The Concept of Community in the Thought of Lucien Goldmann
The Concept of Community in the Thought of Lucien Goldmann

Summary/Abstract: The quest for „authentic human community“ was a central theme of Lucien Goldmann’s oeuvre, beginning with his earliest writings. Due to the reputation of this Rumanian-French Marxist humanist as a sociologist of culture, the profoundly political nature of his thought is more often than not obscured. However, at the heart of his philosophical and literary studies, political questions are to be found. Indeed they are posed in and underlie the structure of his first book, originally a dissertation for the University of Zürich significantly entitled « Mensch, Gemeinschaft und Welt in der Philosophie Immanuel Kants ». Nothing, he insisted, may of right be called philosophy butthat whose aim is “the liberation of man and the realization of a truecommunity.” The author's concern is less with the validity of Goldmann‘s interpretation of Kant per se than with what his interpretation tells about his own thought. Goldmann explicitly states that his book on Kant is one of philosophy and not an exercise in Kant “philology.”

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