Concept of Nature in Marx: Radical Thinkers

The central importance of Marx's concept of nature in the formulation of historical materialism has been largely neglected in the extensive literature on Marx. Alfred Schmidt, philosophical successor to Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in Frankfurt, seeks to elucidate it in this original study.
In The Concept of Nature in Marx, Schmidt shows how Marxism cuts across the traditional tendency to contrast an abstract concept of man with an abstract concept of nature. He stresses the importance in Marxism of the development of industry and science as the mediation between historical man and external nature, leading either to their reconciliation (if positive) or to their mutual annihilation (if negative). He then both explores this mediation in history and shows how an awareness of its positive and negative possibilities is reflected in such writers as Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch.