Article archive

Beyond Objectivism and Relativism Ingvar Johansson One very important line of division in todayt s philosophy is between those who want to go beyond the dualism between objectivism and relativism and those who still think this dualism is a live option. On this issue t I side with Richard Rortyts view in Philosophy and the […]

The Politics of Fulfilment and Transfiguration J. M. Bernstein- SeylaBenhabib’ s Critique, Norm, and Utopia* is, without doubt, the most philosophically acute and learned history of the critical theory of society yet to be written. Because the intentions of Benhabib’s work are systematic rather than historical, her history is equally a major contribution to critical […]

Place and Time in Socialist Theory Michael Rustin Sources of Contemporary Pluralism Pluralism has become fashionable on the left. This new-found enthusiasm for diversity and choice is in part a defensive response by socialists to the decline of the mass support hitherto provided by the working class, to the ‘Forward March of Labour Halted’ 1, […]

Socialism and Myth: The Case of Sorel and Bergson Ma/co/m Vout and Lawrence Wi/de Georges Sorel (1847-1922) continues to exert a fascination for some radicals, as recent books and articles indicate [1]. This attraction is perhaps understandable, but in our view mistaken. It stems from his support for revolutionary syndicalism and his notion of the […]

Ethics and Group Conflict: Between Marxism and Liberalism Carl Hedman Consider the following case: As Jones is driving home from a union meeting, he sees an injured motorist lyirYg in the ditch. He stops to help, but as he steps into the ditch he realizes that the person he is about the help is Smith, […]

The Need to Work Sean Sayers The theme of this paper is work. At a time when mass unemployment is a major social and political problem throughout the industrial world, it is a theme which needs little introduction. Nevertheless, I shall begin with a bit. For I must confess that work is a subject that […]

Mass Media Studies and the Question of Ideology Martin Barker On the face of it, radical understanding of the mass media has to count as one of the great success stories of the post-’60s political and academic culture. Without attempting anything like a historical survey, it is unquestionably the case that whole new fields and […]

The Frankfurt School and the Problem of Critique: A Reply to McCarney Peter Dews and Peter Osborne The question of the possibility, form, and validity of a ‘critical’ social science, of its relation to Marxism and to the ideas of dialectic and contradiction, received considerable attention on the pages of Radical Philosophy in the late […]

Socialism and Democracy: Beyond State and Civil Society Roger Harris Introduction This article started life as a review of John Keane’s Public Life and Late Capitalism ..:. Towards ~ Socialist Thaor y of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 1984), an Lt begins with a brief account of this important book. In the sections which follow I […]

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 […]