Max Adler (lawyer)

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Max Adler (born January 15, 1873 in Vienna , Austria-Hungary ; † June 28, 1937 there ) was an Austrian lawyer, politician and social philosopher ; he was a leading theoretician of Austromarxism . He was a brother of Oskar Adler .

Photo taken around 1930
Memorial plaque on the house where he was born in Waschhausgasse 1a in Vienna-Leopoldstadt
Socialist idea of ​​liberation in Karl Marx , 1918

Life

The son of a Jewish merchant doctorate in 1896 at the University of Vienna Dr. jur. and became a lawyer . In the early summer of 1919 he became a teacher for the Schönbrunn district . The Viennese Vice Mayor Max Winter succeeded in making rooms available to the friends of children in the main building of Schönbrunn Palace . In this Schönbrunn educational school , in which young people were trained as pedagogues, Max Adler was able to realize educational reform programs together with his colleagues Wilhelm Jerusalem , Alfred Adler , Marianne Pollak , Josef Luitpold Stern and Otto Felix Kanitz . In 1920 he completed his habilitation at the University of Vienna and became an associate professor for sociology and social philosophy at the University of Vienna. From 1919 to 1921 he was a social democratic member of the Lower Austrian state parliament . Adler was active in adult education and from 1904 to 1923, together with Rudolf Hilferding, editor of the Marx studies . At the University of Vienna in 1926, Spann , Much , Gleispach , Hugelmann , Czermak and the like prevented Adler from being appointed full professor at meetings of the German Community .

plant

Max Adler's first major theoretical work was a study by Max Stirner . A contribution to establishing the relationship between socialism and individualism (1894). The title is programmatic for Adler's later theoretical endeavors. Although with this study of Marx's frowned upon opponent Stirner violently offended the Marxist party theorists and therefore left it unpublished, Stirner remained in the background of his thinking all his life. After viewing the estate, Adler's biographer Alfred Pfabigan was surprised by the "intellectual relationship between Adler and Stirner because of its high degree of continuity."

Because Adler wanted to work in the context of the emerging social democracy, he later mentioned Stirner, although he considered him to be eminently important as a “psychological counterpart” to Marx, only with great caution and initially largely adopted the doctrine of historical materialism : History is one of Class struggles, the knowledge of which is determined as a unity of theory and revolutionary practice. He saw the social contradictions of the previous development result in “ever greater harmony and perfection”, until in the end, in the revolution of the proletariat, “the pursuit of class interests coincide with the solidarity of society”. Deviating from orthodox Marxism , Adler's dialectics are reduced to a mere methodology of social science, to which no real dialectics of historical being should correspond. Adler also rejects - in agreement with other theorists of the Second International such as Karl Kautsky and Karl Liebknecht - the connection between scientific socialism and materialism: true Marxism is "in reality social idealism". For Adler, historical materialism is basically inverted into subjective idealism. Consequently, he was particularly interested in an epistemological foundation of sociology, in which Marx's motifs are linked with Kant's transcendentalism. According to Adler, “individual consciousness is already socialized a priori” in so far as every logical judgment contains the necessary relation to a multiplicity of coinciding subjects; Adler's 'Sozialapriori' should transcendentally determine the possibility of social reality in general.

In controversies with Hans Kelsen and Hermann Heller , Adler's contributions to a Marxist doctrine of the state emerged . Criticizing the formal concept of democracy, Adler differentiated between political democracy as the ruling organization of the bourgeois class and a social democracy in which, along with class antagonisms, oppression should be abolished and a "solidarity-based administrative reform" of society should take its place. For Adler, the establishment of a socialist society remained tied to Marx's 'breaking up of the state machine'. The politician Adler did not accept any compromises with so-called social chauvinism or majority socialist “reformism”. The Austromarxism represented by Adler, Otto Bauer and Rudolf Hilferding was important not least for the discussions on the left wing of German social democracy before 1933.

Publications

  • Immanuel Kant in memory. Commemorative speech on the 100th anniversary of death . Vienna 1904.
  • Causality and Teleology in the Controversy over Science . In: Marx Studies. Vol. 1, Vienna 1904, pp. 195-433.
  • Marx as a thinker . Berlin 1908 ( digitized 2nd revised edition Vienna 1921) .
  • Socialism and the intellectuals . Vienna 1910 (1919, 1920 and 1923).
  • The sociological sense of the teaching of Karl Marx . Leipzig 1914.
  • Signpost. Studies on the intellectual history of socialism . Stuttgart: Dietz 1914 ( online version ).
  • Principle or romance! Socialist reflections on world wars . Nuremberg 1915.
  • Democracy and the council system . Vienna 1919.
  • Engels as a thinker . Berlin 1920 (1925).
  • The state conception of Marxism. A contribution to the distinction between sociological and legal method . Vienna 1922.
  • The sociological in Kant's critique of knowledge . Vienna 1924.
  • Kant and Marxism. Berlin 1925; thereof reprint: Ahlen 1975, ISBN 3-511-09020-2 .
  • Political or social democracy. Berlin 1926.
  • Textbook of the materialistic conception of history , 2 vols. Berlin 1930/32.
  • Left Socialism . Necessary reflections on reformism and revolutionary socialism , Karlsbad 1933.
  • The riddle of society. On the epistemological foundation of social science . Vienna 1936.
  • Max Stirner and modern socialism. Features from the Arbeiter-Zeitung from October 1906 . Vienna 1992, ISBN 3-900434-36-0 .
  • Marx and Engels as thinkers . Introduced by Thomas Meyer . makol Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1972.

literature

Web links

Commons : Max Adler  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Max Adler  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Biographical data from Max Adler . In: Niederösterreichische Landtagdirektion (Hrsg.): Biographisches Handbuch des NÖ Landtag: 1861–1921. Lower Austria Landtag Directorate, St. Pölten, print: ISBN 3-85006-166-3 (as of January 1, 2005). Online version: PDF, 843 kB
  2. ^ Friedrich Stadler: Anti-Semitism at the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Vienna - Using the example of Moritz Schlick and his Vienna Circle. In: Oliver Rathkolb (ed.): The long shadow of anti-Semitism. Critical examination of the history of the University of Vienna in the 19th and 20th centuries, Vienna 2014, pp. 207–238, here p. 222.
  3. ^ Alfred Pfabigan: Max Adler . Frankfurt / Main: Campus 1982, p. 15
personal data
SURNAME Adler, Max
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian sociologist, representative of Austromarxism and politician, member of the state parliament
DATE OF BIRTH January 15, 1873
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH June 28, 1937
Place of death Vienna