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Reflections on Blair’s Velvet Revolution
“The comprehensive defeat of the Conservatives in the General Election must be a source of satisfaction, indeed jubilation, to the Left everywhere since the administrations of Thatcher and Major were global pioneers of the free market blight and particular foes of social progress in Europe. In the politics . . .” read more
Latin America: The Resurgence of the Left
“The Left in Latin America is staging a major comeback. While most publicists, journalists, academics, government and World Bank officials either celebrate or bemoan the triumph of ‘neoliberalism’, opposition is growing which in time could challenge the dominance of the whole free-market power structure. As yet only loosely . . .” read more
Really Existing Democracy: Learning from Latin America in the Late 1990s
“The resurgence of democracy in Latin America in the last decade or so came as a surprise to many who saw the continent, if not the whole of the Third World, as producing conditions which favoured only the exercise of tyranny. Latin American democracy will indeed remain surprising . . .” read more
A Rejoinder to Iris Young
“Iris Young and I seem to inhabit different worlds. In her world, there are no divisions between the social Left and the cultural Left. Proponents of cultural politics work cooperatively with proponents of social politics, linking claims for the recognition of difference with claims for the redistribution of . . .” read more
Unruly Categories: A Critique of Nancy Fraser’s Dual Systems Theory
“Have theorists of justice forgotten about political economy? Have we traced the most important injustices to cultural roots? Is it time for critical social theory to reassert a basic distinction between the material processes of political economy and the symbolic processes of culture? In two recent essays, Nancy . . .” read more
Beyond Labourism and Socialism: How the Australian Labor Party developed the Model of 'New Labour'
“There is a long tradition among Western communist, Labour and social democratic parties of looking at the electoral successes and failures of sister parties in other nation states. The grass of social change always appears greener elsewhere. Since the 1980s, several countries such as France, Sweden, Norway and . . .” read more
Che Guevera and the Congo
“It’s Che Guevara time again in the pleasure gardens of the West, as publishers and television companies gear themselves up for the thirtieth anniversary of the guerrilla leader’s death in 1997. We’ve already had the early motorcycle diaries, published all over Europe in 1995, and no less than . . .” read more
New Labour and Northern Ireland
“Whatever else a Labour government under Tony Blair may or may not do, it already seems determined to repeat the mistakes every administration, Labour and Conservative, has made in Ireland since the 1960s. As with much of the rest of New Labour policy, few of the specifics are . . .” read more
Rethinking International Relations
“Geopolitics has never found a congenial place within the Marxist tradition, let alone been properly theorized. Consider the exemplary Nicos Poulantzas, originator of the best Marxist works on the state in the 1960s and 1970s. His focus is on class and structure in a domestic setting, as though . . .” read more
History and Illusion
“My comments on François Furet’s book are sceptical. It therefore seems just to note at the outset that there is much in Le passé d’une illusion which I admire, notably the brilliant and beautifully written first chapter on la passion révolutionnaire, and much with which I agree, having . . .” read more
National Unification and Popular Sovereignty
“Since the collapse of the Soviet empire, new states have been emerging in fast-moving sequence—whether through the secession of formerly ‘autonomous’ territories, or through the reunification of national states that had fallen into dependence and partition. These would appear to be only the clearest symptoms that a phenomenon . . .” read more
Reply to Dorothy Thompson and Fred Inglis
“What initially inspired me to study the British New Left was not just an awareness of the intellectual importance and political urgency of its legacy, but a curious attraction to its charismatic personalities. As a matter of fact, and understandably since he was personally involved, Gareth Stedman Jones . . .” read more
New Labour: Old Tory Writ Large?
“In the reign of Charles I, the new religious group of the Arminians, enjoying royal favour, appeared to be carrying all before them while people did not yet know what they believed. An aspiring politician asked a clerical friend what the Arminians held, and got the reply: ‘all . . .” read more
Interpreting the New Left: Pitfalls and Opportunities
“Interpretation of the New Left raises a number of tricky historical and hermeneutical issues for the contemporary commentator. This current has always challenged conventional demarcations between intellectual matters and political life, and has experimented with different kinds of theoretical argument and political project. Accordingly, the New Left does . . .” read more
Habermas on National Unification in Germany and Korea
“Jürgen Habermas’s public lecture in Seoul on ‘National Unification and Popular Sovereignty’ came as a welcome intervention for those Koreans committed to a reunification process which would be both peaceful and democratic. Although little of what he said, even on German unity, was entirely new to many of . . .” read more
Labour Governments: Old Constraints and New Parameters
“It is good to be able to explore again the pattern of constraints likely to beset a Labour Government. For a long time now, such concerns have been definitely off our collective agendas because of the string of heavy electoral defeats for Labour. The bulk of the” read more
Identity Politics and the Left
“My lecture is about a surprisingly new subject. We have become so used to terms like ‘collective identity’, ‘identity groups, ‘identity politics’, or, for that matter ‘ethnicity’, that it is hard to remember how recently they have surfaced as part of the current vocabulary, or jargon, of political . . .” read more
Eastern Europe, Western Power and Neo-Liberalism
“John Lloyd’s article is helpful, above all, in revealing more fully his forms of thought. He appears to think my article was a piece of Marxist economics. Unfortunately it was entirely pre-theoretical: an attempt to introduce the claims of neo-liberals like Lloyd to some pertinent facts, with the . . .” read more
Supply Side Socialism: The Political Economy of New Labour
“Over-arching concepts, like the stakeholder economy, have their value both in determining the ground upon which political debate takes place and broadening the basis of support for the party which successfully employs them. There is considerable electoral virtue in a concept open to disparate interpretations and satisfying a . . .” read more
Approaching Reality: Euro-Money and the Left
“What has happened to the once relatively democratic and humane national governments of Western Europe that they now contemplate the harshness in present circumstances of monetary union? Why is France, a society as socially unjust as Britain and with an ever higher unemployment rate contemplating putting yet more . . .” read more
Gramsci, Bakhtin and the Semiotics of Hegemony
“Antonio Gramsci and Mikhail Bakhtin were very different types of thinkers. While the former spent the 1920s maximally involved in the Italian revolutionary movement as leader of the Communist Party, the latter, living in Petrograd at the time of the revolution and throughout the second half of the . . .” read more
Fundamental Values for a Third Left
“Since 1988 I have been engaged in the launching of a new party of the Left in Finland. It was established in 1990 under the name of Vasemmistoliitto/ Vänsterförbundet (the Left-Wing Alliance). lwa continued the tradition of skdl/dfff (the People’s Democratic League) which included the Communist . . .” read more
Eastern Reformers and Neo-Marxist Reviewers
“Peter Gowan has written an ambitious article. In it, he aims to show that the Group of Seven major industrial states (g7) and the international financial institutions (ifis) have, with a good deal of success, sought to impose at least an economic imperialism over the post-communist . . .” read more
Introduction: Revisiting the New Left
“The publication of several books about the New Left has triggered a querulous chorus from the broadsheet press. Despite the contemporary resonance of the watchwords of the New Left—culture and community, participatory democracy, mobile privatization—it is felt to be part of the old world.” read more
Isaac Deutscher and the Lost History of International Relations
“I would like to express my thanks to the Deutscher Committee for the great honour of this award. The Isaac and Tamara Deutscher memorial prize is a uniquely valuable institution in many ways but the most valuable aspect is surely the legacy of Deutscher himself. For Isaac Deutscher . . .” read more
The Politics of Animal Rights - Where is the Left?
“At the beginning of 1995, in the midst of a generalized governmental crisis, with accusations of ‘sleaze’ and corruption in high places, historically high levels of unemployment, fears about the commercialization of the health service and unprecedented government unpopularity, the political system was suddenly rocked by an explosion . . .” read more
The Figures of Dissent
“Like many of the subscribers to this journal, I have bought it since it first came out. For many years, of course, the latest number has arrived in its tidy polythene wrapper through the post but, in 1960, just having left Cambridge and fired by David Holbrook and . . .” read more
On the Trail of the New Left
“The politics of the non-aligned Left of the years 1956–1962 have become fashionable of late. Two at least of the writers who were prominent in the journals of the time have published memoirs, and at least two more are in the pipeline. Clancy Segal has published two romans . . .” read more
Reviewing a Life. Fred Inglis’s Biography of Raymond Williams
“The publication of a first biography of Raymond Williams was bound to be a significant event for anyone touched by his work and yet now, in a period of immense uncertainty, doubtful of its enduring value and political resonance. Michel Foucault died of aids in 1984 and . . .” read more
Renewing the Left
“The two works under review make important contributions to the reformulation of Left perspectives in the light of the failure of traditional models, whether communist or social-democratic. Elmar Altvater seeks to renew the critical force of the Marxist tradition in the face of the now universal dominance of . . .” read more
Tom Paine and Civil Society
“Meet Tom Paine, raconteur, polemicist, a commoner who dominated political discussion in three countries and served the cause of revolution in them all. John Keane is eager to treat Paine as a contemporary, someone who though dead is, in the force of his thought and the vigour of . . .” read more
The Crisis of Conservatism
“The Conservative Party has always been one of the great certainties of British politics. It has been so dominant throughout the twentieth century that some observers have begun to speak of this period as the ‘Conservative Century’. Between 1945 and 1995, the Conservatives formed majority governments for thirty-two . . .” read more
Is It Global Economics or Neo-Laissez-Faire?
“For Ralph Miliband, socialism was more than an intellectual and theoretical preoccupation. He was intensely concerned with socialism as a practical political project, and with the key element of that project, working-class power. I would be less than respectful of Miliband’s lifelong commitment if I did not acknowledge . . .” read more
Neo-Liberal Theory and Practice for Eastern Europe
“Eastern Europe’s market for policy ideas, suddenly opened in 1989, was swiftly captured by an Anglo-American product with a liberal brand name. This policy equivalent of fast food erected barriers to other new entrants and established a virtual monopoly on advice in most target states in the region. . . .” read more
Reply to Porter and O'Hearn
“Sam Porter and Denis O’Hearn (hereafter poh) accuse us of radically misrepresenting the current situation in Ireland in the interests of sectarian Ulster unionism and British imperialism. They claim that our explicit and implicit agenda is the maintenance of the union of Northern Ireland with Britain, and . . .” read more
From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a 'Post-Socialist' Age
“The ‘struggle for recognition’ is fast becoming the paradigmatic form of political conflict in the late twentieth century. Demands for ‘recognition of difference’ fuel struggles of groups mobilized under the banners of nationality, ethnicity, ‘race’, gender, and sexuality. In these ‘post-socialist’ conflicts, group identity supplants class interest as . . .” 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
The Suffrage Campaign
“Catherine Hall’s article on the circumstances surrounding the 1867 Reform Act (nlr 208) could not, as your editorial notes, be more relevant to political debate today. It is truly a history of the present day. As Hall suggests, the issues of race, class and gender which are . . .” read more
Social Democracy and Full Employment
“‘The voters, now convinced that full employment, generous welfare services and social stability can quite well be preserved, will certainly not relinquish them. Any Government which tampered seriously with the basic structure 0f the full-employment Welfare State would meet with a sharp reverse at the polls’ (Antony Crosland,1956). . . .” read more
Harnessing the Market
“The clearest and most concise statement of John Roemer’s project in A Future for Socialism occurs at the end of his book. In its concluding chapter he summarizes his argument as pivoting on two ‘crucial ideas’—the idea that ‘socialism is best thought of as a kind of egalitarianism, . . .” read more
The Quota Demand and Feminist Politics
“There is not much of a women’s movement in Germany today, in either West or East. A strong backlash can be felt from the relatively united male sector of the population against the achievements of the women’s movement over the past twenty years, and also against the hopes . . .” read more
The Fall of the House of Windsor
“When Charter 88 was founded, six years ago, the issue of the monarchy was conspicuously absent from the programme of political and constitutional reform which it put forward. The omission was deliberate and could hardly have been otherwise. To embark on a campaign to modernize the archaic but . . .” read more
Rethinking Imperial Histories: The Reform Act of 1867
“In Birmingham, Britain’s second city, the Art Gallery celebrates the civic heritage of a place which became rich in the nineteenth century. The gallery itself is a beautiful Victorian building. It was a part of the new town centre designed by Joseph Chamberlain, at that time the Liberal . . .” read more
Back to Socialist Basics
“On 24 November 1993, a meeting of Left intellectuals occurred in London, under the auspices of the Institute for Public Policy Research (ippr), which is a Labour-leaning think-tank. A short document was circulated in advance of the said meeting, to clarify its purpose. Among other things, the . . .” read more