Article archive

‘When people of a later age look back upon the barbarous customs and superstitions of the times we have the unhappiness to live in, what will they say?’ Sue Bridehead’s question – or rather exclamation – in Jude the Obscure – is, of course, rhetorical; and Hardy has surely been vindicated in this appeal to […]

Black Socrates? Questioning the philosophical tradition Simon Critchley Inconsiderateness in the face of tradition is reverence for the past. Martin Heidegger, Sophistes Funk not only moves, it can remove. George Clinton, P. Funk (Wants to Get Funked Up) Philosophy tells itself stories. l One might go further and claim that the life of philosophy, the […]

The Politics of Time Peter Osborne The simple possibility that things might proceed otherwise … is sufficient to change the whole experience of practice and, by the same token, its logic. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice The simple possibility that things might proceed otherwise is something in which there is depressingly little belief at […]

Fashion in Ruins History after the Cold War Susan Buck-Morss On Pariser Platz at the Gate’s east side, vendors sell souvenirs of the fallen Wall and mementos of the fallen regime. To the north, above the tree-line, the German flag flies over the ruins of the Reichstag that was burned in 1933 and bombed during […]

Charles Taylor, Strong Hermeneutics and the Politics of Difference Nick Smith In The Ethics of Authenticity, Charles Taylor sketches a defence of three highly ambitious claims. 1 The first and most general one is that ideals and the practices which are meant to conform to them are answerable to reason. An ideal is made answerable […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

• 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 […]