NEWS Ralph Miliband, 1924 – 1994 The Common Sense of Socialism For anyone studying or teaching politics in the late 1960s and 1970s, the publication ofRalph Miliband’ s The State in Capitalist Society in 1969 was a watershed. The ‘pluralist’ theories which had dominated the discipline, especially in North America, somehow never quite recovered from […]

Miliband’s consistency, comprehensiveness and breadth, not to mention his commitment and lucidity. Marxist historians like E. P. Thompson have contributed greatly to the denaturalisation of capitalism, and to the affirmation of other human possibilities, by tracing its history back to its contested origins, to the confrontation of capitalist principles with other, resistant practices and values. […]

Paul Feyerabend, 1924-1994 A Personal Memoir Paul Feyerabend died on February 11, a month after his seventieth birthday. He wrote the last of his many letters to me in October 1993, and on the outside of the envelope, in typically casual fashion, he scribbled a message saying that he might soon be coming to Brighton, […]

Incomplete Modernity: Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society Michae/ Rustin There has been good reason to fear that ‘post-modem’ and ‘post-industrial’ currents of thought have been sweeping away the foundations of radical critiques without offering to put anything very substantial in their place. It is all very well criticising the limitations of social democracy, the welfare state, […]

Ecologism and the Relegitimation of Socialism Andrew Dobson Ever since 1974 – at least – and the publication of Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s ‘A Critique of Political Ecology’, I the relationship between socialism and ecologism has been a source of contention. Sometimes this relationship has been one of outright hostility as the differences between the analyses […]

Long Live Literature? Englit, Radical Criticism and Cultural Studies Martin Ry/e Has the time come for ‘English’ as an academic discipline to disappear? A crisis can only last so long, after all, before it becomes terminal (or terminally boring). And ‘English’ has been in a self-proclaimed state of crisis for the last fifteen years, in […]

Dialogue Without the Other? A Reply to Francis Mulhern Luke Gibbons Condemning national values has a different meaning depending on whether one lives in a little country (one’s own) in the orbit ofanother, larger one, or whether one lives abroad, in a third country, where one is – where one believes oneself to be – […]

Gender as Performance An Interview with Judith Butler ludithButlerteaches in the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Her first book, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France ( J987) traced the dialectic ofpro- and anti-Hegelian currents in French theory across the writings ofa wide range ofthinkers. She is best known, however, for […]

COMMENTARY Return of the Translator Jonathan Ree ‘The Death of the Author’ is one of the great catchphrases of recent philosophy. It started as the title of an essay by Roland Barthes in 1968, and cleverly captures the idea that the act of reading ought to attend to textual structures rather than authorial personalities – […]

Ted Benton, Natural Relations: Ecology, Animal Rights and Social Justice Bob Brecher Louis Althusser, The Future Lasts a Long Time and The Facts E. Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinker, eds., The Althusserian Legacy David Macey Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures Alan Duiant Gregory Elliott, Labourism and the English […]

NEWS Philosophy and the Information Superhighway The extraordinary capacity of computers to hold text is familiar to anyone who uses a word processor: an average book will fit comfortably onto a 3.5″ floppy disc. With the growth of easy means of communication between computers an immense quantity of information has become available on a world-wide […]

The Politics of Experience Radical Philosophy Conference Birkbeck College, London, 13 November 1993 If, as the cliche goes, a week is a long time in politics, a couple of months is eternity itself when it comes to judging academic conferences. Even in the best of cases, the arguments of the day, stripped of their urgency, […]

EDITORIAL – . =.. .:’1._”it!!!! • =:-= -=111 .,-. · ~-1-. 1 …. – -= – -:. I — ..-. 1=1 .– 11 I . -• • -~-EE A letter recently leaked to The Observer (10.10.93) revealed that government scientists are privately extremely concerned about the problem of long-term nuclear waste storage. Behind the facade […]

Val ue, Rationality and the Environment Andrew Collier Today most people on the Left are aware that ecological damage, and the threat of ecological disaster, are among the foremost contradictions of capitalism, second only to the impoverishment of the Third World. In addition to ecology in the strict sense, the damage done to the material […]

The Meaning of Political Ecology Tim Hayward ‘Political ecology’ is an expression which has become quite familiar in recent years, but does not appear to have acquired a clear and settled meaning. * Evidently it is used to point up some kind of connection between politics, or the political, and ecology, yet the project of […]

Humanism and Nature John O’Neill Those who aim to construct links between Marxism and the green movement often look to Marx’ s early work on alienation as a source for a green Marxism. I There is an immediate apparent problem with any such attempt to marry the early Marx and the greens, viz. that Marx’s […]

Studying Child Sexual Abuse: Morality or Science? Sue Clegg Child abuse has become a major topic of public polemic and academic research. I Modem feminists, like their nineteenthcentury sisters, have singled out sexual abuse for special attention. 2 After decades in which sexual abuse was the concern of a limited number of professionals who dealt […]

COMMENTARY Sexuality and Subcultures in the Wake of Welfare Capitalism A/an Sinfie/d When the British Parliament eventually debated the Gulf War – journalists had earnestly demanded this, pretending to believe that it might somehow make a difference; when we finally got this debate, just two new ideas were produced. One, from an Ulster Unionist, was […]

REVIEWS RULING PASSION STRONG IN DEATH Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, London, Faber, 1993. 363pp, £9.99 pb, 0 571 169732. David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, London, Hutchinson, 1993. 583pp, £20 hb, 0 09 1753449. James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, London, Harper Collins, 1993. 491pp, £18 hb, 0 00 255267 1. ‘Alive,’ claims […]