Toward an epicurean politics : the two instrumentalities (phronesis and the ineffectual)

The paper demonstrates how instrumentality has been repressed in the philosophical discourse of the past century, while it explores the materialist tradition of epicureanism that foregrounds instrumentality. Further, it demonstrates that the conception of instrumentality in materialism is derived from the ancient notion of phronesis, while the modern repression of instrumentality relies on a conception of an action without ends, or the ineffectual. This series of arguments leads to the conclusion that the competing interests of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, which Marx calls "class struggle," is best understood as an extension of the epicurean tradition.