Alfred Sohn-Rethel (; 4 January 1899 – 6 April 1990) was a French-born German Marxian economist and philosopher especially interested in epistemology. His main intellectual achievement was the publication of Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology. He also wrote about the relationship between German industry and National Socialism.
Biography
Born in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris, Sohn-Rethel came from a family of painters, his father was painter, Alfred Sohn-Rethel (1875–1958) and his mother was Anna Julie, née Michels. His mother was a descendant from the noble Oppenheim family and had influential relations with big business. His paternal grandfather was painter, Karl Rudolf Sohn and his paternal grandmother was painter and singer, Else Sohn-Rethel. As his family did not want him also to become a painter, he was brought up by his uncle, the steel industrialist Ernst Poensgen. On Christmas 1915, he expressed a wish for a copy of Karl Marx's Capital as a present. He received one and studied it intensively. Thrown out of home, he participated in the anti-war student protest in his first year at Heidelberg University in 1917. He opposed the Spartacist uprising on the grounds that it prevented a more promising later revolution.
From 1920 Sohn-Rethel was a friend of the philosopher Ernst Bloch, and he met Walter Benjamin in 1921. He came to live in Positano in 1923–24, and Naples: philosophy of the broken recorded his fascination with the relaxed Neapolitan attitude to technology. Between 1924 and 1927 he remained in Italy, "mainly in Capri, where Benjamin and Bloch were staying", He stayed in contact with different members of the Frankfurt School, to whom his theoretical concerns were close; however, they never established a close working relationship.
Sohn-Rethel received his doctorate with the Austrian economist Emil Lederer in 1928. In his thesis he criticized the theory of marginal utility as a petitio principii because it implies the notion of number implicitly. Thanks to Poensgen he found a job as research assistant at the (MWT). The MWT was a lobbying organization of the leading export industries. From 1931 to 1936 he worked 'in the cave of the lion' and watched and analyzed power politics from a very close distance. At the same time he had contacts with socialist resistance groups like Neu Beginnen or .
Due to his classification as "mixed-race" under the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, he emigrated in 1936 to Switzerland, from where he unsuccessfully applied for a lectureship at the New York-based University of Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, encountering the veto of Max Horkheimer despite the support of Theodor W. Adorno.