Background
Rubel, Maximilien was born in 1905 in Czernowitz (then part of Austro-Hungarian Empire).
Rubel, Maximilien was born in 1905 in Czernowitz (then part of Austro-Hungarian Empire).
Law and Philosophy in Vienna and Czernowitz. 1934, Licence des lettres, Paris. 1954, Doctorat des lettres, Sorbonne.
Founder and editor of Études de Marxologie, a journal published under the auspices of the French Institute for Applied Economic Science. From 1947, affiliated with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Taught at University of Paris.
Visiting Professor at numerous European and North American universities.
Rubel is notable as an intellectual revolutionary and as an authority on and rigorous scholar of Marx’s thought. It was always his aim critically to famine developed forms of ‘Marxism’ in the hght of Marx’s original ideas and he regarded those ideas as germane and generative rather than as components of a finished and static system. He edited the three volumes of Marx’s writings. Published by Gallimard, that have become the standard French edition of Marx and he named ar|d was virtually the first practitioner of the discipline of marxologie. The list of his publications on Marx contains more than eighty items. Rubel’s own ideas were radical and penetrating. He argued that an organization such as the party was itself a bourgeois formulation and maintained that the destruction of the state as the preliminary to the inauguration of a collectively managed society must be effected by the spontaneous activity of the workers rather than by any such organization. Rubel perceived not only a scientific and descriptive element in Marx's thought but also a utopian-ethical vision that demanded realization through the activities of the class comprised of ‘the most numerous and most poor, to whom Marx attributed the consciousness of this emancipatory mission’.