Charles Péguy e il valore d’uso come “Kultur”

Résumé 0

The article analyzes the concept of labor in the work of Charles Péguy, clarifying how his interpretations of notions such as ‘production’, ‘proletariat’, ‘socialism’, ‘money’, bourgeoisie’, are strictly inherent to his way of conceiving labor as the core generator of the Kultur (culture and identity) of France, and how this peculiar assumption points out, in the work of Péguy, the interconnection among rightwing and leftwing topics. After a brief introduction on Péguy’s legacy in French right-wing culture, the article, focusing in particular on Notre Jeunesse and L’argent (but also on Péguy’s interpretation of the Bergsonian concept of durée), follows the different stages of Péguy’s intellectual trajectory, pointing out the treatments of the concept of labor in his early writings, in his harsh analysis of the positivist culture of La Sorbonne, as well as in his polemics with the leaders of the socialist and nationalist movements. The final part focuses on Péguy’s interpretation of some Marxian concepts related to labor, highlighting how Péguy’s misinterpretation of some of them (in particular the misinterpretation of the dialectics between use-value and exchange-value) was intrinsic to his way of conceiving the concept of Kultur