an unorthodox radical intellectual: moshe postone

Moshe Postone, c. 2008. The Moshe Postone Legacy Project.

A few weeks ago, I promised to return to the work of André Gorz, and it was while re-reading the re-edition of Gorz's book L'immatériel, that I came across a reference to the work of Moshe Postone. Gorz was writing in 2004 by which time Postone had become quite an academic celebrity in the world of critical theory. I'd rubbed shoulders with Moshe while at the University of Chicago, and so Gorz's reference brought back some memories.
We'd met at faculty cocktail parties and get-togethers in Hyde Park, - almost everyone lived around the campus in this small academic enclave in the middle of South Side Chicago.  We had the same circle of colleagues/friends.  We also both had carrels – small offices where you could hide away – in the University of Chicago's Regenstein library a magnificent institution to which, along side the Seminary Co-op bookstore, I owe a huge part of my education. We had coffee a couple of times in the minuscule, subterranean, refreshment room in the basement of the library.
Moshe was a kind man and tolerated me, a junior academic, talking to him about my work, while I struggled to comprehend the labyrinthine complexities of his. Postone's magnum opus Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory, (1993) was about to come out, while I was working on a chapter of my Troubadours book manuscript. The chapter dealt with contestatory rock music in 1980s China, in particular that of the musician Cui Jian, and I was looking at the phenomenon both in terms of cultural resistance and of hybridity in Homi Bhabha's sense. My time at Chicago (1990-1994) fell just after the Tiananmen débâcle and during the collapse of the Soviet Union. Radical academics - while not dyed in the wool Marxist-Leninists – were uncomfortable with the demise of "actually existing socialism", as the Soviet system was known. That I should apply the kind of critical approach to post-Mao China as they did to capitalist societies made me something of an oddity. But not so much with Postone. He did seem a little dubious about my take on the political impact and function of rock music in post-Mao China – he was after all close to Adorno's ideas and the German critic's views on the validity of studying popular music and had a nefarious effect on popular music studies for decades. Nevertheless, he was open to my critical approach to contemporary China since his reinterpretation of Marxist theory made it legitimate to critique "state capitalist" societies alongside post-war capitalist societies in the West, since "traditional Marxism struggle[d] to account for capitalism as it enters its Keynesian-Fordist phase and cannot adequately formulate a critique of the Soviet Union (since in both societies, the state has some form of control over the distribution of goods...)".* And, what went for the Soviet Union could naturally be mapped onto Marxist-Leninist China, especially after the return to power of Deng Xiaoping.
Postone, although already an oustanding intellectual force, had been mistreated by the university and survived on positions that were very much beneath his stature. While Chicago had a reputation for taking in and nurturing European Jewish liberal intellectuals, such empathy did not extend to the unorthodox Postone. Just after I left the university he was refused a tenured position in sociology. It was hardly surprising, this was the same university that had refused Homi Bhabha's appointment while pointing to his "rebarbative prose". Both decisions were challenged and both overturned. Postone was ultimately given a position in the History department. I found the University of Chicago an establishment that wanted people to crawl while jumping through hoops, if you didn't like crawling then you could walk away. Moshe did neither, stood his ground and was supported by his colleagues. I walked; I left in 1994 when I took up a position at Hong Kong University. Moshe was recognised for the great intellect he was in his later years as he bravely struggled with cancer. I'm glad to have known him.
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*Anke Devyver, "Freedom and Dialectics: On the Critical Theory of Moishe Postone and Theodor Adorno", Philosophy & Social Criticism, 21 (1), 2025, p. 52.
Moshe Postone,Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory,Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Moshe Postone, Temps, travail et domination sociale : Une réinterprétation de la théorie critique de Marx, Mille et une Nuits, 2009.
See also:THE MOISHE POSTONE LEGACY PROJECT https://thects.org/moishe-postone

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