Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) In place of our usual editorial, in this issue we publish differing responses to Simone de Beauvoir’s death from two French newspapers. Rob,ert Maggiori (from Liberation, 15 April 1986) In 1929 two young people, like many others before and after them, must have rushed across to the rue de Grenelle to […]

Proletarian Philosophy: A Version of Pastoral? Jonathan Ree I write in and about an embarrassment: how should I, a philosophy teacher, respond to people who are also committed to philosophy, but cut off from official philosophical institutions? It was partly to focus my attention on this problem that I revisited a much-respected acquaintance a few […]

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 […]

Marx’s “Social Revolution” and the Division of Labour Istvan Meszaros Marx was well aware of the burden of class de terminations which tend to subsume the individuals under their own logic; from his early writings to the Grundrisse and Capital he never stopped defining the task of emancipation as belonging to the social individual. Equally, […]

Civil Disobedience and Nuclear Protest: A Reply to Dworkin Richard Norman Philosophical writing about civil disobedience tends to reach only the vaguest of conclusions: that it is normal1y wrong to disobey the law in a democratic society, but that in some circumstances civil disobedience may be justified, provided the issue is sufficiently serious and weighty […]

COMMENT Strange Days for Philosophers Geoffrey Thomas Philosophers appear to have an unquiet certainty that something is happening to their subject. What I don’t think is happening is the “end” of philosophy. Rather there is a confusion of two things which are very easily detachable. As a distinctive activity philosophy is ineliminable at a certain […]

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 […]

NEWS Caring for Philosophy? “Not to care for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.” So said Pascal. The government and the UGC, it seems, agree. For philosophy departments in Britain’s universities have suffered badly in recent years. Alarmed by these developments, representatives from philosophy depar·tments at Britain’s universities met at Leeds in February to […]

EDITORIAL A number of recent issues of Radical Philosophy have had a central theme or focus: women, gender and philosophy; political philosophy; science, history and philosophy; social theory. This issue is not a theme-based issue in that sense, but the articles we are publishing address, in different ways, a number of concerns which are central […]

Luce Irigaray and the Female Imaginary: Speaking as a Woman Margaret Whitford Although Luce Irigaray’s name is beginning to become more familiar in England, her work has not, for the most part, been translated, so that non-French-speaking readers have had to confine themselves to the odd bits and pieces – the translation of an interview […]

Dialectical Perception: A Synthesis of Lenin and Bogdanov Edmond Wright Ernst Mach (1976, 122) has a story about a savage who was surprised to discover the power of written symbols. The savage was ordered to take a basket of fruit, say, mangoes, from one colonist to another, a basket that, as well as the fruit, […]

Back to Utopia: Anthony Giddens and Modern Social Theory fan Craib I I ![ Over the past fifteen years, Anthony Giddens has produced a series of studies in social theory that must at the very least be caUed impressive. Despite the boom in theoretical work during the ’70s, he is the only British sociologist of […]

The Narration of an Unhappy Consciousness: Lukacs, Marxism, the Novel, and Beyond Keith Ansell-Pearson Parmenides said, ‘one cannot think of what is not’; – we are at the other extreme, and say, ‘what can be thought of must certainly be a fiction.’ – Nietzsche (1) Introduction J. M. Bernstein has written a book that merits […]

COMMENT A New Marxist Paradigm? Joseph McCarney I agree with a great deal in Gregor McLennan’s review of Jon Elster’s Making Sense of Marx (RP42), and most of all with his idea of the book’s importance. He may well be right in thinking it ‘likely to dominate discussions of Marx and Marxism for the next […]

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 […]

EDITORIAL l 1 i 1 J j j This issue of RP focusses on social theory and contains three analyses of issues which are central to different areas of debate on the left. Istvan Meszaros presents a new and important perspective on the prospects for a transition to social.ism. Couched not in terms of the […]

The Cunning of History in Reverse Gear Istvan Meszaros 1. ‘Llst der Vernunft’ and the ‘Cunning of History’ The Marxist notion of the ‘cunning of history’ was formulated as a ‘materialist standing on its feet’ of Hegel’s ‘cunning of Reason’ (Ust der Vernunft). According to Hegel, the latter is: ‘an artful device which, whlle seeming […]

What Makes Critical Theory IC riticaI’? Joseph McCarney The toplc of this paper is the project of a critlcal theory of society. It considers that project in the form it takes in the work of its best known exponents, the theorists of the socalled ‘Frankfurt School’. The main question to be answered is the question […]