The Budapest School: Beyond Marxism

Abstract

In my thesis, I defend the claim that the Hungarian-born thinkers often referred to as the Budapest School have made a vital, yet seldom recognised, contribution to contemporary critical theory. Whilst several more or less recent studies have undertaken to clarify and assess works of the Budapest School, our venturing further into the post-Marxist stage of critical theory brings with it the need to reassess the School’s contemporary significance. In so doing, my thesis seeks to open up new perspectives on the relevance of the Budapest School to our contemporary philosophical culture. Historical in scope and contemporary in its intentions, my thesis offers a narrative conceptualisation of the evolution of the Budapest School’s variously articulated critical theories. More specifically, my dissertation discloses the ways in which the values and commitments which had engendered the School’s earliest attempts to develop a critical and humanistic Marxism led its members beyond Marx towards their own penetrating critiques of the antinomies of modernity. This historical-systematic approach has the merit of not only bringing into question the conception of the Budapest School as ‘merely’ exponents of an outmoded theoretical paradigm and critics of a now defunct social system, but also of directing the thesis towards those debates that have either been inadequately addressed or neglected within the burgeoning critical literature on the Budapest School.