Reviews archive

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 […]

REUIEWS THEORIES OF PRACTICE Richard Norman Richard J. Bernstein, Praxis and Action, Duckworth – 1972; £3.95 One of the declared aims of Radical Philosophy is to draw on alternative philosophical traditions as a way of overcoming the inadequacies of analytical philosophy. This is not to say that any of the other dominant traditions offers a […]

REUIEWS stand them can be ‘on the way to being a philosopher’. Perhaps this doesn’t matter much, though. Yesey assures us: VESEY DOES IT! Jonatban Ree “Philosophers are not a breed apart. They merely have a peculiarly well developed taste for arguing about rather abstruse topics. If you enjoy intellectual games, you will enjoy the […]

REUIEWS m KINDS DF MWIS! only with ‘scientistic’ Harxism.” (4) The exact opposite is true. However often these two things co-exist in practice they are theoretically inconsistent. If Marxism is just a subdivision of natural science there is no place, not only for the cadre but for any self-conscious activity at all, since the revolution […]

REVIEWS Capital futures István Mészáros, Beyond Capital, The Merlin Press, London, 1995. xxvi + 994 pp., £45.00 hb., £14.95 pb., 0 85036 454 X hb., 0 85036 432 9 pb. It is now a quarter of a century since István Mészáros had his first big success in Britain with Marxʼs Theory of Alienation. In the […]

Reviews In the same boat? Ronald Aronson, After Marxism, The Guilford Press, New York and London, 1995. xiv + 321 pp., £29.95 hb., £14.50 pb., 0 89862 417 7 hb., 0 89862 416 9 pb. Cyril Smith, Marx at the Millennium, Pluto Press, London and Chicago, 1996. iv + 182 pp., £40.00 hb., £12.99 pb., […]

41In Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982) Michael Sandel offered an influential critique of John Rawlsʼs A Theory of Justice which constitutes one strand in the ʻcommunitarianʼ challenge to contemporary Anglophone philosophical liberalism. Notoriously, Sandel, along with other communitarians, was charged with a failure to spell out the political implications of his philosophical views, […]

41Frantz Fanon would have been seventy in the summer of 1995 and the volumes under review celebrate the anniversary of his birth. Most of the twenty-one contributions to the Critical Reader are papers delivered at the ʻFanon Todayʼ conference held at Purdue University in March 1995; the handsomely produced The Fact of Blackness originates in […]