Reviews archive

RBVIBWS SOCIOBIOLOGY D. Barash, Sociobiology and Behaviour, Heinemann, 1979, £3.95 pb T. Clutton-Brock & P. Harvey, Readings in Sociobiology, W.H.Freeman, 1979, £4.95 pb W. Mackensie, Biological Issues in POlitics, Manchester UP, 1978, £3.95 hc M. Midgley, Beast and Man, Harvester, 1979, £7.50 hc M. Ruse, Sociobiology: Sense or Nonsense? D. Reidel, 1978, no price E.O.Wilson, […]

exclusively human characteristic. A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs […]

REVIEWS ANOTHER GOODBYE TO ALL THAT Charles Bettelheim, Questions sur la Chine apres la mort de Mao Tse-Tsoung, Maspero (Serie., Economie et Socialisme) 1978. English translation in Monthly Review, issue of July / August 1978 This long essay by Bettelheim was written in response to a Canadian resident in Peking, Neil Burton, who had questioned […]

REVIEWS A MARXIST MATERIALISM? David Hillel Ruben, ~~~~~~~~~~~~, Marxism and Materialism Harvester /Humanities, £10.50 David Ruben sets out to contest ‘those idealist distortions that have managed to find their way into the theory and practice of Marxism”, in his opinion, over the past fifty years – roughly, since the publication of Luka.cs’ History and Class […]

. a-evlews ~ The philosophy of opp..ession .Rip Bulkeley Hodge., Struckmann and Trost, Cultural Bases of Racism and Group Oppression, California, Two Riders Press, 1975 In the orthodox tradition of Philosophy, which we not our concern. We examine past and present patterns and thoughts tl) get an understanding of the basic ingredients of Western culture […]

HERMENEUTICS Bc BEYOND Dilthey: Selected Writings, edited, translated and introduced by HP Rickman, CUP, £8.75 The main philosophical project of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833 -1911) was to establish the possibility of knowledge in the human sciences, or ‘human studies’ as Rickman prefers to translate the term Geisteswissenschaften, thus marking a difference between these and the natural […]

B. Hindess and P. Q. Hirst, Pre-capitalist modes of production B. Hindess and P. Q. Hirst, Mode of production and social formation: An auto-critique of ‘Pre-capitalist modes of production’ Graham Burchell Working Papers in Cultural Studies, No. 10: On Ideology Ian Craib Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama Michael Ryan Jean-Pierre Faye, ed., […]

l- AltJlUsser, L. 1969 For Marx, London, Penguin; 1974 Elements d’autocritig~, Paris, HacheUe Arato, A. 1972a ‘Lukacs’ Theory of Reification’, Telos 11, pp25-66; 1972b Notes on ‘History and Class Consciousness’, Philosophical Forum Vol. JII, pp386-400 Colletti, L. 1973 Marxism and Hegel London, New Left Books Fecnberg, A. 1971 ‘Heificationand the Antimonies of Socialist Thought’ Telos […]

Reviews Goodbye to all that’ ‘1 Perry Anderson, Considerations on western Marxism, New Left Books, 121pp, £4 Marx in British culture Through the sixties and early seventies English academic’ Marxism lay back with its legs open. We experienced the successive thrills of penetration by the giants of continental European Marxist philosophy. Lukacs, Korsch, Adorno (perhaps […]

pose jor the RPJ not so much problems bral philosophy of the university. of editoiship as such (it is always II can’t. say I blame anyone for inexcellent) but problems of basic decision on this point. Meanwhile, RPJ is carrying out theoretical leanings and purposes. As a reader I am nQt always sure Mary Warnock’s […]

Social inertia being what it is revolutions are resisted and hence infrequent. The small caucus which always provides the spark for a popular revolution must be fully aware that a successful revolution will only come about if there prevails a profound dissatisfaction wi~ the status quo. In a sentence whose political profundity makes it strangely […]

Reviews industry demands more than narrow special ism. Gorz analyses the growth of student militancy in this context, but beyond students he sees the contradiction as the source by the social democratic parties of the ‘real needs’ of the ‘modern that came to power in Europe during worker, the needs that will lead to the […]

Reviews Anarchy, State and Utopia R A Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, Blackwells, 1974 367pp £5.50 By elaborating A theory of Justice in terms of a general social, political and moral theory, and by arguing specifically for a form of welfarestate liberalism, John Rawls brought political philosophy back to the academic groves from the wilderness. […]

Reviews Half a Critique Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, trans. Alan Sheridan Smith, ed. Jonathan Ree, New Left Books, 820pp, £15.00 Pietro Chiodi, Sartre and Marxism, trans. Kate Soper, Harvester Press, 162pp, £ 6. 95 lan Craib, Existentialism and Sociology: A Study of Jean-Paul Sartre, Cambridge University Press, 237pp, £ 6. 95 Sartre’s monumental […]

cerned with converting visual sensations into a picture. Drop from ‘picture’ the connotations of ‘picturesque’ and think in terms of visual enquiry and description. Thus, Oezanne’s pictures are as much description and enquiry as mathematical pictures; symbolic logic pictures and pictures in physics – models. Cezanne studied objects and tried to grasp and present the […]

REVIEWS Tragic Marxism Theodor Adorno: Minima Moralia, New Left Books, £4.25 The note on the inside cover describes Minima Moralia as ‘unlike any other book by [Adorno], or any other work in the Western Marxist tradition’. For some, indeed, it might be debatable whether it falls into the Marxist tradition at all;l if it had […]

Reviews Retrieving democracy? c. B. MacPherson, Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval, Oxford University Press, hardback E2.75, ISBN 1982 71875, paperback El.25, ISBN 1982 71891 MacPherson presents two concepts of power corresponding to the two concepts of man’s essential nature. ‘Extractive power’ is what a man has insofar as he is a consumer; it can be […]

LelleJls Dear Editors The trouble with most Marxists, would-be Marxists, left-wing intellectuals, and bannercarrying hangers-on, is that they live outside!the real classstruggle; they live in cloisters, like monks; and only very rarely do they ever descend into the suppurating wound where the organisms of inequality originate. There is sound reason for the belief.that no revolution […]

Lelle:rs Dear Editors Jerry M Cohen in his discussion of Roy Edgley’s article ‘Reason and Violence’, presents himself as both a victim of, and propagandist for, a brand of doublethink increasingly popular amongst our so-called radicals. on the one hand, he argues that we should have no truck with the meaning of words (a pursuit […]

REVIEWS The new journal Economy and Society declared its stand under the banner of serious scholarship. Its editorial statement noted that ‘The search for new orientations (in social science) has led to a revived interest in ~Iarxism, Structural i sm, and Phenomenology in its various forms, to attempts to create a ‘critical’ theory. Thesd’new interests, […]

REUIEWS greatest merit… His I”as a call to arms, to hatred: class against class, against a patient and mortal enemy with whom there could be no accommodation. THE WATCHDOGS Sean Savers The Watchdogs, however, is more than a work of mere passion – it is also a theoretical critique of academicism, particularly in philosophy; and […]