Stanislaw Brzozowski and the Polish Beginnings of 'Western Marxism'

This book introduces the English-speaking reader to the thought of Stanislaw Brzozowski (1878-1911), an outstanding Polish philosopher and literary critic. Although little known in the West, Brzozowski is an important forerunner of the intellectual tradition of "Western Marxism" most commonly associated with Georg Lukács and Antonio Gramsci. Walicki argues that Brzozowski's antinaturalistic approach resulted in a radical reinterpretation of Marxism that dealt with many of the problems of the revolt against positivism in European philosophy, and that it was Brzozwski, not Lukács, who initially conceived of the retrieval of the philosophical and humanist aspect of Marxism and its separation from the Engels school of "scientific Marxism."