleged existence of developed bourgeois class and production rela- tions.6

Marburg between him, Herfried Münkler, and the Romance studies scholar August Buck in 1988. 4 Deppe 1987, p. 289. 5 Deppe 1987, 422. 6 Deppe 1987, p. 427.