The Statist Conception of Politics

THE STADSI [On[EPTIOn OF POLITI[S Tanv Skillen philosophically sanctified. Moral and Political Philosophy are taught as separate fields: evidently the problems of the politician (the Statesman) are not the problems of the ordinary chap, save at such times when the ordinary chap goes to the po:ls or lobbies his M.P. (the Citizen) or marches to […]

The Theory of Ideology in Capital

IHE IHEORY OF ·IDEOlOIiV In [APIIAL John mepham •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• “There must be some way out of here” Said the joker to the thief “There’s too much confusion I can’t get no relief” (Dylan) Where do incorrect ideas come from? In What is to be Done? Lenin argues that “the spontaneous development of the working-class movement […]

Is There a Marxist Sociology?

lU[IEn IiOlDmAnn 15 THERE AmARHI5T 50[IOl06Y? Translated and IntradlHed bV Ion the socially relevant, like so many practitioners of the ‘sociology of literature’. When Lucien Goldmann’ s essay , Is There a Marxist Sociology?’ first appeared in Les Temps Modernes in 1957, it made an important contribution to the revival of a serious consideration of […]

Reports from Kent, London, Oxford

REPORTS HEm ~!……Discussion Weekend at Universi t..L..£.f2 ent , ,?2::.?Z__ .:!..~e first, insofar as its ‘problems’ arc emplr ~~l’: _ l,rohlems (knowledge of the external world, causality, other minJ~, personal identity, etc.), and secondly, insofar as it retain the same ideological orientation as classical empiricism. Epistemology is by its very nature prescriptive; it is for […]

Poor Bertie

Poor Bertie Jonathan Rée In the dark midwinter of 1916, Londoners had an unusual opportunity to see radical philosophical principles applied to the urgent issues of the day. The peace campaigner and feminist C.K. Ogden had hired the Caxton Hall for a series of eight weekly lectures on politics, to be given by Bertrand Russell. […]

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 […]

Globalization is ordinary: The transnationalization of cultural studies

The institutionalization and codification of Cultural Studies continue apace. This is evident, for example, in the recurring debates and anxieties about disciplinary boundaries, artistic and ethical values, and the de-radicalization of Cultural Studies itself. Meanwhile, an apparently endless stream of publications – readers, textbooks and collections of (more or less) concrete analyses – feeds the […]

The space of flows and timeless time: Manuel Castells’s The Information Age

The space of flows and timeless time Manuel Castells’s The Information Age Simon bromley is not new. Giddens, for example, has argued that the world is increasingly moving towards a situation where ʻthe consequences of modernity are becoming more radicalized and universalized than beforeʼ, and in both The Consequences of Modernity and Modernity and Self-Identity […]

A hundred issues have blossomed!

Radical philosophy has become one hundred in the year 2000, mimicking the Christian millennium with a numerological accident of its own. Arbitrary as such anniversaries are, it nonetheless provides an occasion to reflect upon some of the changes in the context of the journal over the last three decades.RP is the only one of the […]

Radicalism and philosophy

Philosophy is popular in Britain at the moment, if the media be the measure; albeit mainly in the guise of a ʻguide to happinessʼ – a television guide and a happiness of a rather minimal sort. [1] Radicalism is not so popular, Ken Livingstoneʼs victory in the London mayoral contest notwithstanding (although we may be […]

Thinking politically with Merleau-Ponty

Merleau-Pontyʼs fertile and provocative approach to philosophy was abruptly terminated by his death in 1961. Paul Ricoeurʼs judgement that he was the greatest of the French phenomenologists1 has frequently been cited since then, yet a second demise occurred during the 1960s: this time at the hands of phenomenologyʼs structuralist and poststructuralist critics. Although their targets […]