Ralph Dumain: "The Autodidact Project": Alfred Sohn-Rethel: Intellectual and Manual Labor: Contents

Intellectual and Manual Labor:
A Critique of Epistemology

Alfred Sohn-Rethel

Contents

	Translator's Foreword	ix

	Preface	xi

	Introduction	1

PART I Critique of Philosophical Epistemology

1	The Fetishism of Intellectual Labour	13
2	Can there be Abstraction other than by Thought?	17
3	The Commodity Abstraction	19
4	The Phenomenon of the Exchange Abstraction	22
5	Economics and Knowledge	29
6	The Analysis of the Exchange Abstraction	35
	(a) Stating the Question	35
	(b) Practical Solipsism	39
	(c) The Form of Exchangeability of Commodities	43
	(d) Abstract Quantity and the Postulate of the Exchange Equation	46
	(e) Abstract Time and Space	48
	(f) The Concept of Value	49
	(g) Substance and Accidents	52
	(h) Atomicity	53
	(i ) Abstract Movement	53
	(j) Strict Causality	54
	(k) Concluding Remarks to the Analysis	56
7	The Evolution of Coined Money	58
8	Conversion of the Real Abstraction into the Conceptual Abstraction	60
9	The Independent Intellect	67
	(a) Self‑alienation and Self‑direction	67
	(b) The Relational Shift	68
	(c) Conversion post festum of Exchange	70
	(d) Division of Society and Nature	71
	(e) Reification at the Root of the Intellect	71
	(f) Knowledge from Sources other than Manual Labour	73
	(g) Laws of Nature	74
	(h) The Guide‑line of Historical Materialism	75
	(i) Money as a Mirror of Reflection	76
	(j) The Social Form of Thinking	76
	(k) The Social Synthesis as the Foundation of Science	78

PART II Social Synthesis and Production

10	Societies of Production and Societies of Appropriation	83
11	Head and Hand in Labour	84
12	The Beginnings of Surplus Production and Exploitation	86
13	Head and Hand in the Bronze Age	88
14	The Classical Society of Appropriation	94
15	Mathematics, the Dividing‑line of Intellectual and Manual Labour	101
16	Head and Hand in Medieval Peasant and Artisan Production	104
17	The Forms of Transition from Artisanry to Science	111
18	The Capitalist Relations of Production	117
19	Galilean Science and the Dynamic Concept of Inertia	123
20	Bourgeois Science	132

PART III The Dual Economics of Advanced Capitalism

21	From De‑socialised to Re‑socialised Labour	139
22	A Third Stage of the Capitalist Mode of Production?	140
23	The Turn to Monopoly Capitalism	144
24	Imperialism and Scientific Management	145
25	The Economy of Time and 'Scientific Management'	148
26	The Essentials of Taylorism	149
27	Critique of Taylorism	153
28	The Foundation of Flow Production	159
29	The Unity of Measurement of Man and Machine	161
30	The Dual Economics of Monopoly Capitalism	163
31	The Necessity for a Commensuration of Labour	166
32	The Commensuration of Labour in Action	170
33	The Way to Automation	172
34	The Curse of the Second‑Nature	175
35	The Epoch of Transition	178
36	Logic of Appropriation and Logic of Production	180

PART IV Historical Materialism as Methodological Postulate

37	The Theory of Reflection and its Incompatibilities as a Theory of Science	189
38	Materialism versus Empiricism	193
39	Marx's Own Object Lesson	194
40	Necessary False Consciousness	196
41	The Philosophical Issue	199
42	The Essentially Critical Power of Historical Materialism	201

	Notes and References	205

	Books and Articles by Alfred Sohn‑Rethel	213

	Index	215

SOURCE: Sohn-Rethel, Alfred. Intellectual and Manual Labor: A Critique of Epistemology. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1977.

Intellectual and Manual Labor: Extracts
by Alfred Sohn-Rethel

Historical Materialist Theory of Knowledge (1965)
by Alfred Sohn-Rethel

“Science as Alienated Consciousness”
by Alfred Sohn-Rethel (with Introductions)

The First Philosophers: Studies in Ancient Greek Society (Contents & Prefaces)
by George Thomson

The Thunderbolt, Interpenetration and Heraclitus
by David H. DeGrood

Book Review, Rudolf Wolfgang Müller, Geld und Geist
by Pasi Falk

Geoffrey Clark reviews Heads or Tails: The Poetics of Money by Jochen Hörisch

"Theories of Knowledge: A Dialectical, Historical Critique"
by Howard L. Parsons

“Towards a Socio‑Historical Interpretation of the Scientific Revolution”
by Paul Piccone

Philosophy and the Division of Labor: Selected Bibliography

Literature, Race, & Money: Selected Bibliography

Offsite:

Intellectual and Manual Labor: Preface - Chapter 4
by Alfred Sohn-Rethel

Outlines of a Critique of Technology
edited by Phil Slater

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Uploaded 6 March 2005
Updated 29 June 2005