Horvat Branko: Politička ekonomija socijalizma (1982/84) [Croatian]

In this important book Branko Horvat advances a type of Yugoslav Marxism referred to by many as Yugoslav ‘Praxis’ Marxism, a name adopted from the journal Praxis that promoted a humanist style of socialist thought from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. For years, Horvat has been directly associated with many of the authors who originally founded this journal, and his work illustrates his indebtedness to them.

Originally published as The Political Economy of Socialism, New York, 1982
Translated by Dubravko Mihaljek and Mia Miki
Publisher ČGP Delo, Globus, Izdavačka djelatnost, Zagreb
546 pages
via Ignorant Schoolmaster and His Committees

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Walter Lippmann: Public Opinion (1922/1997)

In what is widely considered the most influential book ever written by Walter Lippmann, the late journalist and social critic provides a fundamental treatise on the nature of human information and communication. As Michael Curtis indicates in his introduction to this edition, Public Opinion qualifies as a classic by virtue of its systematic brilliance and literary grace.

The work is divided into eight parts, covering such varied issues as stereotypes, image making, and organized intelligence. The study begins with an analysis of “the world outside and the pictures hi our heads,” a leitmotif that starts with issues of censorship and privacy, speed, words, and clarity, and ends with a careful survey of the modern newspaper. The work is a showcase for Lippmann’s vast erudition. He easily integrated the historical, psychological, and philosophical literature of his day, and in every instance showed how relevant intellectual formations were to the ordinary operations of everyday life.

The field of public opinion research has produced much since this 1922 classic, but no work is more compelling in its argument or lasting in its impact. Lippmann’s conclusions are as meaningful in a world of television and computers as in the earlier period when newspapers were dominant. Public Opinion is of enduring significance for communications scholars, historians,- sociologists, and political scientists.

Originally published in 1922.
This edition originally published in 1992 by The Macmillan Company
With a New Introduction by Michael Curtis
Publisher Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New Jersey; London, 1998

Publisher Transaction Publishers, 1997
ISBN 1560009993, 9781560009993
427 pages

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Charity Scribner: Requiem for Communism (2003)

“In Requiem for Communism Charity Scribner examines the politics of memory in postindustrial literature and art. Writers and artists from Europe’s second world have responded to the last socialist crisis with works that range from sober description to melancholic fixation. This book is the first survey of this cultural field.

Today, as the cultures of Eastern and Western Europe merge into the Infobahn of late capitalism, the second world is being left behind. The European Union has pronounced obsolete the structures that once defined and linked industrial cities from Manchester to Karl-Marx-Stadt—the decaying factories and working collectives, the wasted ideals of state socialism and the welfare state. Marxist exponents of global empire see this historical turn as an occasion to eulogize “the lightness and joy of being communist.” But for many writers and artists on the left, the fallout of the last century’s socialist crisis calls for an elegy. This regret has prompted a proliferation of literary texts and artworks, as well as a boom in museum exhibitions that race to curate the wreckage of socialism and its industrial remnants. The best of these works do not take us back to the factory. Rather they look for something to take out of it: the intractable moments of solidarity among men and women that did not square with the market or the plan.

Requiem for Communism explores a selection of signal works. They include John Berger’s narrative trilogy Into Their Labors; Documenta, the German platform for contemporary art and ideas; Krzysztof Kieslowski’s cinema of mourning and Andrzej Wajda’s filmed chronicles of the Solidarity movement; the art of Joseph Beuys and Rachel Whiteread; the novels of Christa Wolf; and Leslie Kaplan’s antinostalgic memoir of women’s material labor in France. Sorting among the ruins of the second world, the critical minds of contemporary Europe aim to salvage both the remains of socialist ideals and the latent feminist potential that attended them.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2003
ISBN 0262194880, 9780262194884
245 pages

Review (Mary A. Nicholas, The Slavic and East European Journal, 2004)
Review (ArtMargins, Hans J. Rindisbacher and Larissa Rudova, 2004)

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