Pieces by Alison Stone

Marxism has differed from most other bodies of radical political thought in its conviction that its political radicalism is inseparably connected to a philosophical radicalism – a conviction that underlies the name of this journal. Engels, Kautsky and the orthodox Soviet Marxists all saw Marxism as distinguished from mainstream (ʻbourgeoisʼ) social thought by the dialectical […]

Sexing the state Familial and political form in Irigaray and Hegel Alison stone In her political writings since the mid-1980s, Luce Irigaray has developed a highly original and provocative conception of the good society, according to which every aspect of social life should be so arranged as to promote the expression, cultivation and accentuation of […]

Reviews Let’s talk about sexLuciana Parisi, Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Bio-technology and the Mutations of Desire, Continuum, London/New York, 2004. x + 227 pp., £60.00 hb., £18.99 pb., 0 8264 6989 2 hb., 0 8264 6990 6 pb. Mario Perniola, The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic: Philosophies of Desire in the Modern World, trans. Massimo Verdicchio, […]

The incomplete materialism of French materialist feminism Alison stone According to one important and influential line of feminist interrogation of the category of sex, we only believe that there are two biological sexes because our thought and perception are constrained by the two-gender social system under which we currently live. [1] The French materialist feminists […]

Reviews Future presentGiovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century, Verso, London and New York, 2007. xiii + 418 pp., £25.00 hb., 978 1 84467 104 5. The concept of development in history has been mainly understood in two ways. In the historicist philosophical tradition, it refers to the concrete spatio-temporal shapes […]

Reviews An omelette of men Stefan Jonsson, A Brief History of the Masses: Three Revolutions, Columbia University Press, New York, 2008, viii + 231 pp., £21.50 hb., 978 0 231 14526 8. What forms can collective political action take today? As it works through its long, hesitant goodbye to the working class and grapples with […]