Walter Benjamin and the Post-Kantian Tradition

This book examines the intellectual development of Walter Benjamin from a young Kantian idealist to Marxist materialist. Beginning with an examination of materialism and the often misunderstood standpoint of neo-Kantianism, it roots our understanding of Benjamin in the philosophical currents of his time without reducing him to a representative of one camp or another.

Walter Benjamin and the Post-Kantian Tradition engages with Benjamin as a theorist of a historical and philosophical problematic: a problematic that he finds manifested, in different philosophical guises, within empiricism, neo-Kantianism and German Romanticism. The book takes us through these manifestations systematically and, in doing so, it demonstrates how Benjamin moves from an aspiring idealist philosopher to a politically engaged Marxist critic without abandoning the theoretical project he develops early on.