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This work looks anew at the belief that we are in an era of more intense violence than ever experienced before. It includes a demonstration of how the term "violence" is riddled with paradoxes. There is also an examination of the prospects for greater civility which rejects simple-minded pacifism.

A comprehensive biography of Walter Benjamin, an original and influential thinker of the 20th century. Brodersen stresses that during the Weimar Republic, Benjamin had been an important critic whose essays and reviews were published by the most distinguished papers of the time.

The themes of citizenship and community are today at the center of a fierce debate as both left and right try to mobilize them for their cause. For the left such notions are crucial in all the current attempts to redefine political struggle through extending and deepening democracy. But, argue the contributors to this volume, these concepts need to be made compatible with the pluralism that marks modern democracy. Rather than reject the liberal tradition, they argue, the aim should be to radicalize it.These essays set out to examine what types of ¿citizen¿ and ¿community¿ might be required by such a radical and plural democracy. From a range of disciplines and a fruitful diversity of theoretical perspectives, the contributors help us to address the following challenge: how to defend the greatest possible pluralism without destroying the very framework of the democratic political community.Despite their differences, a vision emerges from these essays which is sharply at odds both with the universalistic and rationalistic conception to be found in the work of Habermas, and with postmodern celebrations of absolute heterogeneity. For this book is an exploration of politics—of a politics where power, conflict and antagonism will always play a central role.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, Louis Althusser endured a period of mental instability during which he murdered his wife and was committed to a psychiatric hospital. Spanning this period, this fourth volume of political and philosophical writings reveals his wrestling with a series of theoretical problems to produce some of his work.

Exposes the self-serving logic behind much middle-class opposition to Venezuela's elected leader, and explains the real reason for their alarm. This work argues that the Chavez government has instituted one of the progressive constitutions, but warns that they have yet to overcome the dangerous spectres of the country's past.

Colombia is the least understood of Latin American countries. This book explores its history of 150 years of political conflict, characterized by radical-popular mobilization and reactionary repression. It shows how patterns of political conflict after 1848 explain the war destroying Colombian lives, property, communities and territory.

Traces the debate sparked by the author's controversial effort to combine the social politics of equality and the cultural politics of difference, while probing the tensions between them.

This anthology offers a history of ACT UP for a new generation of activists and students. Divided into five sections, it explores the innovative use of civil rights era non-violent disobedience, media work and race and community building, to show how ACT UP has transformed activism.

This work explores the interrelation of Irish political history and Irish literature. It discusses a host of unusual topics, from Shaw and science and Irish attitudes, to nature and the question of language, and a full-scale investigation of the Celtic revival.

Some of the liveliest and most fruitful debates in recent historical writing have been about the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Rodney Hilton’s vast and distinguished body of work on medieval society has been a major reference point in these debates. Throughout his work the dominant theme has been his argument that the “prime mover” in the development of medieval society was the conflict between landlords and peasants over the appropriation of the peasants’ surplus product. This is the class conflict which gives the present volume its title.This wide-ranging collection, updated to include some of Hilton’s most recent writings, explores not only the peasant economy and peasant movements but also the nature of towns and their principal classes. Essays include a fascinating study of women traders in medieval England, and an account of medieval tax revolts—all informed by his lucid, undogmatic attention to broad theoretical issues as well as to empirical detail. This is a book not only for historians, but for anyone interested in the evolution of capitalism or the larger questions of historical process and social change.

A guide to the history of poetic debate and practice in 20th-century Latin America. The book argues that the possibility of universal emancipation is evoked in the transformation of language. Each chapter focuses on key texts by poets such as Cardenal, Neruda, Vallejo and the Andrades.

Attempts to provide a thorough, balanced account of Althusser's ideas and the issues he brought to the forefront of Marxist theory. This volume brings together international work in history, philosophy, economics, sociology and literary criticism, all significantly influenced by Althusser.

This work brings together trends of current thinking - Lacanian psychoanalysis, deconstruction, neo-Hegelianism and political philosophy - to illuminate the question of identity in the contemporary world. It also examines some of the new political identities which have emerged in recent decades.

Collected essays and talks from one of Britain's great thinkers, ranging across political and cultural theory Raymond Williams possessed unique authority as Britain's foremost cultural theorist and public intellectual. Informed by an unparalleled range of reference and the resources of deep personal experience, his life's work represents a patient, exemplary commitment to the building of a socialist future. This book brings together important early writings including ';Culture is Ordinary,' ';The British Left,' ';Welsh Culture' and ';Why Do I Demonstrate?' with major essays and talks of the last decade. It includes work on such central themes as the nature of a democratic culture, the value of community, Green socialism, the nuclear threat, and the relation between the state and the arts. Here too, collected for the first time, are the important later political essays which undertake a thorough revaluation of the principles fundamental to the idea of socialist democracy, and confirm Williams as a shrewd and imaginative political theorist. In a sober yet constructive assessment of the possibilities for socialist advance, Williamsin the face of much recent intellectual fashionpowerfully reasserts his lifelong commitment to ';making hope practical, rather than despair convincing.' This valuable collection confirms Raymond Williams as a thinker of rare versatility and one of the outstanding intellectuals of our century.

This work provides a defence and illustration of deconstruction. Bennington demonstrates the possibility of clear and rigorous explication of deconstructive thought, and explores the political potential of deconstruction, via readings of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Freud, De Man and Lyotard.

Historians generally—and Marxists in particular—have presented the revolution of 1789 as a bourgeois revolution: one which marked the ascendance of the bourgeois as a class, the defeat of a feudal aristocracy, and the triumph of capitalism. Recent revisionist accounts, however, have raised convincing arguments against the idea of the bourgeois class revolution, and the model on which it is based.In this provocative study, George Comninel surveys existing interpretations of the French Revolution and the methodological issues these raise for historians. He argues that the weaknesses of Marxist scholarship originate in Marx’s own method, which has led historians to fall back on abstract conceptions of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Comninel reasserts the principles of historical materialism that found their mature expression in Das Kapital; and outlines an interpretation which concludes that, while the revolution unified the nation and centralized the French state, it did not create a capitalist society.

A survey of Foucault's corpus, from his early work on madness to the "History of Sexuality", this book portrays Foucault's as falling into neither the relativist nor the positivist categories, but rather as the inventor of a new analysis of modern mechanisms of control and exclusion.

Angelo Quattrocchi describes the events of the May 1968 revolt which spread from Nanterre to Paris, aiming to show how ideas that had been the province of radical philosophers became springs of action for millions. Tom Nairn provides an analysis of the causes and consequences of the May events.

Covers the recording industry, from Edison's talking tin foil of 1887 to the age of the compact disk. The book asks: what goes on in the recording industry; how does it affect the music; and do we listen to music differently from our forebears because of reproduction?

A comprehensive anthology of women's film culture, from the origins of cinema to 1950.

What have been the major changes in the intellectual landscape of the left since the mid seventies? Have they on balance represented an emancipation or a retreat for socialist culture as a whole? In the Tracks of Historical Materialism looks at some of the paradoxes in the evolution of Marxist thought in this period. It starts by considering the remarkable and variegated growth of historical materialism in the Anglo-American world, spreading across a broad field from history to economics, politics to literature, sociology to philosophy. By contrast, the same years have seen a drastic recession of Marxist influences in the Latin cultures where it was traditionally strongFrance or Italy. Its main theoretical challengers there proved to be successive forms of structuralism and post-structuralism. The common coordinates of thesetracing the outer bounds of the work of Levi-Strauss or Lacan, Foucault or Derridaare surveyed and criticized, in the light of the inherent limitations of the language model from which they derived. In Germany, on the other hand, the theoretical scene has been largely dominated by the accumulating work of Habermas, with its roots in the Frankfurt School. Yet Habermas’s philosophy also reveals unexpected affinities with the trend of prevalent Parisian concerns, in its unifying emphasis on communicationwhile at the same time diverging from them in the constancy of its political commitments. The historical background of international class struggles against which these variant fates of Marxism in the west were played out is then explored, with special attention to the interconnection between the destinies of Maoism and Eurocommunism. What, finally, is the nature of the relationship between Marxism as a theory and socialism as a goal? A conclusion reviews the wider issues posed for the labour movement by the rise of the peace movement and the women’s movement, and suggests a range of priorities for the further development of Marxist thought in the eighties.

Offers a new perspective on contemporary arguments for animal rights, social justice and environmental protection. Benton brings together modern political ecology, debate about the moral status of animals, and critical social theory.

For 45 years the expatriate Goytisolo has been both widely acknowledged as Spain's greatest living writer and its most scabrous critic. This two-volume autobiography, first published in the 1980s, broke new ground in Spanish letters with its introspective sexual and emotional honesty.

Corporate sponsorship and involvement in the visual arts has become increasingly common. Wu's book is a detailed analysis of this infiltration since the 1980s. Her analysis questions the role of museums, galleries and also the function of art in public places.

This volume launches a new sub-discipline of the human science, "mediology". It includes a new way in which to analyze and think about the media from the city state to the Internet. It is also an examination of the work of Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, C.S. Peirce and Marshall McLuhan.

The radical colonels, courageous communists and burnt-out Ba'athists failed to establish a stable and just democratic republic, thus enabling a return visit by imperialism.

Exploring the relationship between film and other art forms, this book looks at new approaches to thinking about film. Peter Wollen's new book is based on the premise that there are no fixed ways of writing about cinema, but, rather a plethora of paths leading in very different directions.

This synoptic essay considers the nature and evolution of the Marxist theory that developed in Western Europe, after the defeat of the proletarian rebellions in the West and the isolation of the Russian Revolution in the East in the early 1920s. It focuses particularly on the work of Lukcs, Korsch and Gramsci; Adorno, Marcuse and Benjamin; Sartre and Althusser; and Della Volpe and Colletti, together with other figures within Western Marxism from 1920 to 1975. The theoretical production of each of these thinkers is related simultaneously to the practical fate of working-class struggles and to the cultural mutations of bourgeois thought in their time. The philosophical antecedents of the various school within this traditionLukcsian, Gramscian, Frankfurt, Sartrean, Althusserian and Della Volpeanare compared, and the specific innovations of their respective systems surveyed. The structural unity of 'Western Marxism', beyond the diversity of its individual thinkers, is then assessed, in a balance-sheet that contrasts its heritage with the tradition of 'classical' Marxism that preceded it, and with the commanding problems which will confront any historical materialism to succeed it.