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Alfred Sohn-Rethel


Alfred Sohn-Rethel (4 January 1899 – 6 April 1990) was a French-born German Marxian economist and philosopher especially interested in epistemology. He also wrote about the relationship between German industry and National Socialism.

Born in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris, Sohn-Rethel came from a family of painters and his father was a painter too. His mother came from the Oppenheim family and had influential relations with big business.

As his family did not want him also to become a painter, he was brought up by his uncle, the steel industrialist Ernst Poensgen. On Christmas 1915 he expressed a wish for a copy of Karl Marx Capital as a present. He received one and studied it intensively. Thrown out of home, he participated in the anti-war student protest in his first year at Heidelberg University in 1917.

From 1920 Sohn-Rethel was a friend of the philosopher Ernst Bloch, and he met Walter Benjamin in 1921. He came to live in Positano in 1923–24, and Naples: philosophy of the broken recorded his fascination with the relaxed Neapolitan attitude to technology. Between 1924 and 1927 he remained in Italy, "mainly in Capri, where Benjamin and Bloch were staying", meeting Adorno and Kracauer also at Capri in 1924. He stayed in contact with different members of the Frankfurt School, to whom his theoretical concerns were close; however, they never established a close working relationship.

Sohn-Rethel received his doctorate with the Austrian Marxist Emil Lederer in 1928. In his thesis he criticized the theory of marginal utility as a petitio principii because it implies the notion of number implicitly. Thanks to Poensgen he found a job as research assistant at the Mitteleuropäischer Wirtschaftstag (MWT). The MWT was a lobbying organization of the leading export industries. From 1931 to 1936 he worked 'in the cave of the lion' and watched and analyzed power politics from a very close distance. At the same time he had contacts with socialist resistance groups like Neu beginnen or Der rote Stosstrupp. In 1937 he emigrated via Switzerland and Paris to England. He wrote economic analyses for a circle close to Winston Churchill which were used against Neville Chamberlain's appeasement policy.


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