The Philosophy of the Broken and the Practice of the Rearrangement. Anthropological Aspects of Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s Essays on the Neapolitan Attitude Towards Technology

Abstract

The text analyses the content of essays on Naples and its inhabitants from the mid-1920s,
written by the influential German Marxist philosopher and economist Alfred Sohn-Rethel,
who was very close to the Frankfurt School. The key to reading these texts, published under
the title “Napoli: The Philosophy of the Broken” (Napoli: la filosofia del rotto), lies in the idea
that, for the Neapolitans, technology begins to work only when it is “broken” and “subordinated”
to complete control of its owners; this thesis is connected with Claude Lévi-Strauss’s
anthropological theory of bricolage. This text also highlights the concept of porosity, which
at that time also had epistemological importance in the context of interpretations of the
Italian south. Finally, the content of the author’s essays is compared with policies and results
of the introduction of the Taylorist “scientific organization” of labor in the 1920s into the
Italian economy and beyond.