Counterhegemonies and Emancipations: Notes for a Debate (original) (raw)

2012, South Atlantic Quarterly

The limits of political emancipation are evident at once in the fact that the state can free itself from a restriction without man being really free from this restriction, that the state can be a free state without man being a free man. The perfect political state is, by its nature, man's species-life, as opposed to his material life. All the preconditions of this egoistic life continue to exist in civil society outside the sphere of the state, but as qualities of civil society. Where the political state has attained its true development, man-not only in thought, in consciousness, but in reality, in life-leads a twofold life, a heavenly and an earthly life: life in the political community, in which he considers himself a communal being, and life in civil society, in which he acts as a private individual, regards other men as a means, degrades himself into a means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers.-Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question History will not be kind to rigid certainties: we propose this as the starting point to approach the discussion of counterhegemony and emancipation. There are few ideas as deeply rooted in critical thought as those regarding what form social transformation should take. This makes it diffi-Raúl Ornelas Counterhegemonies and Emancipations: Notes for a Debate South Atlantic Quarterly