Article archive

Morality, Masculinity and the Market Ross Poo/e ~ I Interests and Duties Two conceptions of morality dominate contemporary discussion: utilitarianism, which specifies the content of morality in terms of the maximisation of total happiness or want satisfaction, and Kantianism, which defines morality in terms of formal principles of consistency. One purpose of this paper is […]

Debate on Market Socialism Alec Nove Beyond the Market? comments on Boris Frankel The editors have asked me to comment on Frankel’s Beyond the State?, since Frankel devotes several pages to a criticism of the sort of arguments which I advanced in my Economics of Feasible Socialism and in some other works. The key issue […]

‘Political philosophy’, according to Moller Okin in Women in Western Political Thought, consists of ‘writings by men, for men, and about men’. 1 Although the frequent references to the generic term ‘mankind’ by political philosophers might suggest a concern with ‘the human race as a whole’, she argues that ‘we do not need to look […]

From ‘Overdetermination’ to ‘Structural Causality’: Some Unresolved Problems in Althursser’s Treatment of Causality Sheelagh Strawbridge Introduction .Much of Althusser’s work, in collaboration with Balibar, is concerned, by means of a ‘symptomatic’ reading of Marx’s mature work, to draw out the latent, silent, untheorised concepts present in that work and provide and adequately describe these missing […]

Giddens and Historical Materialism Paul Bagguley Jntroduction In this paper I examine a recent critique of historical materialism by the British sociologist Anthony Giddens and the alternative theory of history developed by him. This is contained in his recent book A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism. It is the most recent in a series of […]

Karl Marx, Death and Apocalypse Joanna Hodge Thoughts occasioned by reading Wayne Hudson, The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch (Macmillan, 1982) and Julian Roberts, Waiter Benjamin (Macmillan, 1982) There are five grand’ ‘o’ld me~ of’ twentieth-century European Marxism: Adorno , Benjamin , Bloch , Lukacs , and Marcuse . Their works loom bulky and ominous […]

Mataphor and Metaphysics: The End of Philosophy and Derrida Jonathan Ree * Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, Harvester, xxiv + 330pp., £25.00, 1983 Christopher Norris, The Deconstructive Turn: Essays in the Rhetoric of Philosophy, Methuen, 201pp, £4.95, 1983 ENDS AND MEANS I~ ‘The Ends of Man’ hs~ed between 1~67 and one of the ten essays, […]

Ideological Commitments in the Philosophy of Science Jerry Ravetz To outward appearances the academic discipline of ‘the philosophy of science’ has in recent times been an austere and abstract study. Its concerns have been with one major problem, to the near exclusion of all others. The truthclaims of completed scientific knowledge have been considered to […]

On Revolutionising the Darwin Industry: A Centennial Retrospect Jim Moore The centenary of Darwin’s death has come and gone amid perilous times. In 1882 England’s leading naturalist was interred at Westminster Abbey as ‘Fenian outrages’ convulsed political opinion on the eve of the Phoenix Park assassinations (Moore, 1982). A century, later the Irish troubles persist, […]

Newton at the Crossroads Simon Schaffer ‘The label on a system of ideas is distinguished from that on other articles, amongst other things, by the fact that it deceives not only the buyer, but often the seller as well.’ (Marx, Capital, Volume II) Soris Hessen and his audience In this essay I attempt a re-evaluation […]

New Racism . . . New Realism Two Sides of the Same Coin Mark R. Duffield Introduction The Guardian recently reported that Bradford Metropolitan Borough Council, following research which showed that ethnic minorities did not receive their fair share of help from the social services department, has employed several Asians to act as unqualified social […]

Marxism and the Dialectical Method: A Critique of G.A. Cohen Sean Savers The dialectical method, Marx insisted, was at the basis of his account of society. In 1858, in a letter to Engels, he wrote, In the method of treatment the fact that by mere accident I again glanced through Hegel’s Logic has been of […]

DEBATE ON SEXIST LANGUAGE Sexism and Semantics Deborah Cameron In RP34, two articles appeared dealing with the relation between language and sexism: Alison Assiter’s critique of Dale Spender’s Man Made Language and a dialogue between Mike Shortland and John Fauvel on the subject of sexism and linguistic reform. Although these articles were not explicitly connected […]

Milton Fisk, Marxism and Ethics Andrew Collier “ I When Marxists have written about ethics – which they have not often done at any length – they have generally approached the topic in one of two ways: either they have sought to explain moral codes as ideologies with definite material foundations and functions in the […]

Towards a Theory of Videotics Richard Osborne In the post-structuralist diaspora the search for a nontaxonomic ‘truth’, an understanding of the political history of the presentation of signs, demands that we interrogate our relationship to the notion of the materiality of the sign. From Copernicus to Warhol we have witnessed the destabiliza tion of the […]

Fragments of an Analysis: Lacan in Context David Macey At risk of caricature, the received Anglo-Saxon image of Lacan might be formalized as Freud + Saussure = Lacan (2). The received formula owes much to one of the first texts to introduce Lacan’s work to an English-speaking audience, namely the translation of Althusser’s ‘Freud and […]

Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx and Negativity Chris Arthur In 1844 a turning point occurs in Marx’s philosophical development: for the first time he makes labour the central category of his social ontology (1) position of importance it was never to lose. Productive activity, and its alienation, are thematized in that most extraordinary document containing the results […]

INTRODUCTION TO HOUNTONDJI The article printed below is extracted from African Philosophy: Myth and Reality, by Paulin Hountondji, which was published by Hutchinson in June 1983. Hountondji was born in the Ivory Coast, and received his Higher Education in Paris, where he was a pupil of Althusser in the middle 1960s. He is now Professor […]

In Search of a Method: Hegel, Marx and Realism John Alien The development in recent years of a realist philosphy of science has provoked considerable interest within Marxist social science (1). Its attraction lies in the potential it holds for the construction of a philosophical antidote to posi tivism and conventionalism. In a short space […]

Masters, Slaves and Others Genevieve Lloyd In The Second Sex; Simone de Beauvoir utilised some of the basic concepts of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness – concepts such as ‘immanence’ and ‘transcendence’, ‘being-for-self’ and ‘being-for-others’, ‘bad faith’ and ‘authenticity’ – in a profound diagnosis of the con4ition of women. That she could thus use the framework […]

Women and the High Priests of Reason Janna Thompson Introduction Women are not supposed to be truly rational. The conviction that women can at best worship in the outer precincts of the temple of reason has a long tradition. It has survived philosophical and social revolutions. The idea is not that women are incapable of […]