COMMENTARY Coal Economics versus Emotions? Andrew G/yn On 13 October 1992 the British government sanctioned the closure by British Coal of 31 collieries by the end of the year. It completely miscalculated the scale of public response, especially from such unlikely quarters as the streets of Cheltenham and the pages of the Sun and Express. […]

REVIEWS AVANT-TARD Jean-Fran~ois Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, Oxford, Polity Press, 1991. viii + 216pp., £35 hb, 0 7456 0772 1 NorbertElias, Time: An Essay, translated in part from the German by Edmund Jephcott, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1992. 216pp., £35 hb,O 631 157980 Is it ever too […]

NEWS George Rude, 191 0-1993 George Rude belonged to that remarkable florescence of post -war British Marxist historiography which has played a major part in shaping the methodological and substantive agendas of contemporary historiography. The intellectual and political formation of that generation, whose prominent figures include Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill, E. P. Thompson and E. […]

Hell’s Angels Derrida and the Heidegger Controversy Richard Wolin’s anthology The Heidegger Controversy – reviewed in RP 63 under the heading’ Righteous Indignation’ – has run into trouble with its original publisher, Columbia University Press. This useful selection of texts dealing with Heidegger’s Nazism appeared in November 1991 and sold well. No doubt part of […]

For Godd’s Sake The Spirit of Postmodernism Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 27 February 1993 It seemed that Marx had forgotten to add that not only worldhistorical events but also academic conferences occur twice, the second time as farce. This conference was timed to coincide with the publication of the papers collected from an earlier […]

EDITORIAL L ,. One major preoccupation of recent critical debates has been the attempt at a philosophical definition of the present through an account of our relations to the Enlightenment. Whether for or against ‘modernity’, contributors to these debates have tended to identify modernity with the Enlightenment, and to make their respective philosophical stands on […]

• Feminism and the Enlightenment Pauline Johnson The recent turn taken by feminist theory towards a critique of the spirit of humanism would have surprised de Beauvoir and the early delineators of the concerns of ‘second wave’ feminism. According to The Second Sex, feminism is an expression of humanism in a quite straightforward sense.! Indeed, […]

Foucault’s Aesthetics of Existence Andrew Thacker To become a work of art is the object of living – Oscar Wilde What role has aesthetics in the later work of Mic heI Foucault? In the final completed volumes of his History of Sexuality (translated as Vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure and Vol. 3, The Care […]

Orientalism and After An Interview with Edward Said Edward Said is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, New York and editor of Arab Studies Quarterly. Best known academically for his book Orientatism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978), which was a milestone in the redefinition of the concerns of literary studies, […]

COMMENTARY Ethnic War in Bosnia? Cornelia Sorabji Bosnia is fading from the news, winter has descended to sever its population from the outside world, and military intervention of any significant scale has not occurred. In Britain much of the debate over the desirability of such intervention has revolved around the idea of ‘ethnic war’. Given […]

Reiner Grundmann, Marxism and Ecology Jonathan Hughes Theodor W. Adorno, Alban Berg, Master of the Smallest Link Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno’ s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion Jonathan Rée Moira Gatens, Feminism and Philosophy: Perspectives on Difference and Equality Herta Nagl-Docekal and Herlinde Pauer-Studer, eds., Denken der Geschlechterdifferenz: Neue Fragen und Perspectiven der Feministischen Philosophie […]

NEWS God Bless You, Mr Rosewater Feminist Fortunes in the New Latvia Booking my ticket for Riga, I had not expected a discussion on the shifting geographical boundaries of Europe. Where were the Baltic States, I was asked, and, for insurance purposes, could they be said to be safely European? Qualification for membership was a […]

NEWS God Bless You, Mr Rosewater Feminist Fortunes in the New Latvia Booking my ticket for Riga, I had not expected a discussion on the shifting geographical boundaries of Europe. Where were the Baltic States, I was asked, and, for insurance purposes, could they be said to be safely European? Qualification for membership was a […]

Virtually Real Realism and the Human Sciences Conference, Oxford, 24-26 July 1992 Roy Bhaskar’s opening paper indicated concerns which were to characterise the conference as a whole. He argued that Critical Realism needs to take on Hegelian concepts to bolster its existing epistemic mapping of the world. The notion of totality, for example, could provide […]

Virtually Real Realism and the Human Sciences Conference, Oxford, 24-26 July 1992 Roy Bhaskar’s opening paper indicated concerns which were to characterise the conference as a whole. He argued that Critical Realism needs to take on Hegelian concepts to bolster its existing epistemic mapping of the world. The notion of totality, for example, could provide […]

EDITORIAL ~ /’~~ Socialism has typically presented itself as a project of human emancipation, based on a moral vision of the future, and on a critical diagnosis of the present – informed both by that vision of human possibilities, and by a theoretical grasp of what stands in the way of their realisation. It has […]

Ecology and Human Emancipation Tim Hayward Humanism vs Prometheanism The entry of ecological considerations into political thought raises new questions about the meaning of human emancipation.* In particular, traditional socialist conceptions of emancipation as a move from a sphere of necessity to one of freedom are rendered radically problematic from an ecological perspective. i As […]

On National Identity A Response to Jonathan Ree Ross Poole Jonathan Ree’s ‘Internationality’l makes a number of significant contributions to the sparse philosophical literature on nationalism. The concept which gives the paper its title promises, I think, to be particularly useful. Just as we are now accustomed to think of individual subjects as constituted in […]

REPLIES TO RICHARD RORTY’S ‘FEMINISM AND PRAGMATISM’ I How Did the Dinosaurs Die Out? How Did the Poets Survive? Catherine Wilson In ‘Feminism and Pragmatism’ (Radical Philosophy 59, pp. 3-14), Richard Rorty offers feminists an arrangement of convenience. In exchange for their support of his philosophical programme, which involves the rejection of a representationalist account […]