Series: Radical Thinkers

In this vehement defence of democracy, Jacques Rancière explodes the complacency of Western politicians who pride themselves as the defenders of political freedom. As America and its allies use their military might in the misguided attempt to export a desiccated version of democracy, and reactionary strands in mainstream political opinion abandon civil liberties, Rancière argues that true democracy—government by all—is...

Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays challenges the philosophical presentation of Judaism as the sublime 'other' of modernity. Here, Gillian Rose develops a philosophical alternative to deconstruction and post-modernism by critically re-engaging the social and political issues at stake in every reconstruction.

In the name of an assault on "totalization" and "identity," a number of contemporary theorists have been busily washing Marxism's dialectical and utopian projects down the plug-hole of postmodernism and "post-politics." A case in point is a recent interpretation of one of the greatest twentieth-century philosophers, Theodor Adorno. In this powerful book, Fredric Jameson proposes a radically different reading of...

André Gorz's earlier books—from Ecology as Politics to Farewell to the Working Class and Paths to Paradise—have informed and inspired the most radical currents in Green movements in Europe and America over the last two decades. In Critique of Economic Reason, he offers his fullest account to date of the terminal crisis of a system where every activity and aspiration...

The idea of Kantian ethics is both simple and revolutionary: it proposes a moral law independent of any notion of a pre-established Good or any 'human inclination' such as love, sympathy, or fear. In attempting to interpret such a revolutionary proposition in a more 'humane' light, and to turn Kant into our contemporary—someone who can help us with our own...

With Hobbes and Locke, Spinoza is arguably one of the most important political philosophers of the modern era, a premier theoretician of democracy and mass politics. In this revised and augmented English translation of his 1985 classic, Spinoza et la Politique, Étienne Balibar presents a synoptic account of Spinoza's major works, admirably demonstrating relevance to his contemporary political life. Balibar...

Establishing a rigorous programme of "symptomatic reading" that cuts through the silences and lacunae of Capital to reveal its philosophical core, Louis Althusser interprets Marx's structural analysis of production as a revolutionary break—the basis of a completely new science. Building on a series of Althusser's conceptual innovations that includes "overdetermination" and "social formation," Étienne Balibar explores the historical and structural...

Written in exile from Germany, this potent study of Europe's most controversial composer explodes the frontiers of musical and cultural analysis. Measuring key elements of Wagner's oeuvre with patent musical dexterity, Adorno sheds light on a nineteenth-century bourgeois figure whose operas betray the social gestures and high-culture fantasies that helped plant the seeds of the modern Culture Industry. A foreword...

The feature which distinguishes the great works of materialist thought, from Lucretius' De rerum natura through Capital to the writings of Lacan, is their unfinished character: again and again they tackle their chosen problem. Schelling's Weltalter drafts belong to this same series, with their repeated attempt at the formulation of the "beginning of the world," of the passage from the...

In this succinct and panoramic work—both stimulating for the specialist and accessible to the general reader—one of the world's leading social theorists, Göran Therborn, tackles the question of the trajectory of Marxism in the twentieth century and its legacy for radical thought in the twenty-first. Addressing the history of critical theory from the contemporary vantage-point characterised by postmodernism, post-Marxism and...

Is heterosexual sex inherently damaging to women? Is it possible for women to enjoy sensuality and pleasure with men that does not increase male power? Lynne Segal's unflinching examination of feminist thinking on sexuality over the past twenty-five years tackles these questions head on. Only two decades ago, politically aware women often declared themselves both sexual liberationists and feminists—their right...

What is the specificity of the human race within nature? How is its history to be explained? What impact do material realities, natural and man-made, have on human beings? What role does thought, in all its dimensions, play in the production of social relations? How are the human sciences to be advanced today? These are among the crucial questions confronted...

The System of Objects delves into the intricate world of commodities and consumer culture. Jean Baudrillard meticulously dissects the objects that populate our everyday lives, transforming them into symbols and emblems of our contemporary society. Through a series of theoretical reflections, the book unravels the very fabric of material culture and its profound implications for how we understand our existence...

It is frequently said that we are living through the end of politics, the end of social upheavals, the end of utopian folly. Consensual realism is the order of the day. But political realists, remarks Jacques Rancière, are always several steps behind reality, and the only thing which may come to an end with their dominance is democracy. We could,...

Chantal Mouffe is one of the most influential political theorists at work today. Her work has influenced political parties across Europe and continues to inform the direction of left politics. In this work, The Return of the Political, Mouffe argues that liberal democracy misunderstands the problems of ethnic, religious, and nationalist conflicts because of its inadequate conception of politics.

This book presents a full decade of Sartre's work, from the publication of the Critique of Dialectical Reason in 1960, the basic philosophical turning-point in his postwar development, to the inception of his major study on Flaubert, the first volumes of which appeared in 1971. The essays and interviews collected here form a vivid panorama of the range and unity...