Pieces by Peter Osborne

The Frankfurt School and the Problem of Critique: A Reply to McCarney Peter Dews and Peter Osborne The question of the possibility, form, and validity of a ‘critical’ social science, of its relation to Marxism and to the ideas of dialectic and contradiction, received considerable attention on the pages of Radical Philosophy in the late […]

REVIEWS On the Jackson Trail lonathan Ree, Proletarian Philosophers: Problems in Socialist Culture in Britain, 1900-1940, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984, 176pp, £15 hb If the fundamental experience of twentieth-century European philosophy has been that of a continuing selfreflection upon its own status and identity, a persistent and profound identity-crisis in the face of the growing […]

Jeffrey Moussaieff Mason, ed., The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904 Jeffrey Moussaleff Mason, The Assault on Truth: Freud’s suppression of the seduction theory Stephen Marcus, Freud and the Culture of Psychoanalysis David Archard Noel W. Thompson, The People’s Science: the popular political economy of exploitation and crisis, 1816-34 Mike Shortland R. C. Lewontin, […]

News British Society for the History of Philosophy $ Every few years since the war, a British Society for the History of something-or-other has been set up. This wlll form an interesting study for the future historian of academe, as reveallng in its way as the flurry of scientific, phllosophical and llterary societies in early […]

EDITORIAL ” Environmental politics has so far remained organisationally fragmented and limited in its effects in Britain, compared, for example, with Australia or West Germany. This is also .true of the scale and quality of theoretical contributions on environmental questions in the literature of the Left in Britain. Radical Philosophy has itself so far :nade […]

REVIEWS 8yJingo Finding The Right Level John MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, Manchester University Press, 1984, 288pp., 1:..25 hb MacKenzie’s book is one of that kind that takes a debate which has been going on in papers, articles and reviews, and tries to assemble a definite thesis out of the debate. It is a compilation of […]

EDITORIAL 1984 and all that Recent re-organisation of the Editorial Collective’s working practices, aimed at a more equitable distribution of the work-load, has given rise to the new position of ‘issue editor’. Although basically administrative in character (the Collective as a whole still takes editorial decisions), this position is enlivened by carrying with it the […]

Does the Emperor have any Clothes? Wayne Hudson, The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch, MacMillan, 1982, i.20 hc Bloch’s philosophy is not yet well known in the Englishspeaking world, and yet it forms a remarkable contribution to the Marxist tradition. Bloch 0885-1977) was born and educated in Germany. During the Nazi period he was forced […]

REVIEWS Assessing Marcuse B. Katz, Herbert Marcuse and the Art of Liberation: An Intellectual Biography, Verso, 1982, i4.50 pb Theor 19.95 hc More Marcuse literature. The process of recovery and critical reassessment continues. Both these books contribute in some way to the development of a more informed and theoretically sophisticated account and critique of Marcuse’s […]

Abbot Terrasson has remarked that if the size of a volume be measured not by the number of its pages but by the time required for mastering it, it can be said of many a book, that it would be much shorter if it were not so short. (Kant, Preface to First Edition, Critique of […]

REVIEWS Marxism, Black Power, Black Revolutionaries C.L.R. James, Notes on Dialectics, Spheres of Existence and The Black Jacobins, Allison and Busby, £4.95 each The publication of these three books, which the publishers have added to the already available Beyond a Boundary and The Future in the Present, makes available a range of essays, histories and […]

REVIEWS Philosophies of African Liberation Journal of African Marxists, Issue No.l, November 1981, Zed Press, London, twice yearly, Sub: £2. This ·new and attractive journal aims to provide a forum for progressive African intellectuals, and all those committed to African liberation, to discuss the struggle against neocolonialism and racism. The allAfrican editorial board, supported by […]

NEWS Friendly fire The hoaxing of Social Text W hen the editorial committee of the US journal Social Text chose ʻScience Warsʼ as the title for last yearʼs special double issue (nos 46–47, Spring/Summer 1996), they could hardly have guessed how apt it would prove to be – not as a description of its contents, […]

A leading figure of the New Left in the 1960s, Stuart Hall is one of the founders of cultural studies in Britain and its most influential representative, internationally. The first editor of New Left Review, 1960–61, and author (with P. Whannel) of The Popular Arts, Hall was Director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies […]

for all its voluminousness. This is testament, no doubt, to the historical power of Benjaminʼs writings, but also to a certain more contemporary need for what they have come to represent. For if Benjamin has prospered, in part, from the notorious multiplicity of his personae – and hence from a seemingly endless capacity for reinvention […]

News Anniversary blues Social Emancipation: One Hundred and Fifty Years After The Communist Manifesto 17–20 February 1998, Centro Capitolio, Havana. From Enlightenment to Dialectics: Dialectic of Enlightenment 26–28 February 1998, Columbia University/New School for Social Research/Goethe Institute, New York. Integral to this argument is the critique of such notions as ʻsocial controlʼ and ʻlabour aristocracyʼ, […]

INTERVIEW Arthur C. Danto Art and analysis RP: Your philosophical work appears to be made up of two fairly distinct strands: what one might call a mainstream analytical strand and a more unconventional aesthetic strand. The second strand is dissident, first because itʼs about aesthetics – it takes art seriously, philosophically – and second because […]

Interview Étienne BalibarConjectures and conjunctures PO: In Spinoza and Politics you set out to show that the relationship between philosophy and politics is such that ʻeach implies the otherʼ. Was this true of your own intellectual development?Balibar: I think so, yes. The two things were closely connected in the circle around Althusser at the École […]

Radical philosophy has become one hundred in the year 2000, mimicking the Christian millennium with a numerological accident of its own. Arbitrary as such anniversaries are, it nonetheless provides an occasion to reflect upon some of the changes in the context of the journal over the last three decades.RP is the only one of the […]

Interview Jean LaplancheThe other within Rethinking psychoanalysis RP: howdid you come to psychoanalysis? what made you want to be an analyst?laplanche: Itʼs a long story. I was studying philosophy in the 1940s and psychoanalysis was not as well known as it is now. It was something new and revolutionary. But I had two professors who […]

Philosophy is popular in Britain at the moment, if the media be the measure; albeit mainly in the guise of a ʻguide to happinessʼ – a television guide and a happiness of a rather minimal sort. [1] Radicalism is not so popular, Ken Livingstoneʼs victory in the London mayoral contest notwithstanding (although we may be […]