The subject, the worker, and the slave reification, capitalism, and the divestment of reason from freedom

This article traces a line of thought through a reading of Lukács to suggest that the promise of Enlightenment modernity to emancipate thought from extrahuman authority is an impossibility because the problem of sovereignty returns in the form of the problem of freedom. The authority to make ourselves responsible, and act according to norms of our own making is the keystone feature of philosophical modernity. But this capacity to self-determine requires that the normative compels itself alone. This is a central problem for social pragmatism, which claims heir to Kant and Hegel’s enlightenment. Lukács exacerbates this, pointing both to how capitalism enmeshes us within its sociomaterial systems and how this foregrounds worker’s practical enactment within those systems. This casts doubt on the possibility of detangling norms from power required for autonomy. But rather than follow this line of thought, Lukács foregrounds the split subjectivity of the worker as the material limit of determination. Instead, in confrontation not with the figure of the worker but the slave as reified and naturalised category we might disarticulate reason from freedom in pursuit of the immanent disentangling of thought from the problems of sovereign authority that modernity promised.