Reviews archive

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 […]

In the Preface to The Politics of Time Peter Osborne claims that it comprises two books: ʻa book about the philosophy of time which grew out of a book about the culture of modernityʼ (p. x). The reason for this is that metaphysical questions about time and temporality inevitably confront anyone who inquires deeply enough […]

Kinds of Minds provides an introduction to, and refinement of, the position Dennett has developed to increasing acclaim over nearly thirty years, and which is now sufficiently important to require engagement from those aligned with different philosophical traditions. For he deals with a crucial topic – the place of intentionality in a material world – […]

Philosophy of Mind is presently regarded as one of the most productive areas of comtemporary analytic philosophy. A number of recent introductory works (here those by Jackson and Braddon Mitchell, Crane, Kim and Rey) give us a chance to reflect on the dominant paradigms in terms of which the subject is taught. These texts display […]

Back in the 1960s, Quentin Skinner started a little revolution in the study of political theory in Britain. Drawing on Wittgenstein and Austin, he attacked the whole idea that there could be monolithic cumulative progress in ʻpolitical scienceʼ. There was no fixed set of political questions, he said – rights, the state, equality, and civil […]

Jane Gallop is an American academic whose writings on psychoanalysis, feminism and related topics are as dazzling in their intelligence as they are scintillating in their wit. Their humour is part of the thought processes embodied in her texts. A careful argument, proceeding by tentative steps, will finally reach an explosive and paradoxical conclusion, inducing […]

Reviews A gender lens to the centurySheila Rowbotham, A Century of Women: The History of Women in Britain and the United States, Viking, London and New York, 1997. xiv + 753 pp., £20.00 hb., 0 670 87420 5. The briefest reflection on the scale of this undertaking is enough to produce vertigo, induced not so […]

Marxism has differed from most other bodies of radical political thought in its conviction that its political radicalism is inseparably connected to a philosophical radicalism – a conviction that underlies the name of this journal. Engels, Kautsky and the orthodox Soviet Marxists all saw Marxism as distinguished from mainstream (ʻbourgeoisʼ) social thought by the dialectical […]

Reviews In the Name of the FatherElisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, translated by Barbara Bray, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1997. xix + 574 pp., £25.00 hb., 07456 1523 6. In the spring of 1962, a 21-year-old woman is standing on a balcony in Paris, anxiously waiting for her father to keep his appointment with her. She waits […]