Iring Fetscher

Iring Fetscher (4 March 1922 – 19 July 2014) was a German academic, political scientist and researcher on Hegel and Marxism.

Fetscher was born at Marbach am Neckar, and was brought up in Dresden. After World War II he studied at Tübingen and Paris, receiving a doctorate in 1950. He belatedly published his thesis Hegels Lehre vom Menschen in 1970. He habilitated in 1959 with a dissertation on the political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

From 1963 to 1988 Fetscher was Professor of Political Science and Social Philosophy at the Goethe University Frankfurt. He is identified with the "second generation" of the Frankfurt School, along with Jürgen Habermas and Alfred Schmidt. Leszek Kołakowski, while taking Fetscher to be a distinguished historian of Marxism with a critical but positive attitude, does not see him as of the Frankfurt School more than notionally.

In 1993, Iring Fetscher was honored with induction into the French Order of Academic Palms (Ordre des Palmes Académiques).

Major works

• Von Marx zur Sowjetideologie. Wiesbaden 1956. (22 editions until 1987.)
• Rousseaus politische Philosophie. Zur Geschichte des demokratischen Freiheitsbegriffs. Neuwied, Berlin 1960.
• Der Marxismus. Seine Geschichte in Dokumenten, 3 vols., München 1963–1965.
• Marx and Marxism. New York: Herder & Herder, 1971. (Translation of Karl Marx und der Marxismus, 1967.)
• Die Geiß und die sieben Wölflein Weinheim 1976.
• Neugier und Furcht. Versuch, mein Leben zu verstehen. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1995, ISBN 3-455-11079-7. (Autobiography)