Before democracy

Reivew of Kojin Karatani, Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy
Kojin Karatani, Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 176pp., £70.00 hb., £19.99 pb., 978 0 82236 885 4 hb., 978 0 82236 913 4 pb. Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy is a far from straightforward book to assess. Its sustained and remarkably coherent re-reading of early Greek philosophy […]

Debt society: Greece and the future of post-democracy

Dossier: The Greek Symptom: Debt, Crisis and the Crisis of the Left

The passage from early to late modernity is generally associated with a gradual process of democratization, in both political and economic realms. Politically speaking, representative democracy has enjoyed an unprecedented global spread. In the West, especially, political and social rights seemed to have flourished until quite recently. Economically speaking, we have witnessed a ‘democratization of […]

Noam Chomsky: Freedom and power

Interview noam chomsky Freedom and power Peter hallward I’d like to start by asking you about some of your basic philosophical principles, starting with your understanding of human freedom and creativity. In the modern European tradition I’m most familiar with, freedom is a dominant philosophical theme from Descartes through Rousseau to Kant. With Kant we […]

Red alert in cyberspace!

COMMENTARY Red alert in cyberspace! Paul Virilio One of the major problems now facing political as well as military strategists is the phenomenon of immediacy, of instantaneity. For ‘real time’ now takes precedence over real space, now dominates the planet. The primacy of real time, of immediacy, over space is an accomplished fact, and it […]

The future of post-socialism

The future of post-socialism Michael Rustin This article discusses three contributions to new thinking on the Left. * Two of these, Anthony Giddens’ s Beyond Left and Right: The Future ofRadical Politics and David Miliband’s collection Reinventing the Left (to which Giddens contributes the first chapter), set out to provide the new thinking which the […]

68 Reviews

Jon Elster, Political Psychology Marcus Roberts Lin Chun, The British New Left Gregory Elliott Ross Harrison, Democracy Anne Phillips, Democracy and Difference David Copp, Jean Hampton and John E. Roemer, eds., The Idea of Democracy David Archard A. Phillips Griffiths, ed., A. J. Ayer: Memorial Essays Jonathan Dancy and Ernest Sosa, eds., A Companion to […]

Democracy and Difference, Yale University, 15-18 April 1993; Derrida: Spectres Of Marx, University of Warwick, 20 May 1993; The First European Congress of Analytic Philosophy, Aix-en-Provence, 23-26 April 1993

Discussing Deliberative Democracy Democracy and Difference Yale University, 15-18 April 1993 It is New Haven in April. The annual meeting of the Conference for the Study of Political Thought has ‘descended upon Yale University to debate ‘Democracy and Difference’. The agenda for this year’s Conference, set by Seyla Benhabib, manifests her desire to bring together […]

Conceptions of ‘Civil Society’

Conceptions of ‘Civil Society’ Axe! Honneth When the intellectuals of Eastern Europe began to consider the difficulties and possibilities of a democratically organised political opposition they soon turned to a classical concept in the history of political ideas. They thought that the concept of civil society always used in English to indicate its connection to […]

Place and Time in Socialist Theory

Place and Time in Socialist Theory Michael Rustin Sources of Contemporary Pluralism Pluralism has become fashionable on the left. This new-found enthusiasm for diversity and choice is in part a defensive response by socialists to the decline of the mass support hitherto provided by the working class, to the ‘Forward March of Labour Halted’ 1, […]

Statistical Democracy: An Alternative to Democratic Centralism and Communalism

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 […]

15 Reviews

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 […]

Jacques Rancière: Democracy means equality

INTERVIEW Jacques RancièreDemocracy means equalityPassages: Jacques Rancière, for more than twenty years you have been following a somewhat unusual philosophical itinerary. It is obvious that what you are doing has nothing in common with traditional academic work. Most of your books reveal philosophical thought in unexpected contexts or in contexts that have been reformulated in […]

Constitutional state and democracy: On Jürgen Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms

In his Between Facts and Norms, [1] Jürgen Habermas offers a justification of the ʻdemocratic constitutional stateʼ from the viewpoint of his communicative or discourse theory, and gives a thorough exposition of his conception of democratic politics. In what follows I will attempt to give a general outline of Habermasʼs political philosophy and to suggest […]

Dictators and democrats in Latin America: But can the poor tell the difference?

Commentary Dictators and democrats in Latin America But can the poor tell the difference? Madeleine davis The recent Chilean Supreme Court decision to strip General Augusto Pinochet of his self-granted immunity from criminal prosecution has been widely welcomed, not only because it keeps alive the possibility that Pinochet, having escaped Spanish justice, may yet face […]

The cosmopolitan paradox: Response to Robbins: With Reply to Chandler

Bruce Robbinsʼs excellent article in RP 116 points up the paradox of cosmopolitanism – that it seems ʻperpetually torn between an empirical dimension and a normative dimensionʼ. [1] For Robbins, the paradox of cosmopolitanism is rooted in the limited empirical sense of political community. For genuine democracy people need to belong to the same ʻcommunity […]