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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
Pathbreakers High and Low
A decade ago, Christopher Clark upended conventional accounts of the origins of the First World War; he has now rewritten the history of the European revolutions of 1848–1849, and proposed a new way of considering their outcomes. Analytically, what differentiates and what connects these two outstanding achievements?
Therborn’s World-Casting
Critical engagement with Göran Therborn’s global analysis of 21st-century society and its prospects for the left. If the contradictions that anchored 20th-century socialism have been surpassed, what has taken their place? Perspective for an emancipatory politics working aslant the grain of history.
Jameson after Post Critique
Radical literary theory has defined itself in opposition to a ‘historical-contextual’ approach said to be exemplified by Fredric Jameson. Is this a misreading? Leo Robson on the author of The Political Unconscious as appreciator of plot and popularizer of a positive hermeneutics of globalization.
Topographies Of Capital
Engagement with the recent work of leading American socialist feminist Nancy Fraser, drawing out continuities between Cannibal Capitalism’s multi-dimensional account of the present conjuncture—encompassing crises of capitalist accumulation, gendered social reproduction, global warming and democratic politics—and Fraser’s earlier theses on recognition, redistribution and representation.
Pierre Vilar
“The interview with Pierre Vilar published here for the first time in English was conducted in March 1987. Vilar may be best known in the Anglophone world today for his tightly conceptualized epic, A History of Gold and Money, 1450–1929, and for his landmark ‘Marxist History, a . . .” read more
The Idea of Hope
Reflections on continental philosophy from both sides of the Rhine, tracing complex inter-relations between post-structuralism and the Frankfurt School. Problems of subjectivity and nature, social determination and individual responsibility. Philosophical contexts of critical theory—and German Idealism as laboratory for system-building and experimentalist thought.
Luso-Anomalies
How and why has Portugal differed from Spain since the downfall of their respective dictatorships in the mid 70s? The course of political and economic development since the Revolution of 1974 was contained, and its current discrepant outcome: a conventional social-democratic government obliged to break with Euro-austerity under the pressure of a pact with the radical left.
Culture and Society, Then and Now
The idea of culture in Raymond Williams’s classic work, and discrepant readings of it, fifty years on. Gestation amid CP debates on the English tradition, hidden affinities with the Frankfurt School, and counterposition to the verities of today’s liberal multiculturalism.
Idolatry and its Discontents
Amid rhetorical dust-storms over purported Islamist threats to Western values, Sven Lütticken finds antecedents for contemporary struggles over the image in Judaic and Protestant bans on idolatry. Multiple meanings of the veil and varying forms of iconoclasm, under the aegis of the spectacle.
Modernism’s Nightmare?
In coolly proclaiming itself to be essentially the application of technique to matter, to what further consequences did modern art discover it was committing itself? Christopher Prendergast traces the ‘frightful clockwork of the world-structure’ in the games of Mallarmé, puppets of Flaubert and Kleist, musings of Mann, and the hurdy-gurdy of Cézanne overheard by T. J. Clark.
Culture Talk
Between the elite traditions of Kulturkritik and the populist enthusiasms of Cultural Studies, nominal antagonists, Francis Mulhern’s Culture/Metaculture discerns a covert bond—a common hostility to politics proper, as the antonym of culture. Stefan Collini queries his way of resolving the tension between these two.
Rosa Luxemburg’s Political Heir: An Appreciation of Paul Levi
“Seventy years after his death in 1930, a full biography of Paul Levi is still awaited. In English, the material available on him is scant indeed. Yet the most basic facts of his life, cut short in middle years, suggest an individual whose contribution to the socialist cause . . .” read more