Iring Fetscher

Iring Fetscher (1922–2014) was a German political scientist and researcher on Hegel and Marxism. Fetscher was born on 4 March 1922 at Marbach am Neckar, and was brought up in Dresden. After the Second World War 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). Fetscher died on 19 July 2014.