Blackwell Reference Online

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French political/social theorist and psychoanalyst. Though born in Constantinople and educated in Athens, Castoriadis lived in France from 1945. He founded the influential left-wing journal Socialisme ou Barbarie in 1949. Castoriadis began as a Marxist theorist interested in the questions of bureaucratic capitalism. His early contention that management by workers could serve as a check to Stalinism was confirmed by the events of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. Castoriadis then went on to conduct a systematic inquiry into the foundations of M arxism . This resulted in a rejection of the Marxist shibboleths of materialism and determinism. Castoriadis saw that the deterministic strain in Marxism was incompatible with M arx's own call for the autonomy of revolutionary action. Castoriadis argued that it was time to choose between loyalty to a D iscourse that had outworn its usefulness and the need to remain a revolutionary. He advanced instead a conception of the social-historical. By this he meant the world of human action that would not be restricted to a narrow conception of the political. The revolutionary project itself had to be decentered into a quest for autonomy in which all could participate. Such a project would have to move away from traditional teleologies of time that are deterministic. Castoriadis distinguishes between homogeneous and heterogeneous modes of temporality ... log in or subscribe to read full text