Reviews archive

REVIEWS Isidor Feinstein Stone, The Trial of Socrates, London, Cape, 1988, xi + 282pp, £12.95 hb, ISBN 022402591-0 Near the end of his life 1. F. Stone turned away from the hidden history of US politics to look at an older story, the trial of Socrates. Always a defender of democracy and freedom of speech, […]

REVIEWS LACAN AMONG THE RUBBLE David Macey, Lacan in Contexts, London, Verso, 1988, xi + 322pp., £34.95 hb, £12.95 pb, 0-86091-215-9 hb, 0-86091942-0 pb. French books on Lacan still belong to the age of faith. They are hagiographic, or obscure, or both. Anglo-Saxon versions tend to hesitate between admiring importation of French fashion and nervous […]

REVIEWS THE ORIGINAL CONTRACT? Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract, Oxford, Polity Press, 1988, 264pp., £27.50 hb, £8.95 pb. In the good old days when education was not yet subordinated to the market, and the study of politics was presumed to include acquaintance with classical texts as well as a working knowledge of computers, I used […]

REVIEWS ANTI -ANTI -ALTHUSSERIANISM Gregory Elliott, Althusser: The Detour of Theory, London, Verso, 1988, 359pp., £29.95 hb, £10.95 pb. Few events in the recent history of the intellectual left in Britain can have had as disruptive an effect upon its prevailing orthodoxies and habits of mind as the onset of ‘Ahtusserianism’ in the early 1970s. […]

REVIEWS I I I ~~~~~~t L———_ _ _ ~ ___ J THE HISTORICAL MATERIALISM DEBATE S. H. Rigby, Marxism and History: a Critical Introduction, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1987, 314pp., £29.95 hb. Derek Sayer, The Violence ofAbstraction: the Analytic F oundationsofHistoricaIMaterialism,Oxford,Blackwell, 1987,xiiiand 173pp., £22.50 hb. Alex Callinicos, Making History: Agency, Structure and Change in Social […]

REVIEWS HEGEL: PAST AND PRESENT Laurence Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit, 1770-1807, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (,Ideas in Context’ Series), 1987, xiii + 459pp., £30 hb. David Lamb (ed.), Hegel and Modern Philosophy, London: Croom Helm, 1987, 262pp, £30 hb. Anyone who has followed the remorseless expansion of the literature on […]

REVIEWS FEMINIST FUTURES Lynne Segal, Is the Future Female?, London, VIrago, 1986. Lynne Segal, in Is the Future Female?, criticises much contemporary feminism as uniformly celebrating difference between the sexes, and thereby downplaying the changes that have taken place, historically, in women’s lifes, and the social, psychological and economic variations amongst women. Offering analyses of […]

REVIEWS _ ‘$’npOfPAMMbl M 0 C K B A HEGEL CONTRA NIETZSCHE Stephen Houlgate, Hegel, Nietzsche and the Criticism of Metaphysics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987,300 pp, £27.50 hb In this closely argued and ambitious book Stephen Houlgate presents an Hegelian critique of Nietzsche. The essence of this critique is that Nietzsche’s thought is insufficiently […]

REVIEWS Whitehead Revisited A.N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World. London: Free Associated Books, 1985. £4.95 pb. Free Association Books have brought out a new edition of Science and the ~odern !orld, first published m 1926. It is some years since it was last available in the UK. The initiative for this facsimile reprint was […]

Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope Vincent Geoghegan Kate Soper, Humanism and Anti-Humanism Noel Parker Richard Edwards Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science Kathryn Russell G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophical Propaedeutic Sean Sayers Dick Howard, From Marx to Kant Keith Ansell-Pearson Hilary Lawson, Reflexivity: The Post-Modern Predicament The Second of January Group, […]

REVIEWS On the Jackson Trail lonathan Ree, Proletarian Philosophers: Problems in Socialist Culture in Britain, 1900-1940, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984, 176pp, £15 hb If the fundamental experience of twentieth-century European philosophy has been that of a continuing selfreflection upon its own status and identity, a persistent and profound identity-crisis in the face of the growing […]

REVIEWS Reconstructing Structural Marxism Ted Benton, The Rise and Fall of Structural Marxism; Althusser and his Influence, Macmillan, London, 1984, 259pp lI8.00 hc, 1.6.95 pb Benton’s book has many facets: it is an introductory text, a re-evaluation and reconstruction of Structural Marxism, an argument for theoretical progress lying through the synthesis of Structural Marxism with […]

Jeffrey Moussaieff Mason, ed., The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904 Jeffrey Moussaleff Mason, The Assault on Truth: Freud’s suppression of the seduction theory Stephen Marcus, Freud and the Culture of Psychoanalysis David Archard Noel W. Thompson, The People’s Science: the popular political economy of exploitation and crisis, 1816-34 Mike Shortland R. C. Lewontin, […]

REVIEWS Young Hegels H.S. Harris, Hegel’s Development, Volume 11: Night Thoughts (Jena 1.801-6), Oxford University Press, 1983, £35 hb, lxx + 627pp Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel, Oxford University Press, New York, 1983, £25 hb, xxiv + 646pp M.J. Inwood, Hegel, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983, £24 hb, xv + 582pp In […]

REVIEWS 8yJingo Finding The Right Level John MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, Manchester University Press, 1984, 288pp., 1:..25 hb MacKenzie’s book is one of that kind that takes a debate which has been going on in papers, articles and reviews, and tries to assemble a definite thesis out of the debate. It is a compilation of […]

REVIEWS The Politics of Equality Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and Equality, Martin Robertson, Oxford, 1983, £15 hb. Raymond Plent, Equality, Markets and the State, Fabian Society, London, 1984, £1.50 pb. American philosophers have in recent years made a number of major contributions to systematic political philosophy. Rawls and Nozick are […]

REVIEWS Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes (eds.), Rationality and Relativism, Basil Blackwell, 1982 .Bryan Wilson’s anthology of essays on ‘Rationality’, first published in 1970, has become something of a minor classic in recent analytical philosophy, bringing together the main contributions to a lively and accessible debate, and providing the starting-point for a host of subsequent […]

REVIEWS Elementary Illusions Nancy Cartwright, How the Laws of Physics Lie, Oxford University Press, 1983, 1..16 hb, 1..7.95 pb The classic work of C.G. Hempel established as orthodoxy the view that scientific explanation consists in subsuming phenomena under covering laws. With varying degrees of plausibility the analysis was extended to cover ordinary, everyday explanations, which […]

REVIEWS Post-Industrial Socialism Rudolf Bahro, Socialism and Survival (trans. David Fernbach), Heretic Books, f.3.50 pb Andre Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class (trans. Michael Sonenscher), Pluto Press, 1:.3.95 pb The ‘debate on the concept of the proletariat’ is, suggests Rudolf Bahro, ‘outdated’; it ‘tends right from the start to be scholastic’. Farewell to the Working […]

REVIEWS Assessing Marcuse B. Katz, Herbert Marcuse and the Art of Liberation: An Intellectual Biography, Verso, 1982, i4.50 pb Theor 19.95 hc More Marcuse literature. The process of recovery and critical reassessment continues. Both these books contribute in some way to the development of a more informed and theoretically sophisticated account and critique of Marcuse’s […]

REVIEWS • Two Views of Carol McMillan Carol McMillan, Blackwell, 1982 Women~ Reason and Nature, Basil Carol McMillan’s book grew, as she explains, out of an M.Phil thesis written at Kings College, London, and she acknowledges a debt to Peter Winch. I find her book interesting both because I think it locates some areas in […]