Towards a juridical archaeology of primitive accumulation: A reading of Foucault's Penal Theories and Institutions

The virtual dimensions of a project The implicit diptych formed by the two successive courses delivered by Michel Foucault at the Collège de France between 1971 and 1973 – Penal Theories and Institutions and The Punitive Society – has already been the object of substantial commentary. The principal gains arising from philological or speculative soundings […]
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186 Reviews

Many reviews of books on or by Walter Benjamin begin with a capsule description of the key events in his life. It goes something like this. Born in 1892 into a well-off assimilated German Jewish family in Berlin, Walter Benjamin failed to gain an academic career, just about getting by, instead, through journalism and handouts […]

Olympus Mislaid?: A Profile of Perry Anderson

Olympus Mislaid? A Profile of Perry Anderson Gregory Elliott At the very outset of his story, Berlin seems to have mislaid Mount Olympus. Perry Anderson ‘The Pluralism of Isaiah Berlin’ (1990) In the Foreword to A Zone of Engagement Anderson notes the discontinuity between its first three chapters, classified as ‘intra-mural surveys within the intellectual […]

Abstraction: A Realist Interpretation

Abstrac:tion: A Realist Interpretation Andrew Saver The relations between the theoretical and the empirical, the abstract and the concrete, have always been problematic in marxism. Marx’s disdain for knowledge based upon mere appearances has meant that few marxists have accepted the empiricist doctrine of the theory-neutrality of observation. But while, in a negative way, there […]

20 Reviews

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 […]

Old and New Left

Benton’s comments on Ranci~re seem to put forward a rather different view of science than Althusser does, so we are in fact dealing with three positions, and we can discov~r the implications of Ranci~re’s argument by working through them. Ted Benton provides a useful example in his argument that it is possible to separate the […]