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The Postmodern Chameleon
“I am writing in response to Sabina Lovibond’s article ‘Feminism and Postmodernism’, in New Left Review Number 178, in which I am pigeonholed as an apologist for or advocate of anti-Enlightenment philosophy. I now believe that the case I tried to state in favour of adornment in dress . . .” read more
Feminism and Postmodernism
“The term ‘postmodernism’ exerts an instant fascination. For it suggests that ‘modernity’ is, paradoxically, already in the past; and consequently that a new form of consciousness is called for, corresponding to new social conditions. But of course it does not tell us what the distinctive character of these . . .” read more
Marxism and Natural Limits: An Ecological Critique and Reconstruction
“Many on the left find a source of hope in the realignment of ‘green’ and socialist perspectives. I believe they are right to do so, and I share the hope. But it remains true that important currents within Green politics and culture are hostile to socialism (as they . . .” read more
Rational Choice Marxism: Is the Game Worth the Candle?
“Some time ago, in the pages of the New Left Review, a claim was made on behalf of ‘rational-choice Marxism’ as ‘a fully fledged paradigm, which deserves to take its place beside the two other constellations of theory currently discernible within the broad spectrum ofprogressive social thought—namely, post-structuralism . . .” 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
For and Against Althusser
“Gregory Elliott’s book appears at a time when the reputation of its subject seems near to total eclipse. In Althusser’s own country he is, as Elliott reports, practically a ‘dead dog’, buried beneath ‘the settled anti-Marxist consensus among the majority of the French intelligentsia’. In Britain he is . . .” 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
Liberty, Equality, Community
“It is widely believed that at some time over the last fifteen years the political values of the left were hijacked and the social theories of the left discredited; and that this intellectual reverse bears some relation to the ascendancy of Thatcherism. Whatever the merits of this case, . . .” 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
Marxism and Morality
“Marx’s vision of communism is of a society that has transcended morality. Such a society is not only impracticable but inconceivable, since social and moral conflict requiring the arbitration of ethical rules will be an invariant feature of any human community however saintly one assumes its individuals to . . .” read more
Marxism and Methodological Individualism
“It is often held that Marxism embodies distinctive methodological doctrines which distinguish it from ‘bourgeois’ social science. The difference has been characterized in various ways: Marxism is scientific and materialist, bourgeois theory ideological and idealist; Marxism is holistic, bourgeois theory is individualistic; Marxism is dialectical and historical, bourgeois . . .” read more
Marx and Self-Realization
“Marx was notoriously vague about future society. It is ironic, then, that in the minds of most laymen he is often associated with a very specific utopian vision. As anyone familiar with Marx’s works will know, no blueprint for this vision actually exists. Nevertheless, it would be very . . .” 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
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 Difference of Needs
“‘It’s terrific!’, announced the publishers prior to the appearance of Michael Ignatieff’s new book. It seemed, at the time, an unlikely epithet for a work on so sober a topic as human need, but it has proved curiously apt: highly polished, clever, readable and just a trifle precious, . . .” read more
The Controversy About Marx and Justice
“In this essay I review a fast-growing sector of the current literature on Marx and the controversy that has fuelled its growth. During the last decade or so, the keen interest within moral and political philosophy in the concept of justice has left its mark on the philosophical . . .” read more
Nozick on Appropriation
“1. Associated with the recent rightward movement in the politics of Western capitalist societies is the influential political philosophy of libertarianism, whose most impressive exponent is Robert Nozick of Harvard. The foundational claim of libertarianism is the thesis of self-ownership, which says that each human being is the . . .” read more
Marx’s Concept of Human Nature
“In this novel treatment of an old topic, Norman Geras has found himself facing in two diametrically opposite directions: within the Marxist tradition, there are those who wish to deny legitimate room for any concept of human nature; and there are others who, so far from wishing to . . .” read more
Power and Subjectivity in Foucault
“The ‘philosophy of desire’ developed by Jean-Fraçois Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze in the period from the late 1960s to the mid-70s can be seen as the attempt, within post-structuralism, to affirm the independent force of an ‘inner nature’—that ‘transitivism of a spontaneous aesthetic’ to which Discours, Figure refers—against . . .” read more
Morals Also Have Two Genders
“In a talk entitled ‘Women – Victims or Culprits?’, at the first West Berlin People’s University in 1980, I attempted to construct a theory of the process of women’s socialization. My chief concerns were to show the role played by women themselves in reproducing their own oppression, and . . .” read more
Hegel’s Master/Slave Dialectic and a Myth of Marxology
“There is a widely held view that Marx was profoundly influenced by the Master–Servant (‘Herrschaft und Knechtschaft’) dialectic in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. This view was first popularized by Jean-Paul Sartre, who refers in his Being and Nothingness (1943) to ‘the famous Master-Slave relation which so profoundly influenced . . .” read more
The Practical Foundations of Human Understanding
“This essay concerns the significance of ‘human sensuous activity’—what has become known variously as ‘praxis’ to many Marxists and ‘action’ to analytic and phenomenological philosophers. Put grandly, our thesis is that it is from labour, and not from language or thought, that the category of meaning arises. That . . .” read more
Wittgenstein’s Friends
“Searching for an epigraph to his Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein considered using a quotation from King Lear: ‘I’ll teach you differences’. ‘Hegel’, he once told a friend, ‘always seems to me to be wanting to say that things which look different are really the same. Whereas my interest . . .” read more
Freedom, Justice and Capitalism
“Before I first went to university I had a belief, which I still have, and which is probably shared by the great majority of you. I mean the belief that the way to decide whether a given economic period is good or bad economically is by considering the . . .” read more
Rationality and Class Struggle
“It is commonplace for writers on Marx, whether Marxists of various tendencies or critics of varying degrees of sympathy for Marxism, to hold that among Marx’s major theoretical achievements was the inauguration of a new ‘theory’ of history, designated ‘historical materialism’. While aspects of this theory were intimated . . .” read more
The Problem of Reformism and Marx’s Theory of Fetishism
“The aim of this article is to explore the relationship between two apparently contradictory elements in Marx’s thought; namely, his belief that proletarian revolutionary consciousness will develop in a relatively straightforward way under capitalism, and his argument, in his later economic writings, that the fetishised nature of capitalist . . .” read more
Benjamin’s Philosophical Cabaret
“Whenever a Cabaret appears, we cheerfully go along to see it—then, one moment something strikes a wrong note, the next moment something else has changed and doubled back in its tracks. Benjamin’s first essay in this form affords us the same experience. There is no lack of playful . . .” read more
The Pessimistic Materialism of Giacomo Leopardi
“Giacomo Leopardi was born at Ricanati (a town of the Marches) in 1798, the off-spring of a reactionary and clerical family of the minor nobility (the Marches belonged to the Papal States, even though at the time of Leopardi’s birth its lands were occupied by the French). He . . .” read more
From Contradiction to Catastrophe
“The constitutive claim of historical materialism, of the materialist conception of history, consists in giving an explanatory primacy to a social formation’s ‘material structure’—i.e. to its productive forces (over its relationships of production), to its economic base (over its superstructure). The central difficulties of historical materialism consist in . . .” read more
The Citizen of Geneva and the Seigneur of Ferney
“‘To still find pleasure today in authors such as Rousseau compromises a person once and for all.’ If one were to base one’s judgement on the esteem in which the theorist of the ‘will to power’ is today held, one might be persuaded to think that the bi-centenary . . .” read more
Two Notes on the End of the World
“The apocalypse is part of our ideological baggage. It is aphrodisiac, nightmare, a commodity like any other. You can call it a metaphor for the collapse of capitalism, which as we all know has been imminent for more than a century. We come up against it in the . . .” read more
Problems of Materialism
“There are inevitable difficulties in any serious materialism. In its earliest phases it has a comparative simplicity of definition, since it rests on a rejection of presumptive hypotheses of non-material or metaphysical prime causes, and defines its own categories in terms of demonstrable physical investigations. Yet such definitions . . .” read more
Irrationalism and Marxism
“How should the philosophies of crisis be combated? For some time, Communists have had to pay rather more systematic attention to a number of ideological themes whose contemporary weight cannot be put down to chance. In the economic field, the phenomenon involves such notions as ‘the limits of . . .” read more
Engels and the Genesis of Marxism
“Since his death in London in 1895, it has proved peculiarly difficult to arrive at a fair and historically balanced assessment of Engels’s place in the history of Marxism, both within the Marxist tradition and outside it. Engels was both the acknowledged co-founder of historical materialism and the . . .” read more
Heidegger and Marx
“Invitations to a ‘Marxist’ re-reading of Heidegger are repeated today with ever increasing frequency. Since the suit is pressed with such urgency, and we are recommended so reasonably to avoid adopting an a priori stance, we should at least entertain the suggestion. We therefore propose to devote a . . .” read more
Hegel and Political Economy (Part II)
“Labour is a central notion in the works of Smith and Ricardo, and it is an elaboration of the concept of labour which enables Hegel to say something about human development and human autonomy which goes beyond what is to be found in conventional political economy. The main . . .” read more
Hegel and Political Economy (Part I)
“In The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx, Ernest Mandel writes: ‘Hegel had been profoundly affected in his youth by economic studies, in particular by the work of Adam Smith; Marx saw the Hegelian system as a veritable philosophy of labour.’ He goes on to quote . . .” read more
Althusser and Stalinism
“The purpose of the following article and its sequel (which will appear in nlr 103) is simply to add a further exploratory contribution, once again partial and full of gaps, to my long-standing research on the genesis of contemporary Marxism. Apart from obvious personal limitations, which naturally . . .” read more
'Socialism in One Country'
“I shall concentrate on a single, contemporary example: the emergence in the ussr of the ideological monstrosity of ‘socialism in one country’. A critical investigation will show: 1. that the slogan was a product of conflicts within the leadership; 2. that beyond these conflicts, the slogan represented . . .” read more
Introduction to Sartre
“Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique de la Raison Dialectique appeared in France in 1960. It was entitled Volume i—‘A Theory of Practical Ensembles’. Its object was the abstract relationships between individuals, groups, series and collectives which Sartre called the ‘formal elements of any history’, in a world dominated by . . .” read more
Feyerabend and Bachelard: Two Philosophies of Science
“In 1934 when Gaston Bachelard published his Nouvel Esprit Scientifique and Karl Popper’s Logik der Forschung appeared few philosophers would have dissented from the view that science develops in a linear or monistic fashion, so as to leave meaning and truth-value unchanged, on the basis provided by common . . .” read more
Marxism and the Dialectic
“In this essay, I shall attempt to clarify somewhat a question discussed in my interview with New Left Review—although one that is very difficult to deal with briefly: the problem of the difference between ‘real opposition’ (Kant’s Realopposition or Realrepugnanz) and ‘dialectical contradiction’. Both are instances of opposition, . . .” read more
Dialectical Materialism and Literary History
“All sociologies of thought agree that social life influences literary creation. This is also a fundamental assumption of dialectical materialism; which in addition, however, gives particular emphasis to the importance of economic factors and the relations between social classes. Many writers and philosophers dispute such an influence: they . . .” read more
Commitment
“Since Sartre’s essay What is Literature? there has been less theoretical debate about committed and autonomous literature. Nevertheless, the controversy over commitment remains urgent, so far as anything that merely concerns the life of the mind can be today, as opposed to sheer human survival. Sartre was moved . . .” read more
Considerations on Materialism
“Perhaps the sole characteristic common to all contemporary varieties of Western Marxism is, with very few exceptions, their concern to defend themselves against the accusation of materialism. Gramscian or Togliattian Marxists, Hegelian-Existentialist Marxists, Neo-Positivizing Marxists, Freudian or Structuralist Marxists, despite the profound dissensions which otherwise divide them, are . . .” read more
Marx and Darwin
“In the middle of the 19th century, no one could at the time have discerned any relationship between Marx and Darwin, when there appeared almost simultaneously, a few months apart, two works which were in fact to become fundamental for all modern culture: Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie . . .” read more
Engels and the End of Classical German Philosophy
“Every science has a beginning. Every new science must come from somewhere. It is usually easy enough to discover forerunners and anticipations. What is more difficult is to pinpoint and clarify what is new and original to the science in its course of elaboration. It is clear for . . .” read more