Abstract
In his famous and difficult essay "On the Concept of History," Walter Benjamin introduces the idea of revolutionary redemption. Through their actions, revolutionaries of the present can redeem those whose struggles for liberation failed in the past. According to Benjamin, class struggle is a redemptive intervention into the past. This idea raises a fundamental question: How can present events and actions have an impact on the past and redeem people who are no longer alive? I attempt to answer this question with a conception of emancipation as a temporally extended collective action. On this conception, we are struggling for the past's socialist afterlife.
Gabriel Wollner
Gabriel Wollner studied philosophy, political science, and economics at the universities of Oxford and Harvard. He completed his doctorate in philosophy at University College London and has taught as an assistant professor at the London School of Economics and at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Most recently, he held the chair of political and social philosophy at the University of Bayreuth.
