University of Chicago Press The Birth of Theory

Modern theory needs a history lesson. Neither Marx nor Nietzsche first gave us theory-Hegel did. To support this contention, Andrew Cole's The Birth of Theory presents a refreshingly clear and lively account of the origins and legacy of Hegel's dialectic as theory. Cole explains how Hegel boldly broke from modern philosophy when he adopted medieval dialectical habits of thought to fashion his own dialectic. While his contemporaries rejected premodern dialectic as outdated dogma, Hegel embraced both its emphasis on language as thought and its fascination with the categories of identity and difference, creating what we now recognize as theory, distinct from systematic philosophy. Hegel also used this dialectic to expose the persistent archaism of modern life itself, Cole shows, establishing a method of social analysis that has influenced everyone from Marx and the nineteenth-century Hegelians, to Nietzsche and Bakhtin, all the way to Deleuze and Jameson. By uncovering these theoretical filiations across time, The Birth of Theory will not only change the way we read Hegel, but also the way we think about the histories of theory. With chapters that powerfully reanimate the overly familiar topics of ideology, commodity fetishism, and political economy, along with a groundbreaking reinterpretation of Hegel's famous master/slave dialectic, The Birth of Theory places the disciplines of philosophy, literature, and history in conversation with one another in an unprecedented way. Review " Birth of Theory is first and foremost a rehabilitation: one that cuts through the 'scrim' of what Hegelianism has become and takes us back to who Hegel himself was and what he 'actually said.' . . . The Birth of Theory reveals itself as not just an impressive combination of historical calibration and theoretical intervention, but rather as a methodological clinic in how to do theoretical and historical work now. What Cole demonstrates, in a final Hegelian lesson, is that we can no longer have one without the other."-- "MAKE Literary Magazine" " The Birth of Theory is an ambitious, original, lucidly-written, scrupulously-researched, sui generis book that is difficult to classify. . . . [It] contains local and global insights that are not to be missed: the intertextual allusions between Hegel's early theological writings and Marx on commodity fetishism; the critique of political economy as 'the otherwise hidden connection between Hegel and Bakhtin'; the centrality of a medieval dialectical hermeneutic not only to Hegel but also postmodernists like Jameson; and, above all, a Hegel of much wider relevance than the more specialized readings that characterize the current Hegel boom."-- "Review of Metaphysics" " The Birth of Theory is filled with illuminating and often counterintuitive readings. . . . Cole's argument touches on an array of important avenues of inquiry, offering counterproposals that should unsettle the doctrinally comfortable and reinvigorate theoretical discussions in a variety of connected fields: Hegel scholarship and the history of Continental philosophy; Marxist and post-Marxist analysis of culture, ideology, and commodity fetishism; literary criticism, whether historicist or not; and contemporary discussions of new vitalisms, materialisms, and speculative ontologies. . . . The Birth of Theory offers a set of tantalizing and highly original arguments."-- "Qui Parle" "An extremely important and timely book. . . . By arguing that Hegel recognized the cotemporality of the feudal and the modern-capitalist in his own time and thus was engaged in a form of 'materialist analysis' that is imbued with deep conceptual rigor, Cole can indeed make Hegel not only 'presciently Marxist' but valuable for future 'dialectical interpretation' of all sorts. We can look past the 'mediating scrim, ' i.e., vacuous anti-Hegelian pronouncements, in so much theory, and recognize the close affiliation between Hegel's dialectic (medieva