Paul Mattick Jr.

Paul Mattick Jr. (born 1944) is a Marxist theorist and philosopher.

He is the son of council communist theoreticians Paul Mattick Sr. (1904-1981) and Ilse Mattick (1919-2009).

Mattick was involved in the council communist group Root and Branch, which sporadically published a magazine/pamphlet series, starting in 1969. Other notable members include Jeremy Brecher, Stanley Aronowitz, and Peter Rachleff.

Mattick obtained his PhD from Harvard in 1981. He was previously the editor of the International Journal of Political Economy, and is the author of several books on philosophy of language, aesthetics, and the critique of political economy.

Key works

• Social Knowledge: An Essay on the Nature and Limits of Social Science (1986)
• Art in Its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics (2003)
• Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics and the Reconstruction of Art (editor) (2008)
• Business as Usual: The Economic Crisis and the Failure of Capitalism (2011)