Alfred Sohn-Rethel

Biography

Born in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris, Sohn-Rethel came from a family of painters, his father was painter, Alfred Sohn-Rethel (1875–1958) and his mother was Anna Julie, née Michels. His mother was a descendant from the noble Oppenheim family and had influential relations with big business. His paternal grandfather was painter, Karl Rudolf Sohn and his paternal grandmother was painter and singer, Else Sohn-Rethel. 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's 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. Additionally his paternal uncle, Otto Sohn-Rethel lived in Anacapri a city in Capri, whom he visited with. 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 economist 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.

For a long time after the Second World War Sohn-Rethel was not really able to continue his theoretical work. He made a living teaching French. He joined the Communist Party and despite his disillusionment he was a member until 1972. The 1968 movement created a new interest in his work. At the funeral of Adorno he met the editor Siegfried Unseld who encouraged him to crystallize his ideas in his major work Intellectual and manual labor. In 1978 Sohn-Rethel was appointed Professor for Social Philosophy at Bremen University. He died in Bremen in 1990.