Materialism, Politics, and the History of Philosophy:French, German, and Turkish Materialist Authors in the Nineteenth Century

The aim of this chapter is to analyse the political uses of the categorization of eighteenth-century French materialism as mechanistic and reductionist. Regardless of the current or outdated character of these materialisms, their rejection and the narratives that endorsed such judgments appear as partly ideological. Using several examples, this chapter will examine how this reductionist image of eighteenth-century French materialism was formed in the nineteenth century. It aims to show that the quarrels about materialism focused at that time on the question of a society’s dominant beliefs.Ayşe Yuva, ‘Materialism, Politics, and the History of Philosophy: French, German, and Turkish Materialist Authors in the Nineteenth Century’, in Materialism and Politics, ed. by Bernardo Bianchi, Emilie Filion-Donato, Marlon Miguel, and Ayşe Yuva, Cultural Inquiry, 20 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2021), pp. 293-312