Article archive

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 […]

Feminism and Pragmatism Richard Rorty When two women ascended to the Supreme Court of Minnesota, Catherine MacKinnon asked: ‘Will they use the tools of law as women, for all women?’ She continued as follows: I think that the real feminist issue is not whether biological males or biological females hold positions of power, although it […]

F. H. Bradley and the Concept of RelativeTruth Sean Sayers Few people now read F. H. Bradley and the British Idealists.! This is not because they are not important philosophers. On the contrary. It is generally agreed that Bradley, in particular, is a major philosopher, as well as a great, if demanding, writer. 2 It […]

Does a Marxian Critical Theory of Society Need a Moral Theory? Kai Nielsen To show Marx is not a moral philosopher is not to show that he is not a moralist, i.e., one having or propounding moral judgements and views . R. G. Peffer As the image of actually existing socialism becomes more and more […]

Freedom’s Devices The Place of the Individual in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right John Rosentha/ The ordinary man thinks he is free if it is open to him to act as he pleases but his very arbitrariness implies that he is not free. When I will the rational, then I am acting not as a particular […]

Why Should a Dialectician Learn to Count to Four? Slavoj Zizek The triad and its excess How far must a Hegelian dialectician learn to count? Most of the interpreters of Hegel, not to mention his critics, are trying to convince us in unison that the right answer reads: to three (the dialectical triad, etc.). Moreover, […]

Active Citizenship as Political Obligation Tony Skiffen Rousseau says in The Social Contract: As soon as public service ceases to be the chief business of the citizens, and they would rather serve with their money than with their persons, the state is not far from its fall. When it is necessary to march out to […]

Gorz on Work and Liberation Sean Sayers Work is and always has been a central human activity; but only in the last decade has it become a major political issue. It has taken the re-emergence of mass unemployment to make it so. Right up until the war, the view that mass unemployment is intolerable in […]

Revealing the Truth of Art Andrew Bowie Philosophical discussion of art in English tends not to aim its sights particularly high, and some Anglo-Saxon philosophy has effectively denied art any serious philosophical significance at all. In this light a contemporary German book* which wishes to argue for the truth of art over that of the […]

The Inorganic Body and the Ambiguity of Freedom Andrew Collier The universality of man manifests itself in practice in that universality which makes the whole of nature his inorganic body, (1) as a direct means oflife and (2) as the matter, the object and the tool of his life activity. Nature is man’s inorganic body, […]

Ethical Dimensions of Human Attitudes to Nature Radim Bures In this paper I intend to pursue the question as to how ethics can make a contribution to human efforts to protect, or rescue the environment. A complementary question is how the continuing environmental crisis can influence the development of ethical theory itself. Historically speaking, the […]

Reason and Emotion Miranda Fricker The question of how emotion relates to reason acquires its importance from an apparent conflict between the implicit teachings of Western philosophy and and feminism. If philosophy advises that we should place our trust, if anywhere, in reason; and if feminism has learned that it is a political imperative to […]

Television Fictions Quality and Truth-Telling John Mepham There is now going on a debate about the future of British television broadcasting. This debate was sparked off by issues of broadcasting policy, by specific new proposals for the financing and regulation of television broadcasting. These proposals have seemed to many to threaten the quality of television […]

Ecosocial ismUtopian and Scientific Tim Hayward One of the most urgent intellectual tasks of our time is to understand the implications of ecology for social and political theory. Given that environmental degradation is increasingly undermining the biological (and in some ways the psychological) basis of human social life, it is evident that no social theory […]

The Artificial Womb Patriarchal Bone or Technological Blessing? Carl Hedman Every area of technological innovation has an idea that can serve as a kind of ‘Rorschach Test’ for revealing some of our deepest intuitions.l Consider, e.g., the idea of a fully automated factory. This idea can be used to bring out a person’s intuitions as […]

Writing the Revolution The Politics of Truth in Genet’s Prisoner of Love Simon Critchley , … Saintliness cannot be placed in question. Emmanuel Levinas 1 The last thing Jean Genet’s work needs is another philosopher’s commentary. After Sartre’ s monumental Saint Genet and Derrida’ s equally monumental-although anti-Sartrean -Glas, it might seem prudent, indeed respectful, […]

The Situationist International: A Case of Spectacular Neglect Sadie Plant The recent exhibitions of Situationist art and paraphernalia in London, Paris, and Boston, have given the Situationist International (SI) an unprecedented academic and cultural profile. Even during the movement’s most active period, when many of its ideas and practices were realised in the events in […]

Feminism, Humanism and Postmodernism Kate Soper I shall not begin, as I probably should, by offering to define my terms. Instead, I shall acknowledge that I have brought together three concepts admitted on all sides to be well-nigh indefinable. Or, if they are definable, they are so only by reference to a particular thinker’s usage […]

Reification, Class and ‘New Social Movements’ Paul Browne All significant social movements of the last thirty years have started outside the organised class interests and institutions. The peace movement, the ecology movement, the women’s movement, solidarity with the third world, human rights agencies, campaigns against poverty and homelessness, campaigns against cultural poverty and distortion: all […]