NEWS E. P. Thompson, 1924-1993 The great bustard has winged off, removing as he went one of the prime attractions of these shores, and one of the few remaining reasons for still proclaiming intellectual allegiance to them. Thompson liked to present himself as an earth-bound English creature incapable of much soaring. But he had enough […]

conference at Birkbeck College. He will be remembered by all who knew him for his amiability, his modesty, the ever renewed breadth of his interests, and above all, for his intellectual generosity. We will miss him. His publications include: 1978: Marxism and Education: A Study of Phenomenological and Marxist Approaches to Education (RKP) 1982: Education, […]

EDITORIAL The Radical Philosophy Group, so the mission statement on the inside cover used to announce, grew in part out of opposition to ‘the sterile and complacent philosophy taught in British universities and colleges’. And, as any radical philosopher would have told you, nothing more typified this sterility and complacency than the school of ‘linguistic […]

English Philosophy in the Fifties Jonathan Ree If you asked me when was the best time for philosophy in England in the twentieth century-for professional, academic philosophy, that is – I would answer: the fifties, without a doubt. And: the fifties, alas. * Under the leadership of Gilbert Ryle and f.L. Austin, the career philosophers […]

A Nation, Yet Again The Field Day Anthology Francis Mulhern Anthologies are strategic weapons in literary politics. Authored texts of all kinds – poems, novels, plays, reviews, analyses – play more or less telling parts in a theatre of shifting alliances and antagonisms, but anthologies deploy a special type of rhetorical force: the simulation of […]

Fleshy Memory Kelly Oliver Freud conceived of the ego as energetically self-contained, though formed in relations with the maternal and paternal figures of the Oedipal situation. In his Hegelian reading of Freud, Lacan emphasises the relationships that give rise to (and undermine) a sense of ego identity with his famous account of the infant’s self-recognition […]

Critical Theory in Germany Today 1 r An Interview with Axel Honneth if’ Axel Honneth is Professor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Political Science at the Free University, Berlin. He is the author of The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory (1985; English translation, MIT Press, 1991) and Struggle for […]

COMMENTARY Looking for the Good Life Bob Brecher It is almost impossible these days to stumble across anything like a vision of the good society lurking even in the background of a left position. From the intellectual void that is the Labour Party, to the labyrinthine morass of postmodern and postfeminist postponements that constitutes the […]

REVIEWS EVERYTHING IS DANGEROUS John Rajchman, Truth and Eros: Foucault, Lacan and the Question of Ethics, London, Routledge, 1991. 155 pp., £30.00 hb, £10.99 pb., 04:15 90379 3 hb., 0415 903807 pb. Jana Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power and the Body, London, Routledge, 1991. 130pp., £30.00 hb., £8.99 pb., 0 415 90187 1 hb., 0415 […]

NEWS VICTORY AT SWANSEA Visitor’s Report Reinstates Rebel Lecturers The three lecturers at the centre of the long-running row over academic standards in the Philosophy Department at University College, Swansea are to be reinstated, following the publication of a 173-page report on the affair by retired High Court judge Sir Michael Davies. Two years after […]

Discussing Deliberative Democracy Democracy and Difference Yale University, 15-18 April 1993 It is New Haven in April. The annual meeting of the Conference for the Study of Political Thought has ‘descended upon Yale University to debate ‘Democracy and Difference’. The agenda for this year’s Conference, set by Seyla Benhabib, manifests her desire to bring together […]

problems. Nothing new or constructive was being said: criticisms of the idea [hat history has ended are attacks on an easy target. The last item on the list was the ‘world-wide power of the “phantom states” of the mafia and of the drug groups’. But Derrida was not moved to expand on the subject of […]

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EDITORIAL ‘The world grows old. ‘ We live at a time when the intellectual scene increasingly resembles a mortuary or some nether region of etiolated successor states. The chief object of all this’ endism’ and ‘postism’ is, of course, history itself. The starting point for Gregory Elliott’ s reflections in this issue is the recent […]

The Cards of Confusion Reflections on Historical Communism and the ‘End of History’ Gregory Elliott For Tom and Martha, divisibly … it is well known that History is not a good bourgeois. Roland Barthes (1957) An anti-Communist is a cur. I couldn’t see any way out of that one, and I never will. Jean-Paul Sartre […]

The Call of Nature A Reply to Ted Benton and Tim Hayward Michael Reid Does the critical practice of the ecology movement require a theoretical ground? Ted Benton,l for one, seems to think that it does. In the Autumn 1992 issue of Radical Philosophy Tim Hayward argued that one could accept Benton’ s theory without […]

Conceptions of ‘Civil Society’ Axe! Honneth When the intellectuals of Eastern Europe began to consider the difficulties and possibilities of a democratically organised political opposition they soon turned to a classical concept in the history of political ideas. They thought that the concept of civil society always used in English to indicate its connection to […]

The Early Marx on Needs Andrew Chitty Following the first widespread dissemination of Marx’ s early writings, his treatment of human needs was often taken as the basis for a critique of the ‘false needs’ created by capitalism and its consumer culture. 1 ‘True needs’ for meaningful social interaction were counterposed to the ‘false needs’ […]

TRUTH & RELATIVITY: AN EXCHANGE Sean Sayers’ Relativism Tony Skiffen For some years Sean Sayers has been urging, against empiricism and anal ytical philosophy, the virtues of dialecticallogic. Such logic, he believes, is essential to a proper understanding. I take issue with this view at the level of ‘logic and language’. It seems to me […]