Theoretical practices

Reivew of Natalia Romé, For Theory: Althusser and the Politics of Time
Natalia Romé, For Theory: Althusser and the Politics of Time (Lanham, Boulder, NY: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021). 206pp., £81.00 hb., 978 1 53814 764 1 Although Natalia Romé’s book For Theory: Althusser and the Politics of Time comes in the disguise of humble secondary literature, it is not just an account of Althusser’s theory of […]
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Between subject and citizen: On Étienne Balibar’s Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology

‘All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.’ Spinoza’s maxim, the last sentence of The Ethics, serves as a fitting observation with which to begin a discussion of Étienne Balibar’s Citizen Subject: Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology, given the difficulty proper to the excellence of his text. Its difficulty is not, or not only, […]

Figures of interpellation in Althusser and Fanon

Figures of interpellation in Althusser and Fanon Pierre macherey The text that Althusser published in 1970 under the title ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, where he puts forward the thesis of the individual’s interpellation as subject, is no doubt one of his most innovative, but it is also particularly disconcerting: its exposition, in exploiting a […]

Knowledge as a Social Phenomenon

Knowledge as a Social Phenomenon Sean Sayers The idea that knowledge is a social phenomenon is no longer either novel or unfamiliar. With the growth of the social sciences, we are accustomed to seeing ideas and beliefs in social and historical terms, and trying to understand how they arise and why they take the forms […]

John Rawls and Human Welfare

John Rawls and Human Welfare John Watt INTRODUCTION John Rawls has been a dominant figure over the last generation of Western social philosophy. I know of four book-length studies of his thought – Barry (1973), WoIff (1977), Schaefer (1979) and Martin (1985) – and two volumes of collected essays: Daniels (1975) and Blocker and Smith […]

Ideology and the Media: A Response

COMMENT Ideology and the Media: A Response Martin Barker’s examination of problems and evasions discernible in the use made of the concept of ideology by major strands of media research (Radical Philosophy 46) is timely. Media analysis in Britain seems now to be well-launched into a phase in which empirically-based studies, including studies of audience […]

Milton Fisk, Marxism and Ethics

Milton Fisk, Marxism and Ethics Andrew Collier “ I When Marxists have written about ethics – which they have not often done at any length – they have generally approached the topic in one of two ways: either they have sought to explain moral codes as ideologies with definite material foundations and functions in the […]

What is Scientific Ideology?: With an Introduction by Mike Shortland

Introduction to (ieorges Canguilhem Mike Short/and Take away Canguilhem and you will no longer understand much about Althusser, Althusserianism and a whole series of discussions which have taken place among French Marxists; you will no longer grasp what is specific to sociologists such as Bourdieu, Castel, Passerson and what marks them so strongly within sociology; […]

The ‘New Philosophers’ and the End of Leftism

THI ‘NIW PHILOSOPHIRS’ AND THI IND or LlrTISM Peter Dews Introduction Fashion moves fast in Parisian salons, and the taste for intellectual scandal demands the constant breaking of fresh taboos. Three years ago, in the spring of 1977, a group of young authors styling themselves the ‘New Philosophers’ moved rapidly to the centre of attention, […]

Althusser’s epistemology: The limits of the theory of theoretical practice

ALTHUSSBR’S BPISTBMOLOGY: Ihe limils of Ihe Iheo..y of Iheo..elical p ..aclice PaulPatton concepts and theses which would permit the demarcation of science from other kinds of theoretical discourse. Dialectical materialism, then, was thought to be the philosophical theory Within which the scientific character of historical materialism could be demonstrated. Althusser’s marxist philosophy, however, was no […]

Post-Marxist Modes of Production

POST-MARXIST M I ‘) .. or PRODUCTION According to whoever wrote the editorial ‘notes’ for Radical Philosophy 17, ‘The present upsurge of fundamental Marxist researches may indicate an exit route from the circle of philosophy’s –deaths and re births , via which the problem of the specificity of “the philosophical” might be both subverted and […]

Winch, Wittgenstein and Marxism

‘ Radical Philosophy :Thl.. leell Wlllch, WIII,gellslelll alld Ma.. xlsm ~. Ted Benton A Introduction This paper suffers from a certain ‘instability’ deriving from its having been written some years ago, and then substantially modified more recently to serve quite different purposes. This modification,has, unfortunately, been insufficiently thorough, although the instability of the paper may […]