Advanced search

Wittgenstein and Russia

“In 1922 Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote to a friend that he was haunted by the possibility of an eventual flight to Russia. About two years later he sent the same friend some newspaper clippings of prize-winning poems by workers, urging him to preserve them. In 1937 he wrote him . . .” read more

Introduction to Moran

“Ludwig Wittgenstein’s person and life have on the whole been sedulously shrouded in obscurity by his admirers and devotees. Much less is known about his biography and character than that of most of the philosophers who were his predecessors or contemporaries. In part, this has doubtless been due . . .” read more

A Ventriloquist Structuralism

“The aim of this article is to question the structuralist finery in which Althusser has decked Marxism, and to demonstrate the weakness of its seams. If we find that Althusser’s theory comes apart philosophically, it will be by measuring what he says against what he says, and not . . .” read more

Introduction to Glucksmann

“The publication of the major philosophical works by Louis Althusser in the mid sixties provoked a wide variation of responses in Europe. In the last issue of nlr, Norman Geras provided a careful account of the general design of Althusser’s system, from For Marx to Reading Capital. . . .” read more

Althusser’s Marxism: An Account and Assessment

“In a body of work which has received considerable attention in France and elsewhere and become one of the focal points of contemporary Marxist controversy, Louis Althusser has registered the necessity for a reading of Marx at once critical and rigorous. Critical: the assimilation of Marx’s important discoveries . . .” read more

The Marxism of the Early Lukacs: an Evaluation

“Nearly half a century after its original publication in Germany, Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness has at last become available in English. Those who now read the book for the first time may find its contents surprising. For the notoriety of this forbidden volume of the early . . .” read more

Lukacs On His Life and Work

“Recent events in Europe have posed once again the problem of the relation of socialism to democracy. What are the fundamental differences for you between bourgeois democracy and revolutionary, socialist democracy?” read more

Jurgen Habermas: A New Eclecticism

“Jürgen Habermas is at present the most celebrated of the successors of the Frankfurt School and the only one as yet well-known outside the Federal German Republic. In an article in nlr 63, I discussed the work of Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse, the original nucleus of the . . .” read more

Essence and Appearance: Aspects of Fetishism in Marx’s 'Capital'

“‘Vulgar economy . . . everywhere sticks to appearances in opposition to the law which regulates and explains them. In opposition to Spinoza, it believes that “ignorance is a sufficient reason” ’ (I, 307). ‘ . . . Vulgar economy feels particularly at home in the estranged outward . . .” read more

Philosophy as a Revolutionary Weapon

“Can you tell us a little about your personal history? What brought you to Marxist philosophy?” read more

The Frankfurt School

“In France and Italy, the post-War period has seen the emergence of new schools of Marxist thought (Althusser, Della Volpe). In the German-speaking world, on the other hand, there is a complete continuity from the pre-War years. The veterans Lukács and Bloch are still active and influential, but . . .” read more

The Twin Crises

“Comrade Lukács, how do you see your own life and the era of history in which you have lived? In five decades of revolutionary and scientific work you had your share both of honours and of humiliations. We also understand that your life was in danger after the . . .” read more

Letter On Goldmann

“Dear Comrades,” read more

The Marxist Critique of Rousseau

“In State and Revolution, Lenin quotes and then comments on a passage in Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme as follows: ‘“Equal right” [of everyone to an equal product of labour] we certainly do have here [i.e. in the first phase of communism]; but it is still a . . .” read more

Introduction to Della Volpe

“In the 19th century, the father of Italian Marxism was Labriola, who corresponded with Engels and Plekhanov. After the formation of the Third International, its historical centre became Gramsci. Both were in different ways profoundly influenced by the Hegelian tradition which had become naturalized in Italy after the . . .” read more

Reply to Birchall

“Ian Birchall’s reply to my article on Goldmann is to be welcomed as a contribution to the debate between ‘neo-Hegelian’ and ‘scientific’ maxism. Obviously this debate cannot be solved in a few short polemics, but I should like to take this opportunity to answer Birchall by clarifying some . . .” read more

Itinerary of a Thought

“How do you envisage the relationship between your early philosophical writings, above all L’Etre et Le Néant, and your present theoretical work, from the Critique de la Raison Dialectique onwards? In the Critique, the typical concepts of L’Etre et Le Néant have disappeared, and a completely new vocabulary . . .” read more

Critical Theory: The Philosophy of Marcuse

“1. A vision dominates Marcuse’s career, explaining both his hope and his despair. It derives from German Philosophy of History, from which he appropriated the conviction that the history of humanity can be read as the result of a great project, drafted and executed by a single agency, . . .” read more

Lucien Goldmann: Humanist or Marxist?

“In recent years we have seen in Britain a systematic identification of Marxism with neo-Hegelianism, by left political groups and by bourgeois commentators alike. Neo-Hegelianism views society as a homogeneous totality revolving around one central contradiction; constituent elements are dissolved into an undifferentiated unity, and the internal contradictions . . .” read more

Editorial Note on 'Freud and Lacan'

“At our request, Louis Althusser has agreed to let us reproduce the following article, which was written in 1964 and published in the French Communist Party journal, La Nouvelle Critique.” read more

Freud and Lacan

“Let us admit, without prevarication: anyone today who merely wants to understand Freud’s revolutionary discovery, who wants to know what it means as well as just recognizing its existence, has to make a great theoretical and critical effort in order to cross the vast space of ideological prejudice . . .” read more

The Unknown Marx

“When he assessed his intellectual career in 1859, Karl Marx condemned to deserved obscurity all of his previous works but four. The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) first set forth the decisive points of his scientific views, although in polemical form, he wrote; and he implied that the same . . .” read more

Sociology and Psychology (Part II)

“Social developments thus affect even the most recent trends in psychology. Despite the ever-widening rift between society and psychology, society reaches repressively into all psychology in the form of censorship and superego. As part of the progressive integration of society, socially rational behaviour gets melted together with the . . .” read more

Presentation of Adorno

“The following essay on the relation of sociology and psychology should serve as a long overdue introduction of the work of Theodor Adorno to an English audience. While the English reader will be familiar with the writings of Herbert Marcuse (cf. nlr 30 and 45), who, along . . .” read more

Sociology and Psychology (Part I)

“For more than 30 years, the tendency has been emerging among the masses of the advanced industrial countries to surrender themselves to the politics of disaster instead of pursuing their rational interests and, chief of all, that of their own survival. While they are promised benefits, the idea . . .” read more

Presentation of Althusser

“In the first half of the 20th century Marxist theory was dominated by two orthodoxies: before 1914 by the Kautskyism of the Second International, and from 1920 to 1950 by Bolshevism, the theory of the Third International. The collapse of Kautskyism was due to the spd’s collapse . . .” read more

Contradiction and Overdetermination

“In an article devoted to the Young Marx, I have already stressed the ambiguity of the idea of ‘inverting Hegel’. It seemed to me that strictly speaking this expression suited Feuerbach perfectly; the latter did, indeed, ‘turn speculative philosophy back onto its feet’, but the only result was . . .” read more

On Andre Gorz’s 'Sartre and Marx'

“The article by André Gorz on Sartre’s contribution to Marxism elucidates one of the most fundamental problems of socialist theory in the 20th century, a problem summed up in a phrase of the final paragraph, ‘the question of the possibility of suppressing the inhuman in human history’. That . . .” read more

Reply to W. Thompson

“On Richard Pryke’s Labour and the City” read more

Technology and Social Relations

“Bukharin’s new work serves the long-felt need for a systematic Marxist summary of historical materialism. Nothing of this kind has been attempted within Marxism since Engels’ Anh-Dühring(except for Plekhanov’s small volume). Summaries of the theory have been left to the opponents of Marxism, who have generally only understood . . .” read more

Introduction to Lukacs on Bukharin

“Introduction to Lukács on Bukharin” read more

Presentation of Gorz on Sartre

“One of the major problems of a socialist movement is its relationship with the society which it must subsist in and yet oppose absolutely. It is impossible to achieve an isolation from capitalism within capitalism, but many socialist parties have tried to do just this—notably the maximalist” read more

Sartre and Marx

“A Marxist can approach the Critique de la Raison Dialectique, the most recent of Sartre’s works, in a number of ways. It would be possible to write a historico-critical essay on the complex dialectical relationship between Sartre and Marxism as a movement. Equally, it would be possible to . . .” read more

Reification and the Sociological Critique of Consciousness

“Sociological theories may be grouped around two poles. The first presents us with a view of society as a network of human meanings as embodiments of human activity. The second, on the other hand, presents us with society conceived of as a thing-like facticity, standing over against . . .” read more

Comment on Berger and Pullberg

“Most Anglo-Saxon social scientists are proud of their concentration on fact, and regard the activities of most of their colleagues in continental Europe with amused contempt as ‘metaphysics’ or even ‘mysticism’. History has become the summarization of ever-growing masses of empirical data, sociologists find ever more variables in . . .” read more

Response to Brewster

“It is gratifying to receive comment on one’s ideas as thoughtful and sympathetic as this. Responding to it is but a way of expressing appreciation. Before I do this, however, I must emphasize that I speak for myself only and not also for the co-author of the article, . . .” read more

A Very Bad Biography of Lukacs

“In England in the last 10 years great interest has been shown in the work of Georg Luk`cs, particularly in his later works of literary criticism. He has become a grand old man of European letters, and though what is written on him varies between respectful veneration and . . .” read more

Maruyama and Japanese Thought

“I have a number of thoughts and feelings about contemporary domestic and foreign events. However, I believe I should not precipitately engage in political discussions since my scholarship is still shallow and my practical experience is not yet extensive. I prefer rather to stroll in the free world . . .” read more

Sartre on Genet

“There is a sense in which no biography has ever yet been written. Sartre’s Saint Genet, if one pursues this argument, may be seen as the first biography—and in a sense the last, since it defines prototypically the minimum and perhaps nearly the maximum limits of all future . . .” read more

Marxism and Art

“Hard on the heels of Lukács’s two books, The Historical Novel (1962) and The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (1963), comes Ernst Fischer’s The Necessity of Art: a Marxist Approach. Divided between two publishers—Merlin Press and Penguin Books—the succession is yet a meaningful one, for Fischer, an Austrian Marxist, . . .” read more

The Power of the Moral Ideal?

“On Human Unity; E. E. Hirschmann; Gollancz 25s.” read more

Morality and the Bomb

“Nuclear Weapons and Christian Conscience. Edited by Walter Stein and with a Foreword by Archbishop Roberts, S. J. The Merlin Press. 12s. 6d.” read more

Counter-Revolutions of the Spheres

“The Sleepwalkers. Arthur Koestler. Hutchinsons. 25/-.” read more

Philosophy Again?

“Words and Things, Ernest Gellner. Gollancz (25/-).” read more