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Social Theory Put to the Test of Practice: Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens
“The 1990s have presented a particularly contradictory aspect to social theorists. On the one hand, the ideological climate was dominated by the collapse of the Soviet Union and its East European extensions. While the most widely noticed intellectual trends took different forms—for example, Fukuyama’s announcement of the End . . .” read more
Introduction to Adorno/Marcuse Correspondence
“On 12 January 1969, Herbert Marcuse wrote to Theodor Adorno announcing a June visit to Frankfurt. He wanted to give a lecture. He requested that the meeting be small and intimate, and solicited an official invitation, so that he could get leave from the University of California. This . . .” read more
Grand Narratives of Prehistoric Europe
“Economy and Society in Prehistoric Europe consists of twenty papers written by Andrew Sherratt over the past quarter of a century. Taken together, these articles represent a uniquely coherent and consistent vision of Old World prehistory. They present the Neolithic and the Bronze Age periods in Eurasia . . .” read more
Confronting Neoliberal Regimes: The Post-Marxist Embrace of Populism and Realipolitik
“The dominance of neoliberal policies in Anglo-American countries during the past two decades has not only had a profound impact on the character and programmes of major parties, but has also led to dramatic changes within the ranks of former Marxists and critical theorists. These former radicals now . . .” read more
The Multiple Identities of Walter Benjamin
“In the August issue of Biography, a popular us magazine, the editor-in-chief prefaces some musing on that month’s star profiles, General George C. Marshall and Tina Turner, with an outline of the magazine’s core philosophy: ‘No two life stories are even remotely the same, even the ones . . .” read more
Confessions of a 'New Aeshete': A Response to the 'New Philistines'
“Pausing to allow the waves of sound of the last movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony to ebb away, I return to the delights of my glass of Californian Chardonnay and reflect on the way Dimitri Mitropoulos’s interpretation of the symphony steers the vital course between long-term structure, sudden . . .” read more
Bisexuality, Capitalism and the Ambivalent Legacy of Psychoanalysis
“By the time Freud died in London in 1939, he was already a legend. By the 1950s, he exerted a grip on many imaginations comparable to that of the great figures—Moses, Leonard, Goth, Dostoyevsky—about whom he wrote. Equally important, Frankfurt School theorists placed his work at the centre . . .” read more
Raphael Samuel: 1934-1996
“Raphael Samuel, who died of cancer in December—in the old weaver’s house in Elder Street he loved so much, behind Spitalfield Market in the heart of what was once Jewish and Radical London—was one of the most outstanding, original intellectuals of his generation: a lifelong socialist of deep . . .” read more
Honneth’s New Critical Theory of Recognition
“Axel Honneth’s The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts represents at once an intriguing and revealing turn in the post-Habermasian tradition of the Frankfurt School, an important and original development in critical social theory more generally understood, and an ambitious and stimulating, if still inadequate, . . .” read more
Dialectics of Modernity: On Critical Theory and the Legacy of Twentieth-Century Marxism
“Students of parliamentary history are familiar with the idea of ‘Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition’. Marxism, as a social-historical phenomenon, has been Her Modern Majesty’s Opposition to modernity. Always critical of and fighting against her predominant regimes, but never questioning the legitimate majesty of modernity and, when needed, explicitly . . .” read more
Ernest Mandel 1923-1995
“Ernest Mandel, who died at the age of seventy-two on July 20th, was possessed of outstanding talents as thinker, speaker and political leader, in a combination that has become rarer as the century has progressed. He was one of the world’s leading Marxist economists, and author of more . . .” read more
Sources of Variation in Working-Class Movements in Twentieth-Century Europe
“David Lockwood’s classic essay ‘Sources of Variation in Working-Class Images of Society’ (1966) distinguished three ideal-typical images of society found among workers: proletarian, deferential and privatized. Lockwood was firstly reminding us of the sheer variety of workers’ beliefs, from classconscious proletarians, to conservative status-conscious deferentials, to the calculative, . . .” read more
A Radical Agenda for Britain
“As the Conservative Party threatens to break up on the contradiction between market dogma and traditional Conservative values and institutions, it is sobering to reflect that neither the Labour Party nor the academic Left has produced a hegemonic interpretation of this event, or a persuasive alternative vision of . . .” read more
Empowering Technology: The Exploration of Cyberspace
“The face of Thomas Paine, rendered in yellow and pink, graces the cover of the first British edition of Wired, a successful magazine from the United States devoted to proselytizing the benefits of computer networking. For the technophile devotees of this subject, it is far more than a . . .” read more
The National Imagination
“Eric Hobsbawm, in the final chapter of a comprehensive survey on the history of nationalism, claimed that as a historical phenomenon, it had passed its heyday. Employing a Hegelian idiom he suggested that the nation-state was now on a declining curve of historical viability, the beginnings of its . . .” read more
Overcoming the Past
“I would like your very different biographies and your experiences with the European Left to encounter each other as it were in a discussion on Germany, on ‘overcoming the past’, on the legacy of socialism, on Europe and the lack of synchrony between Germany and Poland. The . . .” read more
Harold Laski: An Exemplary Public Intellectual
“Before proceeding with this review, I should, as they say, declare an interest. I came to know Harold Laski as a student at the London School of Economics (then evacuated in Cambridge) between 1941 and 1943; and I was fairly close to him after I came back to . . .” read more
The Rise of Masculinism in Eastern Europe
“In the recent literature on gender relations in Eastern Europe, it is quite often said that democratization has ‘opened up a space’ within which women can now seek to identify their interests and organize. That is undoubtedly the case. At the same time, however, as offering a space . . .” read more
The Second Life-Fiction of the Federal Republic: We Have Become 'Normal' Again
“Since the fiftieth anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938 a commemorative event has been held every 9th of November in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt. This year Ignatz Bubis reported on some of his experiences during a visit to Rostock, and this provided the theme for the main . . .” read more
The Ideology of the Aesthetic
“In Ingmar Bergman’s film of The Magic Flute, the camera, throughout the overture, traverses the faces of an audience divided by age, sex, ethnicity and style, but united in its common rapture. It is a compelling image of the power of the ‘aesthetic’ to realize—despite everything that tends . . .” read more
The Invisible Flaneur
“The relationship of women to cities has long preoccupied reformers and philanthropists. In recent years the preoccupation has been inverted: the Victorian determination to control working-class women has been replaced by a feminist concern for women’s safety and comfort in city streets. But whether women are seen as . . .” read more
The Ruins of Westminster
“Britain, or the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland as it is still officially known, resembles an ungainly, dilapidated, half-refurbished Victorian pile threatened by the simultaneous onslaught of subsidence, storm damage, woodworm and dry rot. This year brings an election that could be dangerously inconclusive and . . .” read more
The True Realm of Freedom: Marxist Philosophy after Communism
“This article is an attempt to consider the implications for Marxist philosophy of the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. It would be well to start by saying what Marxist philosophy is taken to be here. A convenient map of the field is provided . . .” read more
The Vacuum in Hungarian Politics: Classes and Parties
“In February 1989 the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (Magyar Szocialista Munkáspárt or mszmp) formally accepted the principles of multi-party democracy. Within thirteen months of this decision, free elections were held and a complex political system emerged in which six parties came to represent distinct political fields in . . .” read more
Fin de Siecle: Socialism after the Crash
“As we enter the last decade of the twentieth century, the ruin of ‘Marxist-Leninist’ Communism has been sufficiently comprehensive to eliminate it as an alternative to capitalism and to compromise the very idea of socialism. The debacle of Stalinism has embraced reform-communism, and has brought no benefit to . . .” read more
Feminism as Critique
“The usual idea behind the collective anthology is that it should serve as a means for bringing together the thought of several different authors in debate upon a common theme. In practice, this rarely happens, and it is all too common for volumes of this kind to be . . .” read more
Gramsci and Marxism in Britain
“Outside Italy, nowhere more than in Britain have Gramsci’s writings exercised so prolonged, deep or diversified an influence. Some of this has been channelled through the academic disciplines of history, political science and cultural studies, but much of it has worked directly upon the theory and practice of . . .” read more
The Nazi State: An Exceptional State?
“Any discussion of the character of an ‘exceptional’ state must presumably begin with a notion of what categorizes a state as ‘normal’. My own starting assumption is to accept Max Weber’s concept of the state: ‘an administrative and legal order subject to change by legislation . . . . . .” read more
The Situationist International
“De Sade liberated from the Bastille in 1789, Baudelaire on the barricades in 1848, Courbet tearing down the Vendôme Column in 1870—French political history is distinguished by a series of glorious and legendary moments which serve to celebrate the convergence of popular revolution with art in revolt. In . . .” read more
The Cost of Neo-Liberal Europe
“Throughout the present decade, neo-liberal economic strategies—interacting with intense competitive pressures on world markets—have sought to remodel the capitalisms of Western Europe. In the context of mass unemployment the drive towards a renewed subordination of workforces has found unity and direction in the demand for labour flexibility, while . . .” read more
Poetry and Politics: A Conversation with Stuart Hood
“Erich Fried was not only a distinguished and prolific poet—he said once in a characteristic phrase that he wrote poems the way rabbits have babies—but a novelist, essayist and translator of Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas and Eliot. These achievements have been recognized throughout Europe but are only now . . .” read more
Logics of Disintegration
“This is a fascinating book on many levels. It is first of all an excellent guide through the sometimes murky landscape of post-1960 French thought. Dews manages the exceptional feat of being both fair and clear in expounding Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard and Foucault. It is all too easy . . .” read more
Perestroika: The Dialectic of Change
“To Western observers, Soviet society at the end of the 1970s seemed hopelessly conservative and arguments over the ‘unreformability of Communism’ became commonplace among dissidents and the liberal intellectuals who sympathized with them. Pessimism reigned even among official experts, many of whom, on their own admissiom, ‘had fallen . . .” read more
The Uses of Cultural Theory
“For a year or so I have been wanting to say something relatively formal about cultural theory, and this seems to be an occasion. The point is not, at least initially, one of proposition or amendment within this or that theory of culture, but rather a reconsideration of . . .” read more
The Role of the Individual in History: The Case of World War Two
“The primacy of the relationships and conflicts between social forces in determining the course of history is one of the fundamental assumptions of historical materialism. In societies divided into different social classes, such relationships are perforce class relations. History is thus explained, in the final analysis, as a . . .” read more
Adorno, Post-structuralism and the Critique of Identity
“Over the past few years an awareness has begun to develop of the thematic affinities between the work of those recent French thinkers commonly grouped together under the label of ‘post-structuralism’, and the thought of the first-generation Frankfurt School, particularly that of Adorno. Indeed, what is perhaps most . . .” read more
International Communism in the Heyday of Stalin
“Serious scholarship on the history of Communist Parties has been experiencing a major upswing. Literature was never exactly in short supply. But its value was invariably vitiated by the ingenuousness of its bias, in which the official apologetics of the Communist Parties’ own accounts was matched by the . . .” read more
Historical Materialism, Answer to Marxism’s Crisis
“Has any period since Marx’s death been marked by weaker conviction among Marxists than our own? Doubts and doubters have been with us for as long as Marxism itself, but those of today no longer face a compelling politicaltheoretical field of force, dominated by an individual, movement, party, . . .” read more
Revolution Against 'Progress': Walter Benjamin’s Romantic Anarchism
“Walter Benjamin’s style of thinking is unique and resists classification, but it can be better understood and explained if related to the cultural atmosphere of Mittel-Europa at the beginning of the century, and to certain religiouspolitical undercurrents among German-speaking Jewish intellectuals of this period. Neo-romanticism, as a moral . . .” read more
A Philosophico-Political Profile
“Could you tell us something of the sequence of the principal intellectual influences on your work? You are often represented as an heir of the Frankfurt School who gave its legacy a ‘linguistic turn’, with a move from a philosophy of consciousness to one of language. Is this . . .” read more
The Myth of Germany’s Missing Revolution
“It is now over half a century since Hitler came to power in Germany, inaugurating twelve years of bloodshed and destruction without parallel in human history. Throughout this period the Nazi phenomenon has posed a major challenge to human understanding. Why should fascism, in such an extreme, racist . . .” read more
Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
“The last few years have been marked by an inverted millennarianism, in which premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that (the end of ideology, art, or social class; the ‘crisis’ of Leninism, social democracy, or the . . .” read more
How the French Left Learned to Love the Bomb
“The election of a Socialist, François Mitterrand, as President of the French Republic on 10 May 1981 aroused hopes in a European left that by the end of the seventies had to console itself as best it could. Mitterrand himself was, indeed, a Fourth Republic war-horse, a patriotic . . .” read more