55 Editorial

EDITORIAL RP55 kicks off with an article by Sadie Plant on the Situationalist International. This politically radical art movement, with its desire to subvert the banality of everyday life, flourished back in the ’50s and ’60s but has since fallen into relative obscurity. Plant’s particular concern is to identify the links, in her view too […]

50 Reviews

REVIEWS I I I ~~~~~~t L———_ _ _ ~ ___ J THE HISTORICAL MATERIALISM DEBATE S. H. Rigby, Marxism and History: a Critical Introduction, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1987, 314pp., £29.95 hb. Derek Sayer, The Violence ofAbstraction: the Analytic F oundationsofHistoricaIMaterialism,Oxford,Blackwell, 1987,xiiiand 173pp., £22.50 hb. Alex Callinicos, Making History: Agency, Structure and Change in Social […]

Svelte Discourse’ and the Philosophy of Caution

‘Svelte Discourse’ and the Philosophy of Caution Stuart Sim Recently, Radical Philosophy was offered a piece by JeanFrancois Lyotard, one of the leading lights of the postmodernist movement, entitled ‘Svelte Discourse and the Posunodern Question’. The piece came not from Lyotard himself but from his translator, Mark S. Roberts. So odd did this particular piece […]

45 Editorial

EDITORIAL This issue of RadIcal Phllosophy covers a range of topIcs central to the journal’s concerns: the Frankfurt School, sodaHsm and democracy, feminist aesthetIcs, and reflections on the state of being a philosopher. Joseph McCarney’s article on the Frankfurt School in RP 42, ‘What makes CritIcal Theory CritIcal?’ is the subject of a reply by […]

45 Reviews

Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope Vincent Geoghegan Kate Soper, Humanism and Anti-Humanism Noel Parker Richard Edwards Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science Kathryn Russell G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophical Propaedeutic Sean Sayers Dick Howard, From Marx to Kant Keith Ansell-Pearson Hilary Lawson, Reflexivity: The Post-Modern Predicament The Second of January Group, […]

Lyotard and the Politics of Antifoundationalism

Lyotard and the Politics of Antifou ndational ism Stuart Sim 11 An increasingly important trend in recent philosophy has been antifoundationalism: the rejection of the search for 10gical1y-consistent, self-evidently true “grounds” for philosophical discourse, and the substitution of ad hoc tactical manoeuvres as justification for what are quite often eccentric lines of argument. Antifoundationalism is […]

43 Reviews

REVIEWS Reconstructing Structural Marxism Ted Benton, The Rise and Fall of Structural Marxism; Althusser and his Influence, Macmillan, London, 1984, 259pp lI8.00 hc, 1.6.95 pb Benton’s book has many facets: it is an introductory text, a re-evaluation and reconstruction of Structural Marxism, an argument for theoretical progress lying through the synthesis of Structural Marxism with […]

40 Reviews

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 […]

RP day school on dialectic; Hegel conference; State of literary theory

NEWS R.P. Day School on Dialectic On 19 June Goldsmiths College played host to another Radical Philosophy Day School. The speakers were Istvan Meszaros (The Cunning of History in Reverse Gear); Joe McCarney (Social Science and Dialectic); and Sean Sayers (Materialism, Realism, and the Theory of Reflection). The presentations were exceptionally clear and provided a […]