New Racism . . . New Realism Two Sides of the Same Coin Mark R. Duffield Introduction The Guardian recently reported that Bradford Metropolitan Borough Council, following research which showed that ethnic minorities did not receive their fair share of help from the social services department, has employed several Asians to act as unqualified social […]

REVIEWS Elementary Illusions Nancy Cartwright, How the Laws of Physics Lie, Oxford University Press, 1983, 1..16 hb, 1..7.95 pb The classic work of C.G. Hempel established as orthodoxy the view that scientific explanation consists in subsuming phenomena under covering laws. With varying degrees of plausibility the analysis was extended to cover ordinary, everyday explanations, which […]

NEWS Socialist Legality Problems of Power In the workgroup on ‘Beyond Formal Justice’ – which met as a subcommittee of the recent conference of the International Sociological Association held in Antwerp – a remarkably diverse and captivating series of papers was presented, detailing and critically appraising the developments and difficulties of actually existing legal systems […]

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 […]

Marxism and the Dialectical Method: A Critique of G.A. Cohen Sean Savers The dialectical method, Marx insisted, was at the basis of his account of society. In 1858, in a letter to Engels, he wrote, In the method of treatment the fact that by mere accident I again glanced through Hegel’s Logic has been of […]

DEBATE ON SEXIST LANGUAGE Sexism and Semantics Deborah Cameron In RP34, two articles appeared dealing with the relation between language and sexism: Alison Assiter’s critique of Dale Spender’s Man Made Language and a dialogue between Mike Shortland and John Fauvel on the subject of sexism and linguistic reform. Although these articles were not explicitly connected […]

Milton Fisk, Marxism and Ethics Andrew Collier “ I When Marxists have written about ethics – which they have not often done at any length – they have generally approached the topic in one of two ways: either they have sought to explain moral codes as ideologies with definite material foundations and functions in the […]

Towards a Theory of Videotics Richard Osborne In the post-structuralist diaspora the search for a nontaxonomic ‘truth’, an understanding of the political history of the presentation of signs, demands that we interrogate our relationship to the notion of the materiality of the sign. From Copernicus to Warhol we have witnessed the destabiliza tion of the […]

REVIEWS Post-Industrial Socialism Rudolf Bahro, Socialism and Survival (trans. David Fernbach), Heretic Books, f.3.50 pb Andre Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class (trans. Michael Sonenscher), Pluto Press, 1:.3.95 pb The ‘debate on the concept of the proletariat’ is, suggests Rudolf Bahro, ‘outdated’; it ‘tends right from the start to be scholastic’. Farewell to the Working […]

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 […]

Fragments of an Analysis: Lacan in Context David Macey At risk of caricature, the received Anglo-Saxon image of Lacan might be formalized as Freud + Saussure = Lacan (2). The received formula owes much to one of the first texts to introduce Lacan’s work to an English-speaking audience, namely the translation of Althusser’s ‘Freud and […]

Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx and Negativity Chris Arthur In 1844 a turning point occurs in Marx’s philosophical development: for the first time he makes labour the central category of his social ontology (1) position of importance it was never to lose. Productive activity, and its alienation, are thematized in that most extraordinary document containing the results […]

INTRODUCTION TO HOUNTONDJI The article printed below is extracted from African Philosophy: Myth and Reality, by Paulin Hountondji, which was published by Hutchinson in June 1983. Hountondji was born in the Ivory Coast, and received his Higher Education in Paris, where he was a pupil of Althusser in the middle 1960s. He is now Professor […]

In Search of a Method: Hegel, Marx and Realism John Alien The development in recent years of a realist philosphy of science has provoked considerable interest within Marxist social science (1). Its attraction lies in the potential it holds for the construction of a philosophical antidote to posi tivism and conventionalism. In a short space […]

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 […]

to the romantic and increasingly reactionary nationalism of, for example, Schulze and Henning, there also emerged the far more critical notions of men like Eduard Gans and Heinrich Leo, whose unwillingness to construe existing laws as the absolute embodiment of actualised Reason produced, for example, a strong critique of bureaucratic government as a form of […]

RADICAL PHILOSOPHY SPECIAL ISSUE: EN, GENDER, AND PHILOSOPHY INTRODUCTION Here we present the first ever special issue of Radical Philosophy on Women, Gender and Philosophy. Much has been written in the past ten years in this country by feminist women working in the social sciences and in economics – on women and the state; on […]

Masters, Slaves and Others Genevieve Lloyd In The Second Sex; Simone de Beauvoir utilised some of the basic concepts of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness – concepts such as ‘immanence’ and ‘transcendence’, ‘being-for-self’ and ‘being-for-others’, ‘bad faith’ and ‘authenticity’ – in a profound diagnosis of the con4ition of women. That she could thus use the framework […]