Alfred Sohn-Rethel (4 January 1899 – 6 April 1990) was a French-born German Marxian economist and philosopher especially interested in epistemology.
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.
[6] In his thesis he criticized the theory of marginal utility as a petitio principii because it implies the notion of number implicitly.
He wrote economic analyses for a circle close to Winston Churchill which were used against Neville Chamberlain's appeasement policy.
At the funeral of Adorno he met the editor Siegfried Unseld who encouraged him to crystallize his ideas in his major work Intellectual and manual labor.
All of Kant's categories such as space, time, quality, substance, accident, movement and so forth are present in the act of exchange.
The second domain where Sohn-Rethel made important contributions was the study of the economic policies that favoured the rise of German fascism, much of which is based on first-hand knowledge gained from his time at the MWT.
The endorsement of the compromise between industry and big agrarians at the shareholders' meeting of the IG Farben in 1932 paved the way for the dictatorship, according to Sohn-Rethel.