István Mészáros (philosopher)
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István Mészáros (philosopher)
István Mészáros (, , ; 19 December 1930 – 1 October 2017) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher. Described as "one of the foremost political philosophers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries" by ''Monthly Review'', Mészáros wrote mainly about the possibility of a transition from capitalism to socialism. His ''magnum opus'', ''Beyond Capital: Toward a Theory of Transition'' (1995), was concerned not only with this theme but provided a conceptual distinction between capitalism and capital, and an analysis of the current capitalist society and its " structural crisis". He was interested in the critique of the "bourgeois ideology", including the idea of " there is no alternative", and he also elaborated analysis on the failures of " real socialism". Biography Early life in Hungary Mészáros was born in Budapest, Hungary. He was raised by his single mother and his maternal grandmother, and at age twelve falsified his birth date to work along with his mother i ...
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Western Philosophy
Western philosophy refers to the Philosophy, philosophical thought, traditions and works of the Western world. Historically, the term refers to the philosophical thinking of Western culture, beginning with the ancient Greek philosophy of the Pre-Socratic philosophy, pre-Socratics. The word ''philosophy'' itself originated from the Ancient Greek (φιλοσοφία), literally, "the love of wisdom" , "to love" and σοφία ''Sophia (wisdom), sophía'', "wisdom". History Ancient The scope of ancient Western philosophy included the problems of philosophy as they are understood today; but it also included many other disciplines, such as pure mathematics and natural sciences such as physics, astronomy, and biology (Aristotle, for example, wrote on all of these topics). Pre-Socratics The pre-Socratic philosophers were interested in cosmology (the nature and origin of the universe), while rejecting unargued fables in place for argued theory, i.e., dogma superseded reason, ...
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Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their use for the purpose of obtaining profit. This socioeconomic system has developed historically through several stages and is defined by a number of basic constituent elements: private property, profit motive, capital accumulation, competitive markets, commodification, wage labor, and an emphasis on innovation and economic growth. Capitalist economies tend to experience a business cycle of economic growth followed by recessions. Economists, historians, political economists, and sociologists have adopted different perspectives in their analyses of capitalism and have recognized various forms of it in practice. These include '' laissez-faire'' or free-market capitalism, state capitalism, and welfare capitalism. Different forms of capitalism feature varying degrees of free markets, public ownership, obstacles to free competition, and state-sanctioned social poli ...
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The Communist Manifesto
''The Communist Manifesto'' (), originally the ''Manifesto of the Communist Party'' (), is a political pamphlet written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, commissioned by the Communist League and originally published in London in 1848. The text is the first and most systematic attempt by Marx and Engels to codify for wide consumption the historical materialist idea that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles", in which social classes are defined by the relationship of people to the means of production. Published amid the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe, the manifesto remains one of the world's most influential political documents. Marx and Engels combine philosophical materialism with the Hegelian dialectical method in order to analyze the development of European society through its modes of production, including primitive communism, antiquity, feudalism, and capitalism, noting the emergence of a new, dominant class at each st ...
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Anti-Dühring
''Anti-Dühring'' (, "Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science") is a book by Friedrich Engels, first published in German in 1877 in parts and then in 1878 in book form. It had previously been serialised in the newspaper '' Vorwärts.'' There were two further German editions in Engels' lifetime. ''Anti-Dühring'' was first published in English translation in 1907. Contents This work was one of Engels's major contributions to the exposition and development of Marxist theory. Its full title translates as ''Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science'': this is meant ironically and polemically. The short title recalls Julius Caesar's polemic '' Anti-Cato''. Eugen Dühring had produced his own version of socialism, intended as a replacement for Marxism. Since Karl Marx was busy at the time with writing ''Das Kapital'', it was left to Engels to write a general defence. The sections are ''Philosophy'', ''Political Economy'' and ''Socialism''. Among communists, it is a popular ...
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Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels ( ;"Engels"
''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary''.
; 28 November 1820 – 5 August 1895) was a German philosopher, political theorist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He was also a businessman and Karl Marx's lifelong friend and closest collaborator, serving as the co-founder of Marxism. Born in Barmen in the Kingdom of Prussia, Engels was the son of a wealthy textile manufacturer. Despite his Bourgeoisie, bourgeois background, he became a staunch critic of capitalism, influenced by his observations of industrial working conditions in Manchester, England, as published in his early work ''The Condition of the Working Class in England'' (1845). He met Marx in 1844, after which they jointly authored works including ''The Holy Family (book), The Holy Family'' (1844), ''The ...
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The Eighteenth Brumaire Of Louis Napoleon
''The'' is a grammatical article in English, denoting nouns that are already or about to be mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The'' is the most frequently used word in the English language; studies and analyses of texts have found it to account for seven percent of all printed English-language words. It is derived from gendered articles in Old English which combined in Middle English and now has a single form used with nouns of any gender. The word can be used with both singular and plural nouns, and with a noun that starts with any letter. This is different from many other languages, which have different forms of the definite article for different genders or numbers. Pronunciation In most dialects, "the" is pronounced as (with the voiced dental fricative followed by a schwa) when followed by a consonant sound, and as (homophone of the archaic pronoun '' the ...
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Karl Marx
Karl Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, political theorist, economist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He is best-known for the 1848 pamphlet '' The Communist Manifesto'' (written with Friedrich Engels), and his three-volume (1867–1894), a critique of classical political economy which employs his theory of historical materialism in an analysis of capitalism, in the culmination of his life's work. Marx's ideas and their subsequent development, collectively known as Marxism, have had enormous influence. Born in Trier in the Kingdom of Prussia, Marx studied at the universities of Bonn and Berlin, and received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Jena in 1841. A Young Hegelian, he was influenced by the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and both critiqued and developed Hegel's ideas in works such as '' The German Ideology'' (written 1846) and the '' Grundrisse'' (written 1857–1858). While in Paris, Marx wrote ...
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Single Mother
A single parent is a person who has a child or children but does not have a spouse or live-in partner to assist in the upbringing or support of the child. Reasons for becoming a single parent include death, divorce, break-up, abandonment, becoming widowed, domestic violence, rape, childbirth by a single person or single-person adoption. A ''single parent family'' is a family with children that is headed by a single parent. History Single parenthood has been common historically due to parental mortality rate due to disease, wars, homicide, work accidents and maternal mortality. Historical estimates indicate that in French, English, or Spanish villages in the 17th and 18th centuries at least one-third of children lost one of their parents during childhood; in 19th-century Milan, about half of all children lost at least one parent by age 20; in 19th-century China, almost one-third of boys had lost one parent or both by the age of 15. Such single parenthood was often short in du ...
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The Scotsman
''The Scotsman'' is a Scottish compact (newspaper), compact newspaper and daily news website headquartered in Edinburgh. First established as a radical political paper in 1817, it began daily publication in 1855 and remained a broadsheet until August 2004. Its parent company, National World, also publishes the ''Edinburgh Evening News''. It had an audited print circulation of 8,762 for July to December 2022. Its website, Scotsman.com, had an average of 138,000 unique visitors a day as of 2017. The title celebrated its bicentenary on 25 January 2017. History ''The Scotsman'' was conceived in 1816 and first launched on 25 January 1817 as a liberal weekly newspaper by lawyer William Ritchie (Newspaper Editor), William Ritchie and customs official Charles Maclaren in response to the "unblushing subservience" of competing newspapers to the Edinburgh establishment. These two plus John Ramsay McCulloch were co-founders of the venture. The paper was pledged to "impartiality, firm ...
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Real Socialism
Real socialism, better known as actually existing socialism was an ideological catchphrase popularized during the Brezhnev era in the Eastern Bloc countries and the Soviet Union. The term referred to the Soviet-type economic planning implemented by the Eastern Bloc at that particular time. From the 1960s onward, Communist states such as Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia began to argue that their policies represented what was realistically feasible given their level of productivity. The concept of real socialism alluded to a highly developed socialist system in the future. The actual party claims of nomenclatory socialism began to acquire not only negative, but also sarcastic meanings. In later years and especially after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the term began to be remembered as only one thing, i.e. as a reference for Soviet-style socialism. Definition After World War II, the terms "real socialism" or "really existing socialism" gradu ...
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There Is No Alternative
"There is no alternative" (TINA) is a political slogan originally arguing that liberal capitalism is the only viable system. At the turn of the 21st century the TINA rhetoric became closely tied to neoliberalism, and its traits of liberalization and marketization. Politicians used it to justify policies of economic liberalism (or fiscal conservatism) and austerity. The slogan is strongly associated with the policies and persona of Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister and leader of the Conservative Party during the 1980s, and, as , with Angela Merkel, who served as Chancellor of Germany from 2005 until 2021. Researchers of populism generally agree that its growth since the 1990s is the result of political elites accepting certain concepts (like free market) as unalterable truths and the associated disappearance of the political discord (so-called post-politics). This created a virtual " party cartel", where the views of established parties did not differ on policies ...
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Bourgeois
The bourgeoisie ( , ) are a class of business owners, merchants and wealthy people, in general, which emerged in the Late Middle Ages, originally as a "middle class" between the peasantry and Aristocracy (class), aristocracy. They are traditionally contrasted with the proletariat by their wealth, political power, and education, as well as their access to and control of Cultural capital, cultural, Social capital, social, and financial capital. The bourgeoisie in its original sense is intimately linked to the political ideology of liberalism and its existence within cities, recognised as such by their urban charters (e.g., municipal charters, town privileges, German town law), so there was no bourgeoisie apart from the Burgher (social class), citizenry of the cities. Rural peasants came under a different legal system. In communist philosophy, the bourgeoisie is the social class that came to own the means of production during modern industrialisation and whose societal concerns ar ...
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