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Quiddity and Flux

Gregor McLennan on Haim Hazan, Against Hybridity. A gerontologist opposes irreducibly opaque realities to capitalist logics of blending in.

Charting Radical Theory

Gregor McLennan on Göran Therborn, From Marxism to Post-Marxism?. A balance-sheet of the legacies of radical social theory, and its prospects in the new century.

Mr Love and Justice

Gregor McLennan on Terry Eagleton, Trouble with Strangers and Reason, Faith, and Revolution. Lacan enlisted on the side of Jesus, for an ethics of revolutionary goodness.

On Malevolence

Gregor McLennan on Peter Dews, The Idea of Evil. Exploration of the nature—and necessity?—of humankind’s moral orientation, tracing a thread from Kant and Hegel to Nietzsche and Adorno.

Among the Unbelievers

Gregor McLennan on Charles Taylor, A Secular Age. A dialectical account of God’s role under conditions of modernity, with otherworldly intimations of ‘fullness’ compensating for materialism’s spiritual void.

The Question of Eurocentricism: A Comment on Immanuel Wallerstein

“In his critique of Eurocentrism, Immanuel Wallerstein has provided a useful discussion of a major issue for contemporary left politics and critical social science. By contrast with the higher-profile subject of ‘multi-culturalism’, to which it is of course related, the Eurocentrism question has received less considered debate. Wallerstein’s . . .” read more

Fin de Sociologie? The Dilemmas of Multidimensional Social Theory

“The discourse of sociology, though never at the heart of modern bourgeois culture, has always seemed pivotal to the critical self-understanding of modernity. Unlike the other major disciplines, sociology has presented itself simultaneously as a special science of structural patterns and as a totalizing search for social meaning. . . .” read more

Post-Marxism and the 'Four Sins' of Modernist Theorizing

“In this paper, I want to tackle some of the underlying issues around ‘post-Marxism’ in contemporary social theory, using just one exemplar of this emerging framework, namely Michèle Barrett’s book The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault. The rationale for this limited focus is that the field . . .” read more