Abstract egalitarianism

Reivew of Katrina Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice
Katrina Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). 432pp., £28.00 hb., 978 0 69116 308 6 In 1952, a young American philosopher named John Rawls arrived in Oxford on a Fulbright scholarship. Fresh from military service in the Pacific that had diverted his […]
Band of light seen through mesh in water

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, […]

Everybody thinks: Deleuze, Descartes and rationalism

In his 1968 book Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze famously stresses the violent, unnatural and shocking character of thought, counterposing his own anti-representational philosophy of difference to what he depicts as a dogmatic, humanist ‘image of thought’. In his own words: ‘“Everybody” knows very well that in fact men think rarely, and more often under […]