Marxism Today An Interview with Istvan Meszaros /stwin Meszaros left Hungary after the Soviet invasion of 1956. He recently retiredfrom a Chair in Philosophy at the University of Sussex. He established his reputation in the English-speaking world with his widely translated Marx’s Theory ofAlienation (1970), which was awarded the / saac Deutscher Memorial Prize. His […]

COMMENTARY Endgame Joseph McCarney Every now and then an event occurs which brings a shift of perspective on the intellectual scene, relating familiar components in new ways and by its oblique light revealing the contents of dark corners and alleys. Such an event is the publication of Francis Fukuyama’s The End ofHistory and the Last […]

Michele Le Doeuff, Hipparchia’s Choice Catherine Wilson Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition Martin Ryle Axel Honneth, The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory Thomas McCarthy, Ideals and Illusions: On Reconstruction and Deconstruction in Contemporary Critical Theory Jane Braaten, Habermas’ s Critical Theory of Society Anthony Elliott Hubert […]

NEWS Massacre of the Innocents: Derrida and the Cambridge Dons On 21 March, at a lofty conclave of dons at Cambridge University, something happened. The matter for discussion was a list of academic aristos to be invited to receive an honorary doctoral degree from the Duke of Edinburgh. (Honorary degrees are solemn rewards for those […]

EDITORIAL Since the late ’80s, all those with sympathies on the Left have had to reconsider their position. In the editorial of the last RP, Greg Elliott, from a knowledge of the recent history of Western Marxism, considered the changed situation of marxist philosophy over the twenty years of RP’s existence. He expressed opposition to […]

Justice and the Gulf War Michael Rustin This article is concerned with the Gulf War in relation to the theory of just and unjust wars. The morality of the war was of course strongly contested, and it seems valuable now that its violence (although not its consequences in suffering) lie in the past to reflect […]

A Just War? The Left and the Moral Gulf Gregory Elliott A striking incidental feature of the Gulf War was the philosophical conflict attending the military hostilities. Norberto Bobbio or Jiirgen Habermas, Noam Chomsky or Ted Honderich, to name only a few of the participants, felt compelled, in their contrasting ways, to adopt and seek […]

Habermas on Heidegger and Foucau It Meaning and Validity in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity Rudi Visker Meaning, Habennas warns us, should not be allowed to consume validity. 1 For once that happens the further exhaustion of the project of modernity and the loss of its nonnative content are inevitable. This is clear from the […]

Reflections upon Roy Bhaskar’s ‘Critical Realism’ Wal Suchting ‘ … quamquam ridentem dicere verum quid vetat?’ TRANSCENDENTAL REALISM (‘ … but what is to stop anyone with a smile on his face from telling the truth?’) 2 ‘Empiricism’ and Its Critique (Horace, Satires, I, i, 25) 1 Introduction 1.1 Over the last fifteen years or […]

Reason Without Emoti·on Carol Jones J In ‘Reason and Emotion’ (RP 57), Miranda Fricker objects to the polarisation of reason and emotion, the separation of which she sees as a factor in the conflict between rational, patriarchal modes of reasoning and the ‘expressive power of emotions’ which feminists have tended to prefer. Seeking to refute […]

Conservatism, Ideology, Rationale, and a Red Light Ted Honderich Among reviews of my Conservatism, Kevin Magill’s in Radical Philosophy 59 several times struck me as the most challenging. It is not Tory bumble, of course, and it has all his characterful intelligence. But in my re-readings of it, it fails to fulfil its promise. It […]

Bernard Harrison, Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory Genevieve Lloyd Len Doyal and lan Gough, A Theory of Human Need Roger Harris Gregor McLennan, Marxism, Pluralism and Beyond Kevin Magill Krishnan Kumar, Utopianism Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times Vincent Geoghegan Ellie Ragland Sullivan and Mark Bracher, […]

NEWS Golden Years? 25 Years of History Workshop Was there ever a golden age, in politics? Sooner or later, whichever may have seemed the golden years of our own personal involvement are likely to become tarnished as we are forced to see the faces then excluded, to hear the voices silenced then even as we […]

EDITORIAL Charles 11 once invited the members of the Royal Society to explain to him why a dead fish weighs more than the same fish alive; a number of subtle explanations were offered to him. He then pointed it out that it does not. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue Who ate the fish? A heckler’s response […]

Internationality Jonathan Ree With the unification of Gennany and the fragmentation of the Soviet Union and its satellites, nationhood has suddenly become a topical issue. * And, by good fortune, scholars are well prepared to debate it: in the past decade several historians and social scientists have revived and perhaps transfonned the whole question of […]

Framing and Freeing: Utopias of the Female Body Lynda Nead The standard definition of utopia is in two parts: it is at once ‘no place’ and also the imagined location of the good society. * Utopian fiction and non-fiction frequently tell the story of the traveller who moves from the flawed world of the present […]

Levels of Analysis in Marxian Political Economy: An Unoist Approach Robert Albritton Nearly every major thinker and school of thought within contemporary Marxian political economy has made some reference to levels of analysis or levels of abstraction, and has shown some sensitivity to the difficulties in mediating more abstract levels of analysis with more concrete. […]

The Spirit of Modernity and its Fate: JOrgen Habermas Nick Smith Jurgen Habennas’s ongoing opus is organised around distinctive conceptualisations of ‘modernity’, ‘crisis’, and critique’. * The Theory of Communicative Action (2 volumes, Boston, 1984 & 1987), in which these internally related concepts are articulated into a theory of rationality, was written by Habennas to […]

Marxism, Moral Theory and Moral Truisms: A Response to Nielsen Rodney Peffer The first thing that should be noted about Kai Nielsen’s ‘Does a Marxian Critical Theory of Society Need a Moral Theory?’ (RP 59) is that he is not proposing that we should jettison morality altogether when it comes to making judgements about social […]