This semester we are also getting off to a critical start with the introductory days to critical theory! Society has long been considered so complex that it cannot be reduced to a simple concept. And yet it still functions as a whole: as a context of domination, as capitalism, as an administered world whose global crises increasingly point to the fact that everything is connected to everything else.
How can this contradiction be understood? The concept of totality is linked to the question of whether and to what extent an overall social context can be defined. The lecture develops totality as a problem in the history of critical social theory and attempts a current definition.
For without a concept of totality, there can be no objection to the prevailing conditions. For a long time, Karl Marx was considered scientifically irrelevant in Germany.
He has been on the classics shelf for a few years now: a great thinker, but rather irrelevant to the problems of the present, capitalism has developed quite differently than Marx predicted. But did Marx really make so many predictions, and then wrong ones at that? It is not, as has long been claimed, an almost finished system, but a fragmentary research program that can only now be surveyed with the texts published in recent years in the Marx Engels Complete Edition MEGA.
The countries of the global North like to describe themselves as the inventors of enlightenment, human rights, freedom, equality and justice, science and the arts. But from a southern perspective, the North looks different.
