One of the central themes Agnes Heller’s work constantly revisits is Karl Marx’s philosophical and anthropological image of the human being rich in need. When assessed from this vantage point Heller’s work reveals itself as a continuing engagement both with and against Marx. The figure of the...

This chapter revisits Marx’s work from the vantage point of the value he assigns to the category of need.See; Bertell Ollman, Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society, second ed. (United Kingdom: Cambridge U P, 1976). Ian Fraser, Hegel and Marx:...

The reading of Marx presented in the previous chapter forms the background for any understanding of the significant influence Heller’s early reassessment of Marxism has on the...

This chapter builds upon the previous discussion of Heller’s relationship both with and against Marx. It is on the basis of her reading of Marx...

Heller’s phenomenology of feelings is one side of her social theory and is complemented by a social theory of everyday life and values. Heller’s anthropology of feelings is set within her attempt to reconsider the nature of...

Heller wants to retain an image that is central to her work as a whole; an analysis of the advent of a modern social arrangement from the perspectives of both its pitfalls and its promises. Marx recognized the inherent dynamism of capitalist modernity, its impetus towards universalization and its ability to remake conceptions of human essence outside traditional and conventional notions of...

If modernity is dynamic, constituted by competing logics and open to a wealth of interpretations, all of which cannot be grounded, how does this image of modernity not slip into a relativism or an irrationalism? For Heller it cannot because as intimated above, everyday life, and modern everyday life is rational and as such evaluative, and it is to this central thematic concern within...

For Heller politics is constructed against the backdrop of freedom as the “non-founding” foundation of the modern world....

Heller’s continuing engagement both with and against Marx forms the backdrop of her conception of the good life beyond politics. Due to the value she assigns to Marx’s image of the human being as a whole, the good life is not reducible to the logic of political equality or justice. Instead the good person is...

The good person provides what Heller terms the moral condition of the good life. This is due to the fact that “goodness (honesty, righteousness) is the fundamental and overarching constituent of the good life” but it is not...

Adorno, Theodor,B02.21 , 4.28 , 4.33 , 6.33 , 6.45 ,