Michael J. Thompson (ed.): Georg Lukács Reconsidered: Critical Essays in Politics, Philosophy and Aesthetics (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, capitalism, critical theory, cultural criticism, ethics, law, literary criticism, marxism, philosophy, political theory, politics
Georg Lukács stands as a towering figure in the areas of critical theory, literary criticism, aesthetics, ethical theory and the philosophy of Marxism and German Idealism. Yet, despite his influence throughout the twentieth century, his contributions to the humanities and theoretical social sciences are marked by neglect. What has been lost is a crucial thinker in the tradition of critical theory, but also, by extension, a crucial set of ideas that can be used to shed new light on the major problems of contemporary society.
This book reconsiders Lukács’ intellectual contributions in the light of recent intellectual developments in political theory, aesthetics, ethical theory, and social and cultural theory. An international team of contributors contend that Lukács’ ideas and theoretical contributions have much to offer the theoretical paucity of the present. Ultimately the book reintegrates Lukács as a central thinker, not only in the tradition of critical theory, but also as a major theorist and critic of modernity, of capitalism, and of new trends in political theory, cultural criticism and legal theory.
Publisher Continuum, 2011
ISBN 1441108769, 9781441108760
253 pages
PDF, PDF (updated on 2014-12-22)
Comment (0)Jacques Ellul: Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (1962/1973)
Filed under book | Tags: · agitprop, democracy, ideology, marxism, mass media, propaganda, soviet union, technology, totalitarianism
“A far more frightening work than any of the nightmare novels of George Orwell. With the logic which is the great instrument of French thought, [Ellul] explores and attempts to prove the thesis that propaganda, whether its ends are demonstrably good or bad, is not only destructive to democracy, it is perhaps the most serious threat to humanity operating in the modern world.” –Los Angeles Times
Originally published in French as Propagandes by A. Colin, Paris, 1962.
Translated by Konrad Kellen and Jean Lerner
With an introduction by Konrad Kellen
Publisher Vintage Books, Random House, New York, 1973 (reprint of the Alfred A. Knopf 1965 edition)
Vintage political science and social criticism
ISBN 0394718747, 9780394718743
332 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-7-17)
Comment (1)Rethinking Marxism: Special Issue on the Common and the Forms of the Commune (2010)
Filed under journal | Tags: · biopolitics, commons, communism, community, education, marxism, political economy, politics
This issue brings together papers that tackle a series of problematics which are formulated around the concepts of common, commune, community, and communism, and which engage with the field of critical Marxism. The discussions include the critique of property and commodity fetishism; the relation between ‘modes of production’ and ‘modes of subjectivity’; the rupture with a bourgeois political imaginary circumscribed by the relation between public and private; and the antagonistic nature of class as a process or composition. While an organizing aspiration has been to stage an encounter between operaismo and Althusserian Marxism, contributors complicate this divide by drawing from different philosophical sources and bringing into existence a broader intellectual plane within which these problematics can be situated.
Rethinking Marxism, Volume 22, Issue 3, 2010
Editor: S. Charusheela
Guest editors: Anna Curcio and Ceren Özselçuk
more (flyer)
Comment (0)