Eugene Kamenka

Eugene Kamenka (4 March 1928 – 19 January 1994) was an Australian political philosopher and Marxist scholar.

Biography[]

Kamenka was born in Cologne in 1928 and taken to Australia in 1937. He was educated at the Sydney Technical High School, and after interrupting his studies went to Jerusalem where he married his first wife Miriam Mizrachi and with her encouragement he returned to Sydney University to complete his degree and begin work on his later published thesis "The Ethical Foundations of Marxism" for the Australian national university, publ 1962. Professor John Anderson of Sydney University was a key influence in his early career.

Kamenka lectured in philosophy at the University of Singapore where he met his second wife, Alice Tay and lectured and researched in Europe, North America and most countries in Asia; he was a Professor and the Head of the History of Ideas Unit at the Institute of Advanced Studies of the Australian National University, and lived in Canberra. Together with his second wife, a professor of jurisprudence at Sydney University and scholar of comparative and Asian legal systems, he authored several works in philosophy of law and comparative law.^[1]

He died in Canberra.

Works[]

• Marxism and Ethics (1969)
• A World in Revolution? (1970)
• The Philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach (1970)
• Nationalism: The Nature and Evolution of an Idea (1976)
• The Portable Karl Marx (1983)
• Bureaucracy (1989)

See also[]

• Karl Marx
• Marxist Humanism
• Ethics

References[]

External links[]

• The Ethical Foundations of Marxism by Eugene Kamenka (1962)
• Marxian Humanism and the Crisis in Socialist Ethics by Eugene Kamenka (1965)
• New York Times Obituary (26 January 1994)