Political physics

EDITORIAL Intellectual journals have their moments; if they’re lucky more than one. But to sustain themselves over decades, they have to change (or become part of an establishment), and change more than once. With this issue, Radical Philosophy marks forty-five years as a collectively edited, selfpublished and still largely self-produced print journal. It is still […]

Marx after Marx after Marx after Marx

Harry Harootunian, Marx After Marx: History and Time in the Expansion of Capitalism, Columbia University Press, New York, 2015. xiv + 292 pp., £20.67 hb., 978 0 231 17480 0. The study of Marx in the anglophone academy – established during the boom years of sociological theory in the 1970s, when sociology was de facto […]

Disguised as a dog: Cynical Occupy?

Disguised as a dog Cynical Occupy? Peter osborne I take my title and my philosophical cue from a passage in Marx’s 1839 ‘Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy’. I take my artistic cue from the early work of Valie Export. The passage from Marx reads as follows: As in the history of philosophy there are nodal points […]

80 Reviews

REVIEWS A paradigm too far? Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, translated by Joel Anderson, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1995. xxi + 215 pp., £39.95 hb., 0 7456 1160 5. Axel Honneth, The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political Philosophy, edited by Charles W. Wright, State […]

67 Reviews

Ted Benton, Natural Relations: Ecology, Animal Rights and Social Justice Bob Brecher Louis Althusser, The Future Lasts a Long Time and The Facts E. Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinker, eds., The Althusserian Legacy David Macey Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures Alan Duiant Gregory Elliott, Labourism and the English […]

66 Reviews

REVIEWS RULING PASSION STRONG IN DEATH Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, London, Faber, 1993. 363pp, £9.99 pb, 0 571 169732. David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, London, Hutchinson, 1993. 583pp, £20 hb, 0 09 1753449. James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, London, Harper Collins, 1993. 491pp, £18 hb, 0 00 255267 1. ‘Alive,’ claims […]

64 Reviews

REVIEWS AVANT-TARD Jean-Fran~ois Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, Oxford, Polity Press, 1991. viii + 216pp., £35 hb, 0 7456 0772 1 NorbertElias, Time: An Essay, translated in part from the German by Edmund Jephcott, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1992. 216pp., £35 hb,O 631 157980 Is it ever too […]

63 Reviews

Reiner Grundmann, Marxism and Ecology Jonathan Hughes Theodor W. Adorno, Alban Berg, Master of the Smallest Link Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno’ s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion Jonathan Rée Moira Gatens, Feminism and Philosophy: Perspectives on Difference and Equality Herta Nagl-Docekal and Herlinde Pauer-Studer, eds., Denken der Geschlechterdifferenz: Neue Fragen und Perspectiven der Feministischen Philosophie […]

60 Reviews

Kate Soper, Troubled Pleasures: Writings on Politics, Gender and Hedonism Peter Osborne, ed., Socialism and the Limits of Liberalism Dave Archard Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth and Essays on Heidegger and Others, Philosophical Papers, Vols. I and II Kate Soper Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction Richard Rorty Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of […]

55 Reviews

REVIEWS THE SHAMEFUL FACE OF PHILOSOPHY Michele Le Doeuff, The Philosophical Imaginary, trans. Colin Gordon, London, Athlone Press, 1989. x + 199pp., £32 hb, 0485 11352 X. Western philosophy has, by tradition, defined itself in opposition to myth, fable, the poetic, and all that inhabits the domain of the image. Whatever else either reason or […]

51 Reviews

REVIEWS ANTI -ANTI -ALTHUSSERIANISM Gregory Elliott, Althusser: The Detour of Theory, London, Verso, 1988, 359pp., £29.95 hb, £10.95 pb. Few events in the recent history of the intellectual left in Britain can have had as disruptive an effect upon its prevailing orthodoxies and habits of mind as the onset of ‘Ahtusserianism’ in the early 1970s. […]

49 Reviews

REVIEWS HEGEL: PAST AND PRESENT Laurence Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit, 1770-1807, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (,Ideas in Context’ Series), 1987, xiii + 459pp., £30 hb. David Lamb (ed.), Hegel and Modern Philosophy, London: Croom Helm, 1987, 262pp, £30 hb. Anyone who has followed the remorseless expansion of the literature on […]

46 Reviews

REVIEWS Whitehead Revisited A.N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World. London: Free Associated Books, 1985. £4.95 pb. Free Association Books have brought out a new edition of Science and the ~odern !orld, first published m 1926. It is some years since it was last available in the UK. The initiative for this facsimile reprint was […]

44 Reviews

REVIEWS On the Jackson Trail lonathan Ree, Proletarian Philosophers: Problems in Socialist Culture in Britain, 1900-1940, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984, 176pp, £15 hb If the fundamental experience of twentieth-century European philosophy has been that of a continuing selfreflection upon its own status and identity, a persistent and profound identity-crisis in the face of the growing […]

42 Reviews

Jeffrey Moussaieff Mason, ed., The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904 Jeffrey Moussaleff Mason, The Assault on Truth: Freud’s suppression of the seduction theory Stephen Marcus, Freud and the Culture of Psychoanalysis David Archard Noel W. Thompson, The People’s Science: the popular political economy of exploitation and crisis, 1816-34 Mike Shortland R. C. Lewontin, […]

40 Reviews

REVIEWS 8yJingo Finding The Right Level John MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, Manchester University Press, 1984, 288pp., 1:..25 hb MacKenzie’s book is one of that kind that takes a debate which has been going on in papers, articles and reviews, and tries to assemble a definite thesis out of the debate. It is a compilation of […]

35 Reviews

REVIEWS Assessing Marcuse B. Katz, Herbert Marcuse and the Art of Liberation: An Intellectual Biography, Verso, 1982, i4.50 pb Theor 19.95 hc More Marcuse literature. The process of recovery and critical reassessment continues. Both these books contribute in some way to the development of a more informed and theoretically sophisticated account and critique of Marcuse’s […]