This chapter engages with an important tradition of Marxist literary criticism – principally via Fredric Jameson – that has insisted on the insufficiencies of the naturalist novel as a vehicle for revolutionary impulses. It takes up Jameson’s claims as a spur to reconsidering the contested politics of Zola’s best-selling strike novel Germinal (1885). The chapter conceives of the strike as a particular vehicle for the idealist imagination that Zola obsessively discredits – casting it as a form of ‘impossibilism’, an epithet applied to the earliest manifestation of French Marxism. Embedded in contemporary schisms on the Left, Zola’s strike novel is shown to negotiate with debates about the ethical and political legitimacy of this weapon of working-class struggle, as well as the figure of the ambitious strike leader. Zola’s critical account of political idealism ultimately entails a set of anxious reflections on the naturalist novel’s own modes of representation, as well as its equivocal sense of political purpose.

Critics misunderstood Lacan’s thought for decades. They interpreted him as a theorist who reduced subjectivity to its social and linguistic determinations. What they missed was his emphasis, following Kant and Hegel, on subjectivity. This is what both Slavoj Žižek and Joan Copjec provide when they burst onto the Lacanian scene in 1989. Their works place the emphasis in Lacan’s theory on the problem of subjectivity insofar as the subject remains irreducible to the social order. They uncover a radical version of Lacan that subsequent theorists pick up in the fields of queer theory, feminism, anti-racism, and Marxism. This version of Lacan remains vibrant to this day with many adherents in many disciplines.

The chapter provides historical and philosophical evidence that Marxist epistemology and historiography of science were largely consistent with the maker’s knowledge tradition that inspired Vico in the eighteenth century. Marxist scholars produced an extraordinary number of historical reconstructions and philosophical analyses resonating with many of the ideas discussed in Chapters 1–3: viz. the conviction that the history of knowledge (as history tout court) is not the history of great geniuses, but the history of collective actions; the belief that consciousness of individual subjects is the product of a given society; the idea that knowledge is more about making and doing than speculating and theorising; the idea that new forms of making and doing, and therefore thinking and imagining, emerge throughout human history and that all knowledge is eminently historical and rooted into specific social relations and material cultures. Scholars as different as Lifshitz or the so-called father of Russian Marxism, Georgi Plekhanov; Marxist historians, philosophers, and scientists like Boris Hessen, Nikolai Bukharin, Benjamin Farrington, György Lukács, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, and Max Horkheimer (among many others) all subscribed to different versions of praxis epistemology.

Proletarian realism’s aspiration to depict the social totality stresses the causal connections among antagonistically opposed classes in capitalist society, a critical examination of the ideological standpoints accompanying this antagonism, and the working-class struggle for liberation from the yoke of capital. The sense of dialectical possibility informing many works of US proletarian realism – which were largely produced during the Great Depression – reflects the abiding influence of the Bolshevik Revolution. While guided by a sense of the social world as a process in motion, thus “drawing their poetry from the future,” as Marx wrote, works in this genre frequently stress the fetters – material but above all ideological –preventing the proletariat from grasping the social totality in which it is inserted. Proletarian novels deploy a range of techniques, both realist and modernist, to bring to the awareness of the reader historical forces often beyond the ken of individual characters. Realism is thus a matter not just of style and structure but also of epistemology – the text’s aspiration to grasp the social totality is an aspiration toward the truth that will liberate the proletariat from its chains.

This chapter examines the way in which the Holocaust has been brought into conversation with understandings of the modern world, with a strong focus on historical and sociological accounts (though recognizing the place of the Holocaust in postmodern literary and critical theory.) It shows the multiple ways in which concepts of modernization, modernity, and the modern have been deployed, be it to establish the Holocaust’s paradigmatic or normative character, or the reverse. It illustrates the paradoxical character of efforts to highlight the Holocaust’s distinctiveness while harnessing it to a pervasive and generic “modernity.”

This semi-autobiographical essay offers the perspective from the 1970s to the present of a leading historian of Nazi Germany. It shows how a series of paradigms in one way or another obscured the Holocaust, while at the same time underling the importance of the scholarship on the Final Solution that took off in the 1960s. A particular focus of the essay is the debates around fascism and the difficulty of acknowledging the centrality of racism within the fascist model.

This chapter analyzes the ideological roots of social medicine in Latin America, its diffusion through institutional and interpersonal networks, and how they translated into social policy. It argues that Latin American social medicine was a movement with two distinct waves, bridged by a mid-century hiatus. First-wave social medicine – whose protagonists included figures such as Salvador Allende of Chile and Ramón Carrillo in Argentina – had its roots in the scientific hygiene movement, gained strength in the interwar period, and left its imprint on Latin American welfare states by the 1940s. Second-wave social medicine, marked by more explicitly Marxist analytical frameworks, took shape in the early 1970s amidst authoritarian pressures and crystallized institutionally in Latin American Social Medicine Association (ALAMES) (regionally) and Brazilian Association of Collective Health (in Brazil, ABRASCO). A dialectical process links these two waves into a single story: early social medicine demands, once institutionalized in welfare states and the international health-and-development apparatus, led to ineffective bureaucratic routines, which in turn sparked critical reflection, agitation for change, and a new wave of social medicine activism.

This chapter documents the complex relationship between the papacy and liberation theology. Prior to the explicit emergence of liberation theology, the papacies of Pius XII and John XXIII provided important institutional and theological conditions in which liberation developed and became influential. A relative harmony existed during the ministry of Paul VI, as liberation theologians often took positions influenced theologically by Vatican II and politically by Paul VI’s attention to global poverty and hopes for the underdeveloped world. This tenor changed dramatically under John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Their experiences of communism and reaction to perceived excesses in the implementation of Vatican II translated into great tensions between the Vatican and liberation theologians. The papacy of Francis signals that these tensions have passed, as his priorities align more closely to the work of liberation theologians with important implications for Church governance and in relation to pressing global issues.

“Socialist Realism, Socialist Expressionism” examines how Expressionist aesthetics metamorphosed from a radical critique of bourgeois liberalism into full-blown fascism. During his period of involvement with National Socialism, Gottfried Benn treated the Volk as an aesthetic object – as a work of art that could be shaped and refined through direct eugenic interventions. Yet Benn’s staunchest critics on the left did not dismiss his aesthetic definition of the Volk outright. Instead, they appropriated the Volk for a leftist politics. Examining the celebrated Expressionism Debate of 1937–1938, I argue that Marxists like Georg Lukács refrained from a vocabulary of class struggle in order to promote a populist aesthetics that associated the Volk with a distinctly anti-modernist literary mode: the realist novel. Hence the chapter grapples with populist cultural politics from both the radical left and right at the moment when the liberal tradition descending from Kant was reaching its nadir.

This chapter discusses archaic Roman property law, whose symbolism and terminology show a striking orientation toward the ownership of living creatures, human and animal. That symbolism and terminology was seized upon by many of the leading thinkers of the past, who believed it offered clues to the origins of human society. It was also seized upon by both Communist and Fascist ideologues. Today, by contrast, its significance is generally dismissed. Modern scholarship has been heavily dedicated to reconstructing the socio-economic realities; scholars often deploy their learning to dispel the “myths” in the sources, among them the myths in the archaic Roman sources. Yet the myths matter; “idioms of power” cannot simply be written off. The chapter brings the anthropology of property law to bear on the interpretation of these mysterious sources, and describes the long intellectual and political history of their interpretation and ideological use.

This chapter discusses the formation of high classical Roman property law, which displays what Orlando Patterson calls a master/slave “idiom of power.” It focuses on the emergence of the term dominus, “master,” as the ordinary word for “owner.” The rise of the dominus was once the topic of extensive analysis and controversy, and it figured prominently in the ideologies of Communism and Fascism. It has, however, been forgotten by contemporary scholars. The chapter sets out to revive this forgotten topic. Drawing on Roman social history, the chapter argues that the appearance of the new terminology of the dominus in classical law can be linked to important social changes in the nature of Roman elite power. The chapter closes by arguing that Roman property law bore a kinship to classical Greco-Roman religion, which was marked by the “symbolism and ideology of the paradigmatic hunter.”