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Intellectual History
Eagleton on Marx
| Jack Stuart | October 29, 2011 |
Review of Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton
New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011, 258 pp., $25.00
New-York Historical Society Sinks to a New Low with a Black-Tie Gala for Henry Kissinger
| Jesse Lemisch | October 24, 2011 |
[Reprinted from the History News Network.]
The Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde of 20th Century Intellectual History
| by Michael Wreszin | Summer 2011 |
Anyone interested in intellectual history from the great depression of the thirties to the post war 1980s will be familiar with the impact of Arthur Koestler, whose famous assault on Stalinism and the Soviet Union in his novel Darkness at Noon was a widely praised international bestseller. There was a vehemently critical biography written by David Cesurani, Arthur Koestler—The Homeless Mind published in London in 1998. It was an opinionated attack on Koestler’s personality and moral stature.
Red Rosa: An Intimate Self-Portrait
| by George Fish | Summer 2011 |
The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg is the first volume in a projected 14-volume set, The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, of all the extant writings of this great revolutionary socialist in English—all available newspaper articles and speeches, significant polemical and Marxist theoretical writings, and her letters and telegrams, prepared collaboratively by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, Karl Dietz Veralg, and Verso Books.
Sartre and the Idea of Freedom in the Anti-Colonial Struggle
| by Dan La Botz | Summer 2011 |
In the late 1960s it seemed to many almost certain that Jean-Paul Sartre would be remembered as the most important philosopher of the twentieth century and the most important public intellectual on the left of that era. Certainly it seemed so to me at the time. Sartre had in the 1930s taken Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time and its reactionary and religious version of phenomenology and transformed them in Being and Nothingness into his new humanist philosophy of existentialism, a leftwing philosophy of freedom.
Rising Above the Herd: Keith Preston's Authoritarian Anti-Statism
| Matthew N. Lyons | April 29, 2011 |
"Perhaps what I champion is not so much the anarchist as much as the 'anarch,' the superior individual who, out of sheer strength of will, rises above the herd in defiance and contempt of both the sheep and their masters."
-- Keith Preston, "The Thoughts That Guide Me: A Personal Reflection" (2005)[1]
Chomsky, Anarchism, and Socialism
| by George Fish | Summer 2010 |
For several years I worked closely with an anarchist youth collective in Indianapolis that ran a left-wing bookstore. While they were a bold, feisty group of determined activists (a welcome change from the timid and hidebound peace church "progressives" that dominate the left in Indianapolis) with whom I very much enjoyed working, I did find their anti-intellectualism disquieting.
Chomsky and Anarchism: Reply
Letter: George Fish Winter 2011Seth Farber’s response to my "Chomsky, Anarchism, and Socialism" (Summer 2010 New Politics) places a very heavy burden on what is a book review, not a major study of Chomsky’s political thought. As such, I believe it does exactly what a book review should: give a basic outline of the book being reviewed, assess its strengths and weaknesses, and indicate to the reader why the reviewer recommends or does not recommend reading the book.
Marx and the non-Western World
| by Michael Löwy | Winter 2011 |
This truly path-breaking book goes against the grain of the conventional wisdom which reduces Marx to an Eurocentric and economistic thinker; as Douglas Kellner comments, Kevin Anderson shows that Marx “is the sophisticated and original theorist of history some might not have ever expected him to be.” Analyzing a variety of Marx’s writings, including his journalistic work written for the New York Daily Tribune as well as unpublished material on non-European societies, it brings to the fore a global theorist whose social critique was se
The Soul of Man Under . . .Anarchism?
| by Kristian Williams | Winter 2011 |
The title of Oscar Wilde’s essay "The Soul of Man Under Socialism" has long perplexed readers, especially anarchists who rightly feel that the essay belongs in their canon rather than that of the Marxists, the Fabians, or the Labour Party.[1]