The Space of Rights: On Benjamin, Gramsci, and Polanyi

For intellectual generations born at the end of the 19th century in Europe, the discourses on rights were to a large measure determined by proponents and detractors of various versions of Marxism. Hence the debates on justice and rights predominantly operated with the conceptual and analytical instruments of European political economy. These debates also were premised on assumptions about the status of the political economy of Europe and North America in the distribution of global space. But the intellectual generations born at the end of the 19th century, and particularly those with interests in the Marxist project -- as Benjamin, Gramsci, and Polanyi were-- were also witnesses to the facts of the Soviet Revolution and its evolution into the Stalinist state. In this paper I will first of all examine the ways in which Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci, and Karl Polanyi elaborated and expanded the concept of transatlantic space inscribed into the Marxist project. I will then investigate to which extent their familiarity with the rights practices of Stalinism impacted their elaboration of new forms of the space of rights: Benjamin’s concept of the historical space of ‘messianism’ that transcends the historical limits of the space of rights of historical materialism; Gramsci’s concept of cultural space as a struggle for rights that expands Marx’s terrain of political economy, and Polanyi’s concept of anthropological space that expands the conceptual space of economic analysis of classical Marxism. The purpose of the paper is to gain a measure of understanding of the links that obtain between conceptual apparatuses of leading intellectuals and global transformations in the first half of the twentieth century, particularly since these intellectuals developed their ideas relatively independently from the structures of organized knowledge production of universities and academies. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript