Showing papers in "Thesis Eleven in 1990"

The End of Communism

Abstract: Bolshevik kind of communism was born in the 20th century, and it took final shape with the establishment of the Communist (Third) International. Although 20th century Communism changed some of its features several times the act of foundation, its enduring identity cannot be sincerely questioned. Theoretical did not establish this identity; the communist systems themselves depended on it for their own self-legitimation. It entailed a continuity with 19th century communism, and also with anti-democratic radicalism of a national kind in every communist party or state. Still, the &dquo;Zero Hour&dquo; for communist parties and states remained the establishment of their Bolshevik identity. The relationship between Leninism and Marxism was shaped by the shrewd Georgian seminarist after the image of the relationship between the New and the Old Testament.

Marxism and Theories of Culture

Abstract: Culture designates, on the one hand, some all-pervasive aspect of social practices and their results: in its contemporary understanding the meaning-bearing and -transmitting dimension, the signifying system/s of any society (the wide anthropological meaning of culture). The anthropological notion of culture, it cannot be articulated by the conceptual means of a "historical materialism". This certainly does not mean that Marxism has nothing to say about the various aspects and elements of the so-designated domain of phenomena, only that from the viewpoint of its own internal logic they do not constitute a unity which could be approached and made intelligible in a uniform way. The narrow, value-marked concept of culture, on the other hand, constituted for Marxism, from its very inception, an important domain of theoretical interests. The chapter also points out what seems to constitute the principal difficulty involved in any notion of "cultural production".Keywords: cultural production; Marxism; theories of culture

Reviews : Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge University Press, 1989)

Abstract: or destructive loonies? Certainly they were obscure, numerically few and sometimes silly&dquo;. His answer lies in the value of exploring the &dquo;small but continuous revolutionary-republican ’underground’ which runs from the mid1790s to early Chartism&dquo; first set out by Edward Thompson, and in opening up &dquo;a region where popular politics intersected with lumpen and professional crime&dquo;. In both of these objectives, McCalman succeeds admirably. People of the left who are concerned, above all, to keep their theoretical purity intact,

Socialism and Democracy

Abstract: Democracy carries with it, always, an immense amount of baggage. Everybody today is a democrat, with the exception of a few Jacobin and Leninist types, and even they usually feign a respect for democracy. But while we are all democrats, we are not all democrats in the same way. When we invoke democracy, we invoke various hidden curriculums. We tacitly refer to ideal worlds of action and behaviour.

Democracy and The Human Sciences An Interview with Marcel Gauchet

Abstract: B.R.: A lot of things seem to be happening in the human sciences. Could you tell us about some of the main directions being followed? M.G.: It’s difficult to give a comprehensive answer to your question. From the inside things look far from clear. Inertia, momentum, unions, commissions ensure that the internal landscape remains largely as it was, even if the public one has changed. Besides, I can only speak of the area that I know myself. From where I stand, it certainly looks as if we

The Dialectic of the State and the Political

Abstract: (6changeur culturel) and ’bridging concept’ (concept relais) that prepared the ground for the neo-liberal rehabilitation of the market against the State&dquo;. True, &dquo;the right to be different which was used by ThirdWorldists in the 1960s has been literally coopted and redirected by the right in the name of the &dquo;deculpabilizing the West&dquo; at the same time that for the left &dquo;totalitarian barbarism gradually acquired a new sense ... it is not so much the State as the individual who is now accused&dquo; . Such paradoxes, inversions which claim not to be self-denials, reciprocal exchanges of &dquo;barbarians&dquo; within a single political orientation are explained by the dialectics which Evelyne Pisier has applied in her text. The first task of the admiring commentator is to draw out the theoretical foundation of her method.

Review Articles : The Redemption of Modernity Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, Polity, 1987); John F. Rundell, origins of Modernity: The Origins of Modern Social Theory from Kant to Hegel to Marx (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1987):

Abstract: perhaps the best known defender of the increasingly besieged &dquo;classical&dquo; project of modernity. Amidst the myriad voices ranged against the Enlightenment goal of humankind’s rational self-control and progressive development, Habermas’s has sometimes appeared to be a lonely, if distinguished, voice in defence of the emancipatory potential of reason. Both Habermas’s recently-translated Philosophical Discourse of Modernity and John Rundell’s Origins of Modernity can be read as a further attempt to redeem the project of modernity from its (radical) critics. Concerned principally with its philosophical rather than its aesthetic dimension, Rundell defines modernity as: