My introduction begins with Dorothy Richardson who, in the second volume of Pilgrimage, gives us a scene straight out of Jane Austen, which she then quickly abandons. Richardson’s particular form of modernism, I suggest, requires an engagement with realism in order to foreground its own interests. Using Richardson as a jumping off point, I outline the way modernism’s earliest critics reproduced arguments from the modernists themselves that emphasized their distinction from their realist predecessors. This debate then carried over to the seminal Marxist arguments of the 1930s between Lukács and Adorno, through which the terms modernism and realism hardened into an opposition that is still with us today. This reified divide cannot be simply wished away: we can still meaningfully distinguish works dominated by a realist impulse from those that use modernist’s characteristic disruptions. What we cannot do, I argue, is: (1) array these two movements simplistically via a false divide between form and content; (2) draw a straight line between politics and form. Instead, we must look to the ways in which specific aesthetic techniques combine to produce the form of each particular work of art.

This essay outlines Brecht’s relation to Marxism along three dimensions. First, it examines his Marxist influences including Karl Marx, V. I. Lenin, Karl Korsch, and Fritz Sternberg. Second, it explores Marxist reactions to him, particularly those of GeorgLukács and Theodor Adorno. Lastly, it investigates his influences on Marxist thought vis-à-vis Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Rancière, and others. It shows that not only was his work heavily influenced by the movement, his thought also occupies an often-unrecognized central position within it.

The Introduction discusses why, to draw out a genuinely critical social theory from Hegel’s thought, we must turn away from his official social and political philosophy in the Philosophy of Right, and instead use the logic of essence in the Science of Logic. The logic of essence, I suggest, does not present a historically invariant ontology, but sets out an ontology that is specific to capitalism. Finally, I introduce the central thesis of the book, namely, that the categories of the logic of essence give expression to the general structure of social domination in capitalism.