The ‘Authoritarian’ Nature of Utopia Barbara Goodwin I t In recent years there have been a number of famous denigrators of utopianism whose views are formed by liberal-democratic culture: among them, Popper, Oakeshott, Talmon and Hayek. From the standpoint of lib..eralism, the main objection to the utopian way of thinking is that it precludes free […]

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 […]

NEWS French Socialism and Philosophy Since May 1981 Has the new French Socialist Government made any moves to alter the position of philosophy in French education where (in spite of a diminution of the proportion of philosophy in the syllabus in the mid-seventies) philosophy still retains a role in school education not entirely unlike that […]

CORRESPON DENCE Philosophy and Feminism Dear Radical Philosophy, In her article on The Sceptical Feminist, Jean Grimshaw describes my position as an enfeebled and unviable thing, scarcely worth the name of feminism. In one sense I hardly blame her. The position she describes seems to me all that and more: I should even call it […]

On Materialism· Wal Suchting TEACHER SI FU TEACHER SI FU TEACHER SI FU Si Fu, name the basic questions of philosophy. Are things external to us, selfsufficient, independent of us, or are things in us, dependent on us, non-existent without us? What opinion is the correct one? There has been no decision about it …. […]

Preface to ‘Proletarian Nights’ The article printed below is a translation of the Introduction (pp.7-l2) of Jacques Ranci~re’s La Nuit des Proletaires, which was published last year [1]. The book deals with some well known events of the l830s and l840s – the utopias of Fourier, Saint-Simon, Cabet and Enfantin; the ‘Free Women’; the socialist […]

sacrificing the majesty of the masses and the positivity of their practices to the discourses and the illusions of a few dozen ‘non-representative’ individuals. In the labyrinth of their real and imaginary travels, I simply wanted to follow the thread of two guiding questions: What paradoxical route led these deserters, who wanted to tear themselves […]

15 with considerably more historical precision than Heidegger, who is more concerned with proving that reification is the permanent structure of the human mind. That not only this question but the whole book was largely conceived as a response to Luk§cs has been convincingly demonstrated by Goldmann, in Lukacs and Heidegger. But, as Lukacs has […]

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 […]

the worker tries to gain mastery over the labour process). The contradictions arising directly from this type of work are arguably near-maximal for free labour: labour allows negligible mastery of skills; the efficacy of labour is felt to be external to the labour process and is located in the spheres of circulation and exchange. It […]

CORRESPONDENCE For Lacan Dear Radical Philosophy, l I John Bird’s article on Lacan (RP 30) was so vehement that some response is necessary. But replying to Bird raises a problem. Bird has pitted himself against Lacan, and this makes any reply seem to speak for Lacan – a role it is impossible to fulfill. The […]

Feminism: History and Morality Jean Grimshaw Janet Radcliffe Richards’ book The Sceptical Feminist (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980, £12 hb) is an attempt to extricate feminism from what she sees as ideological commitments that are not essential to it, and serve merely to confuse feminists themselves, and alienate potential supporters. The image of the feminist […]

Jacques Lacan – the French Freud? John Bird French intellectual life appears to exercise a fascination, some might say a dreadful influence, on the .English intellectual avant-garde. In the 1960s it was the tortuous debate between Sartre and LeviStrauss; in the 1970s, the ‘true’, dehumanised Marxism of Althusser; and as we enter the 1980s, we […]

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 Crucially, linguists do not agree. Mounin, G., Clefs pOUY’ la linguistique, Seghers, Paris, 1971, p.ll. See above, ‘Process Three – The Oedipus Complex, the Father and Social Rules’ . Identified by, amongst others, E.P. Thompson. Turkle, S., Psychoanalytic Politics, Burnett Books, New York, 1979. For […]

71 72 his endorsement of the latter as opposed to the former see PhiLosophy of Right, para.67, and also my discussion in the earlier noted article in Radical, PhiLosophy 26. Phenomeno Logy, para. 196 . This is clearer in the discussion in the EnayaZopaedia: BegeL’s PhiLosophy What’ 5 73 of Mind, trans. lVallace and Findlay […]

A Comparison of Marxist and Hegelian Dialectical Form fan Hunt and Roy Swan Introduction Our aim in this paper is to exhibit the formal differences that distinguish the Harxist dialectic from its Hegelian predecessor. In sum, whereas in Hegel’s system identity has primacy over contradiction and, what comes to the same thing, self-identity has primacy […]

REVIEWS Apel: Transformation of Philosophy K.O. Apel, Towards a Transformation of PhiZosophy, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980 (trans. Adey and Frisby), £12.50 hc This book·assembles some of the results of a sustained interplay between the broadly analytic and pragmatist traditions and traditions in German philosophy and critical theory, with the central aim of outlining a […]

right sources to draw on, and I am in general sympathy with Pilling’s approach. However, it must be said that he does not go beyond his sources. Much of the book consists in the rehearsal of familiar passages from Marx. I would say therefore that the book is likely not to be too exciting for […]

CORRESPONDENCE Dear Radical Philosophy, < Oh, come on Jennifer Todd (RP 28), why don't you stop flogging a dead horse. There's no point in making political art; there's just no meat left – the flies have taken .it all. It's all been consumed away, turned into culture and thrown back at us as another form […]