As we prepared Postone’s papers for transfer to the archives, we worked to identify and scan documents that could be useful for research. Below you will find a selection of these documents available for download.

Postone’s Reading Notes

Examples from the scanning include Postone’s extensive reading notes, which he used for both writing and teaching. We focused on making these available for two main reasons. First, they include not only notes on Marx and the Frankfurt School, but also material on a wider range of authors than Postone engaged in published works. Thus they are some of the only records of his thinking on such topics as classical sociology, psychoanalysis, and contemporary political economy. Second, in these notes Postone often recorded descriptive outlines of texts in black, followed by his questions, comments, and criticism, typically in red. This reflects his well-known rigor as a reader, and we hope that it might reproduce some of the experience of reading texts along with him.

Clicking on a link below will download a pdf of the document to your device. We will continue to add to the documents available here in the future, so please check back for updates.