Article archive

Materialism, Realism and the Reflection Theory* Sean Savers I The reflection theory is the traditional theory of knowledge of Marxism. It is this theory which is put forward by Engels and which is developed and defended at length by Lenin in MateriaZism and EmpirioCriticism [1]. The basic principles of this theory are simply stated and […]

A Critical Note on Bhaskar and Systems Theory* G. Carchedi Von Bertalanffy’s article ‘The Theory of Open Systems in ~hysics and Biology’, published in 1950 [1], is widely regarded as having started the systems-thinking movement. In the words of F.E. Emery, scientific interest was mobilized by von Bertalanffy’s ‘rigorous distinction between open and closed systems’ […]

of them has much in the way of arguments. Q. r’;hat do you make of Donald Davidson and the contemporary philosophy of action, which has been taken very seriously on the continent? A. I never found it very interesting. It seems to me to be a hang over from the problem of free will. I’m […]

Abbot Terrasson has remarked that if the size of a volume be measured not by the number of its pages but by the time required for mastering it, it can be said of many a book, that it would be much shorter if it were not so short. (Kant, Preface to First Edition, Critique of […]

Liberty, Authority and the Negative Dialectics of J.S. Mill Trevor Pateman I Overview Social systems do not automatically reproduce themselves, and it may require an immense effort to create or recreate conditions of possibility for the continued reproduction of a particular social order, or component part of a social system. For at least part of […]

The ‘Authoritarian’ Nature of Utopia Barbara Goodwin I t In recent years there have been a number of famous denigrators of utopianism whose views are formed by liberal-democratic culture: among them, Popper, Oakeshott, Talmon and Hayek. From the standpoint of lib..eralism, the main objection to the utopian way of thinking is that it precludes free […]

On Materialism· Wal Suchting TEACHER SI FU TEACHER SI FU TEACHER SI FU Si Fu, name the basic questions of philosophy. Are things external to us, selfsufficient, independent of us, or are things in us, dependent on us, non-existent without us? What opinion is the correct one? There has been no decision about it …. […]

Preface to ‘Proletarian Nights’ The article printed below is a translation of the Introduction (pp.7-l2) of Jacques Ranci~re’s La Nuit des Proletaires, which was published last year [1]. The book deals with some well known events of the l830s and l840s – the utopias of Fourier, Saint-Simon, Cabet and Enfantin; the ‘Free Women’; the socialist […]

sacrificing the majesty of the masses and the positivity of their practices to the discourses and the illusions of a few dozen ‘non-representative’ individuals. In the labyrinth of their real and imaginary travels, I simply wanted to follow the thread of two guiding questions: What paradoxical route led these deserters, who wanted to tear themselves […]

15 with considerably more historical precision than Heidegger, who is more concerned with proving that reification is the permanent structure of the human mind. That not only this question but the whole book was largely conceived as a response to Luk§cs has been convincingly demonstrated by Goldmann, in Lukacs and Heidegger. But, as Lukacs has […]

Jacques Lacan – the French Freud? John Bird French intellectual life appears to exercise a fascination, some might say a dreadful influence, on the .English intellectual avant-garde. In the 1960s it was the tortuous debate between Sartre and LeviStrauss; in the 1970s, the ‘true’, dehumanised Marxism of Althusser; and as we enter the 1980s, we […]

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 Crucially, linguists do not agree. Mounin, G., Clefs pOUY’ la linguistique, Seghers, Paris, 1971, p.ll. See above, ‘Process Three – The Oedipus Complex, the Father and Social Rules’ . Identified by, amongst others, E.P. Thompson. Turkle, S., Psychoanalytic Politics, Burnett Books, New York, 1979. For […]

71 72 his endorsement of the latter as opposed to the former see PhiLosophy of Right, para.67, and also my discussion in the earlier noted article in Radical, PhiLosophy 26. Phenomeno Logy, para. 196 . This is clearer in the discussion in the EnayaZopaedia: BegeL’s PhiLosophy What’ 5 73 of Mind, trans. lVallace and Findlay […]

A Comparison of Marxist and Hegelian Dialectical Form fan Hunt and Roy Swan Introduction Our aim in this paper is to exhibit the formal differences that distinguish the Harxist dialectic from its Hegelian predecessor. In sum, whereas in Hegel’s system identity has primacy over contradiction and, what comes to the same thing, self-identity has primacy […]

Scientific Realism and the Human World: the case of psychoanalysis Andrew Collier In this paper, I want both to defend scientific realism as the correct ontological assumption of the human as well as the natural sciences, and to make certain reservations about the epistemological status of the human sciences. l The main course of the […]

Introduction to (ieorges Canguilhem Mike Short/and Take away Canguilhem and you will no longer understand much about Althusser, Althusserianism and a whole series of discussions which have taken place among French Marxists; you will no longer grasp what is specific to sociologists such as Bourdieu, Castel, Passerson and what marks them so strongly within sociology; […]

Abstrac:tion: A Realist Interpretation Andrew Saver The relations between the theoretical and the empirical, the abstract and the concrete, have always been problematic in marxism. Marx’s disdain for knowledge based upon mere appearances has meant that few marxists have accepted the empiricist doctrine of the theory-neutrality of observation. But while, in a negative way, there […]

‘eorg Lukuc:s, Waiter Benjamin, and the Motivation to make Politic:al Art Jennifer Todd In this paper I re-explore the relations which do and which should hold between art and politics. I reaffirm the traditional Marxist view that there is an overlap between socialist politics and aesthetic activity from which both politics and art should benefit. […]

Rawls’ Theory of Justice and ‘Market Socialism’ Carl G. Hedman 1 Market Socialism and Individualism One of the intuitions behind recent attempts to combine a socialist perspective with a limited reliance on market mechanisms is that a genuinely democratic socialism is incompatible with the bureaucratic tendencies of a command economy. David Schweickart has put this […]

Statistical Democracy: an Alternative to Democratic Centralism and Communalism John Burnheim 1 The Problem The central failure of socialist thinking in this century is its failure to produce a plausibly realistic and attractive conception of how a socialist society might operate. The two major contenders for the allegiance of socialist theorists are either unattractive or […]

Realism and Social Science Some Comments on Roy Bhaskar’s ‘The Possibility of Naturalism’ Ted Benton 1 Introduction An increasing body of philosophical work l is now available which (a) presents a ‘realist’ alternative to the hitherto predominant ‘positivist’ and ‘conventionalist’ currents in the philosophy of science and (b) attempts to use this realist account of […]