But even given this and many other preconditions – of which the careful reading of one anothers’ texts must be the most important – it may be that there is a limit soon reached where nothing more can be yielded, and nothing more defined; and it would be plausible to conjecture that those very reasons […]

Editorial Radical Philosophy has never had radical political philosophy at its centre. This stark fact, contrary to the aims and to the self-consciousness of the ‘Group’, requires explanation. It was as if, in the heady early days, the validi ty of some socialist political philosophy or other (untainted by the evils of actually existing socialism) […]

New Right Utopias Ruth Levitas ‘” I (i) ‘Thatcherism’ (in ‘The New Right’ Many commentators have noted that there are two different strands to New Right thinking, economic liberalism and political authoritarianism. This is clearest in the collection The Politics of Thatcherism , where most of the contributors make similar assumptions: that Thatcherism exists (a […]

Doctrinaire Liberalism Anthony Arblaster ••• the liberal rarely needs to be ashamed of the realities created in his name as the socialist has to be much of the time. (Ralf Dahrendorf <1» Liberal writers, at least in the last forty years, have made a speciality of claiming that, unlike almost all other doctrines, and certainly […]

Morality, Masculinity and the Market Ross Poo/e ~ I Interests and Duties Two conceptions of morality dominate contemporary discussion: utilitarianism, which specifies the content of morality in terms of the maximisation of total happiness or want satisfaction, and Kantianism, which defines morality in terms of formal principles of consistency. One purpose of this paper is […]

Debate on Market Socialism Alec Nove Beyond the Market? comments on Boris Frankel The editors have asked me to comment on Frankel’s Beyond the State?, since Frankel devotes several pages to a criticism of the sort of arguments which I advanced in my Economics of Feasible Socialism and in some other works. The key issue […]

REVIEWS The Politics of Equality Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and Equality, Martin Robertson, Oxford, 1983, £15 hb. Raymond Plent, Equality, Markets and the State, Fabian Society, London, 1984, £1.50 pb. American philosophers have in recent years made a number of major contributions to systematic political philosophy. Rawls and Nozick are […]

LETTERS Dear .Bf., I am sure that readers of RP respect the tenacity and courage with which the philosopher Julius Tomin resisted the brutality and irrationality of Czech totalitarianism. Clearly the significance for Oxbridge philosophy of even its limited contact with aspects of the situation of Czech philosophy goes far beyond what Martin Walker’s journalistic […]

‘Political philosophy’, according to Moller Okin in Women in Western Political Thought, consists of ‘writings by men, for men, and about men’. 1 Although the frequent references to the generic term ‘mankind’ by political philosophers might suggest a concern with ‘the human race as a whole’, she argues that ‘we do not need to look […]

From ‘Overdetermination’ to ‘Structural Causality’: Some Unresolved Problems in Althursser’s Treatment of Causality Sheelagh Strawbridge Introduction .Much of Althusser’s work, in collaboration with Balibar, is concerned, by means of a ‘symptomatic’ reading of Marx’s mature work, to draw out the latent, silent, untheorised concepts present in that work and provide and adequately describe these missing […]

Giddens and Historical Materialism Paul Bagguley Jntroduction In this paper I examine a recent critique of historical materialism by the British sociologist Anthony Giddens and the alternative theory of history developed by him. This is contained in his recent book A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism. It is the most recent in a series of […]

Karl Marx, Death and Apocalypse Joanna Hodge Thoughts occasioned by reading Wayne Hudson, The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch (Macmillan, 1982) and Julian Roberts, Waiter Benjamin (Macmillan, 1982) There are five grand’ ‘o’ld me~ of’ twentieth-century European Marxism: Adorno , Benjamin , Bloch , Lukacs , and Marcuse . Their works loom bulky and ominous […]

Mataphor and Metaphysics: The End of Philosophy and Derrida Jonathan Ree * Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, Harvester, xxiv + 330pp., £25.00, 1983 Christopher Norris, The Deconstructive Turn: Essays in the Rhetoric of Philosophy, Methuen, 201pp, £4.95, 1983 ENDS AND MEANS I~ ‘The Ends of Man’ hs~ed between 1~67 and one of the ten essays, […]

REVIEWS Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes (eds.), Rationality and Relativism, Basil Blackwell, 1982 .Bryan Wilson’s anthology of essays on ‘Rationality’, first published in 1970, has become something of a minor classic in recent analytical philosophy, bringing together the main contributions to a lively and accessible debate, and providing the starting-point for a host of subsequent […]

EDITORIAL Marksism: The Shape of Things to Come? Following the success of the first Radical Philosophy special number (RP34 on Women, Gender and Philosophy), and as an extension of our long-standing interest in the subject, we are devoting this issue to the theme of Science, History and Philosophy. As Peter Osborne explained in the last […]

Ideological Commitments in the Philosophy of Science Jerry Ravetz To outward appearances the academic discipline of ‘the philosophy of science’ has in recent times been an austere and abstract study. Its concerns have been with one major problem, to the near exclusion of all others. The truthclaims of completed scientific knowledge have been considered to […]

On Revolutionising the Darwin Industry: A Centennial Retrospect Jim Moore The centenary of Darwin’s death has come and gone amid perilous times. In 1882 England’s leading naturalist was interred at Westminster Abbey as ‘Fenian outrages’ convulsed political opinion on the eve of the Phoenix Park assassinations (Moore, 1982). A century, later the Irish troubles persist, […]

Newton at the Crossroads Simon Schaffer ‘The label on a system of ideas is distinguished from that on other articles, amongst other things, by the fact that it deceives not only the buyer, but often the seller as well.’ (Marx, Capital, Volume II) Soris Hessen and his audience In this essay I attempt a re-evaluation […]