Cornelius Castoriadis Quotes

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Reification, the essential tendency of capitalism, can never be wholly realized. If it were, if the system were actually able to change individuals into things moved only by economic forces, it would collapse not in the long run, but immediately. The struggle of people against reification is, just as much as the tendency towards reification, the condition for the functioning of capitalism. Capitalism can function only by continually drawing upon the genuinely human activity of those subject to it, while at the same time trying to level and dehumanize them as much as possible.

Cornelius Castoriadis

Either history is really governed by laws, and in that case a truly human-activity is impossible, except perhaps in a technical sense; or human beings really make their own history, and then the task of theory will not be directed to discovering 'laws', but to the elucidation of the conditions with in which human activity unfolds.

Cornelius Castoriadis

Cornelius Castoriadis

Cornelius Castoriadis

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Born: March 11, 1922

Died: December 26, 1997 (aged 75)

Bio: Cornelius Castoriadis was a Greek-French philosopher, social critic, economist, psychoanalyst, author of The Imaginary Institution of Society, and co-founder of the Socialisme ou Barbarie group.

Known for:

The imaginary institution of society (1975)
World in fragments (1990)
Figures of the Thinkable
Crossroads in the Labyrinth (1984)
On Plato's Statesman

Cornelius Castoriadis on Wikipedia

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