Article archive

From Virginia Woolf to the Post-Moderns: Developments in a Feminist Aesthetic Pauline Johnson Contemporary feminist art theory and practIce has, by and large, turned away from a modernist affirmation of the autonomy of art from IHe towards a post-modern problematisation of the specIfIc category of the aesthetIc. The modernist assertion of the freedom of the […]

The Question ‘Why Do I Do Philosophy?’ James Grant Someone recently suggested to me – not entirely unkindly – that I should try and write something to the title ‘Why do I do Philosophy?’ My first assumption was that the question was in effect ambiguous, and could be answered in two quite different ways. In […]

Proletarian Philosophy: A Version of Pastoral? Jonathan Ree I write in and about an embarrassment: how should I, a philosophy teacher, respond to people who are also committed to philosophy, but cut off from official philosophical institutions? It was partly to focus my attention on this problem that I revisited a much-respected acquaintance a few […]

Lyotard and the Politics of Antifou ndational ism Stuart Sim 11 An increasingly important trend in recent philosophy has been antifoundationalism: the rejection of the search for 10gical1y-consistent, self-evidently true “grounds” for philosophical discourse, and the substitution of ad hoc tactical manoeuvres as justification for what are quite often eccentric lines of argument. Antifoundationalism is […]

Marx’s “Social Revolution” and the Division of Labour Istvan Meszaros Marx was well aware of the burden of class de terminations which tend to subsume the individuals under their own logic; from his early writings to the Grundrisse and Capital he never stopped defining the task of emancipation as belonging to the social individual. Equally, […]

Civil Disobedience and Nuclear Protest: A Reply to Dworkin Richard Norman Philosophical writing about civil disobedience tends to reach only the vaguest of conclusions: that it is normal1y wrong to disobey the law in a democratic society, but that in some circumstances civil disobedience may be justified, provided the issue is sufficiently serious and weighty […]

Luce Irigaray and the Female Imaginary: Speaking as a Woman Margaret Whitford Although Luce Irigaray’s name is beginning to become more familiar in England, her work has not, for the most part, been translated, so that non-French-speaking readers have had to confine themselves to the odd bits and pieces – the translation of an interview […]

Dialectical Perception: A Synthesis of Lenin and Bogdanov Edmond Wright Ernst Mach (1976, 122) has a story about a savage who was surprised to discover the power of written symbols. The savage was ordered to take a basket of fruit, say, mangoes, from one colonist to another, a basket that, as well as the fruit, […]

Back to Utopia: Anthony Giddens and Modern Social Theory fan Craib I I ![ Over the past fifteen years, Anthony Giddens has produced a series of studies in social theory that must at the very least be caUed impressive. Despite the boom in theoretical work during the ’70s, he is the only British sociologist of […]

The Narration of an Unhappy Consciousness: Lukacs, Marxism, the Novel, and Beyond Keith Ansell-Pearson Parmenides said, ‘one cannot think of what is not’; – we are at the other extreme, and say, ‘what can be thought of must certainly be a fiction.’ – Nietzsche (1) Introduction J. M. Bernstein has written a book that merits […]

The Cunning of History in Reverse Gear Istvan Meszaros 1. ‘Llst der Vernunft’ and the ‘Cunning of History’ The Marxist notion of the ‘cunning of history’ was formulated as a ‘materialist standing on its feet’ of Hegel’s ‘cunning of Reason’ (Ust der Vernunft). According to Hegel, the latter is: ‘an artful device which, whlle seeming […]

What Makes Critical Theory IC riticaI’? Joseph McCarney The toplc of this paper is the project of a critlcal theory of society. It considers that project in the form it takes in the work of its best known exponents, the theorists of the socalled ‘Frankfurt School’. The main question to be answered is the question […]

The Human Body in Social Theory: Reich, Foucault and the Repressive Hypothesis Russell Keat 1. Are human bodies human? / recurrent issue in both philosophy and the human sciences has been the possibility of identifying distinctively human characteristics – such as the capacities for language, purposive action and conscious experience; sodallty, historlcity, and cultural diversity; […]

Scientific and Social Problems and Perspectives of Alternative Medicine: Analysis of a Dutch Controversy by Joseph Keu/artz, Chung/in Kwa and Hans Radder Introduction Ever since the mid-1970s, the Western world has seen growing public and polltical interest in alternative medicine. The main reason has been a feellng of dissatisfaction with regular, science-based medicine, which gained […]

A Critique of Deep Ecology Part 11 Richard Sylvan 5. Beyond the value core: central metaphysical and epistemological ‘intuitions’ of deep ecology. Extension beyond the value core is essential to explain how the core themes can be maintained. In particular, it is required to explain what values-in-nature suggests; how it is, and can be, that […]

Politics Re-entered: The State in its Place Tony Skillen Though we cannot turn our backs on it or imagine, or wish, that it will wither away, the idea that the state is by definition the sole locus of politics seems Increasingly archaic. The price of retaining ‘the statist conception of politics’ seems to me that […]

A Critique of Deep Ecology Richard Sylvan Part I Deep ecology appears to be some elaboration of the position that natural things other than humans have value in themselves, value sometimes perhaps exceeding that of or had by humans. But which elaboration is quite another matter. Indeed deep ecology has not just been rapidly converted […]

Social Madness Ronald Aronson In The Dialectics of Disaster: A Preface to Hope I have analyzed the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Problem’ as an act of societal madness . We ordinarily use this term ‘madness’ quite freely in conversation, but then abandon it upon moving into serious discourse and study – perhaps in trying […]

English Conservatism and the Aesthetics of Architecture Michael Rustin Prologue Architecture seems a ‘natural’ subject for conservatives, and it is therefore fitting that it has become one of the maill t·:!rrains for the advocacy of the intellectual perspectives of the New Right. Particularly, that is, of the New Right in England, where organic and traditionalist […]

New Right Utopias Ruth Levitas ‘” I (i) ‘Thatcherism’ (in ‘The New Right’ Many commentators have noted that there are two different strands to New Right thinking, economic liberalism and political authoritarianism. This is clearest in the collection The Politics of Thatcherism , where most of the contributors make similar assumptions: that Thatcherism exists (a […]

Doctrinaire Liberalism Anthony Arblaster ••• the liberal rarely needs to be ashamed of the realities created in his name as the socialist has to be much of the time. (Ralf Dahrendorf <1» Liberal writers, at least in the last forty years, have made a speciality of claiming that, unlike almost all other doctrines, and certainly […]