The philosophical and political development that converted Georg Lukacs from a distinguished representative of Central European aesthetic vitalism into a major Marxist theorist and Communist militant has long remained an enigma. In this absorbing scholarly study, Michael Lowy for the first time traces and explains the extraordinary mutation that occurred in Lukacs's thought between 1909 and 1929. Utilizing many as yet unpublished sources, L ...
This book which combines the methods and results of both Freud and Marx is by one of the leaders of the West German student left during its most militant phase in the late 1960s. For reasons the author makes clear, the anti-authoritarian movement took more thoroughgoing and trenchant forms in West Germany than anywhere else. A new sexual morality was not only preached but practised. Is it possible, however – the author asks – that this new emp ...
When this book was first published in English in 1975, the previous forty years had seen the emergence of a new tradition in the philosophy of the sciences, or 'epistemology' in France. The founder of this tradition was Gaston Bachelard. Rather than elaborating from existing philosophy a series of categories to judge science's claims to truth, Bachelard started from the twentieth-century revolution in physics and critically examin ...
The Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko, who died in 1976, symbolizes one of the most notorious yet obscure episodes in the history of the Soviet Union. Emerging from provincial shadows in the Ukraine during the twenties, Lysenko achieved a meteoric career under Stalin's dictatorship, when ever greater claims were officially made for his 'environmentalism'. Overlord and autocrat of all Soviet biology after the Second World War, Lysen ...
Nicos Poulantzas’s third major work is a pioneering survey of some of the most fundamental, yet least studied, aspects of the class structure of advanced capitalist societies today. The book starts with a general theoretical essay that for the first time seriously explores the distinction between the “agents” and “positions” of capitalist relations of production, and seeks to avoid the typical errors of either functionalism or historicism. It al ...
When Value and Naturalism in Marx was first published in English in 1979, recent controversies in socialist economic theory had been concentrated on the tenability or untenability of Marx's labour theory of value. Marco Lippi's provocative book accepts the Sraffian correction of Marx's account of profits and prices, but goes on to ask the central question: why did Marx identify value with embodied labour-time? The answer, Lippi ar ...
"Poulantzas is a sophisticated Marxist theoretician who straddles the fields of sociology and political science. His book is one of the most thoughtful exercises in Marxist reinterpretation, and has justifiably won him widespread respect among many scholars. Recommended for all self-respecting college libraries as well as for seminars for graduate and more sophisticated seniors." Choice "This is a book which deserves a very wide audie ...
The election in Chile of the Marxist leader of the Socialist Party, Salvador Allende, to the presidency in October 1970 inaugurated a political situation unique in Latin America and of world-wide significance. Allende’s Popular Unity coalition embraced Socialists and Communists and campaigned on an election programme of unprecedented radicalism – nothing less than the abolition of monopoly capitalism and imperialism in Chile. In this book Regis ...
The Crisis of the Dictatorships is Nicos Poulantzas's fourth book. It is a compact study, at once topical and theoretical, of the historical end of the reactionary and authoritarian regimes that have dominated much of Southern Europe. Poulantzas applies the categories of his now standard general works – on Political Power and Social Classes, Fascism and Dictatorship, and Classes in Contemporary Capitalism – to the specific social structures ...
