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These files are maintained strictly for historical reference, research, and recordkeeping purposes,
and the content has not been altered or updated since archiving.
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If you require an alternative, accessible format of any information found on this site,
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Marx never said a word about the Master-Servant relation. The first time anyone said anything about it was in 1933 in Kojeve's seminars on Hegel. At that time, the only French translations of Hegel were very inferior translations of the Encyclopedia by the Italian Marxist Augusto Vera, and there was very little interest in Hegel at all in France. The subsequent surge of French commentary and translations of Hegel flowed directly from Kojeve. Kojeve's reading of Hegel is absolutely his own, and has very little to do with Hegel. This has generated a series of myths, whereby people think that Hegel had some kind of philosophy about masters ans slaves and in some kind of way this "influenced" Marx. This is fiction from beginning to end.
Andy Michael Glassman wrote:
Immersed in some of the different views of Marx for a different type of project I was interested to find a difference between the French view of Marxism and change and I suppose the more central and Eastern Europe (recogniaing of of course that these type of general distinctions are ridiculous to begin with). The difference seems to center around the French revolution and the degree to which the Master/Slave relationship, or the Master/Servant relationship is involved in Marx's view of change. The French view of Marxism seemed to have been very influenced by the idea that the French took revolution in to their own hands and moved from an assymetrical relationship to more of an equal relationship between humans that was based on ideas and shared knowledge and less on power relationships. For the French then Hegel's Master/Servant relationship became ciritical to the whole idea of revolution, where there Servant, as an individual, recognizes that the Master has no special
powers, does not actually have any power to control nature. Individual thinking is critical in this instance - leading to Hegel's famous quote about the French revolution that individuals were finally walking on their heads. The more central and eastern Europe vision of change did not seem to integrate the Master/Servant relationship in to the idea of Marxist based revolution, seeing it as coming from tensions within the larger social system (that's my take anyway). One wonders if this has anything to do with the myths and belief systems of these central and Eastern European countries.
Anyway, it always seems that this tension is there - are individuals the cause or effect of revoluion? Michael
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Andy Blunden http://home.mira.net/~andy/ Hegel's Logic with a Foreword by Andy Blunden: From Erythrós Press and Media <http://www.erythrospress.com/>. _______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca