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16Socialism and morality (edited book)St. Martin's Press. 1990.WHAT IS THE ROLE OF MORAL VALUES IN SOCIALISM? CAN SOCIALISM BE 'SCIENTIFIC' OR IS IT ESSENTIALLY AN ETHICAL DOCTRINE? IS THERE ANY PLACE FOR mORALITY IN Marxism? THESE QUESTIONS ARE CENTRAL TO MUCH RECENT CONTROVERSY ON THE LEFT. 'SOCIALISM AND MORALITY' CONTAINS A VARIETY OF ORIGINAL AND IMPORTANT CONTRIBUTIONS TO THESE DEBATES BY A DISTINGUISHED GROUP OF PHILOSOPHERS AND POLITICAL THEORISTS. ALL THE PAPERS WERE SPECIALLY WRITTEN FOR THIS VOLUME AND MAKE A LIVELY, WIDE-RANGING AND VALUABLE CON…Read more
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Review of Hilary Putnam, The collapse of the fact/value dichotomy and other essays (review)Radical Philosophy (122): 52-53. 2003.
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198The Concept of Labor: Marx and His CriticsScience and Society 71 (4). 2007.Marx conceives of labor as form-giving activity. This is criticized for presupposing a "productivist" model of labor which regards work that creates a material product — craft or industrial work — as the paradigm for all work (Habermas, Benton, Arendt). Many traditional kinds of work do not seem to fit this picture, and new "immaterial" forms of labor (computer work, service work, etc.) have developed in postindus trial society which, it is argued, necessitate a fundamental revision of Marx's ap…Read more
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40Review of Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent rational animals: Why human beings need the virtues and Stuart Hampshire, Justice is Conflict (review)Radical Philosophy 102 (102): 47-49. 2000.
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6Socialism and DemocracyMacmillan. 1991.A collection of essays by nine prominent thinkers on the compatibility of socialism and democracy and its future.
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71Something about my book, Marxism and Human Nature,1 seems to have provoked Eagleton's hostility and clouded his mind, but it is difficult to figure out what. All that is evident from his review is that he has not read the book carefully or taken the trouble to understand it properly.
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7Plato's Republic: An IntroductionEdinburgh University Press. 1999.This book provides a clear, lively and highly readable introduction to the main themes of Plato's Republic. It covers Plato's social and political thought, his moral philosophy, his epistemology and metaphysics, and his philosophy of art and literature. Plato's theories in all these areas are presented in concise and straightforward terms. They are located in the context of the views of subsequent philosophers and critically assessed in the light of current debates. The contemporary significance…Read more
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74The fundamental principles of modern dialectical philosophy derive from Hegel. He sums them up as follows. ‘Everything is inherently contradictory ... Contradiction is the root of all movement and vitality, it is only in so far as something has a contradiction within it that it moves, has an urge and activity' (Hegel 1969, 439). In Hegel's philosophy these ideas form part of an all−embracing idealist system which portrays all phenomena ×− both natural and social ×− as subject to dialectic. Marx …Read more
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6Review of Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (review)The European Legacy 2 (7): 1263-1264. 1997.
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26Psychoanalysis and human rationalityJournal of Social Philosophy 22 (2): 60-70. 1991.Freud is often credited with having revealed the irrational content of psychology and thus undermined traditional ideas of human rationality. This is only part of the truth. Psychoanalysis also questions traditional ideas of irrationality. It shows that dreams, neurotic symptoms and other apparently irrational psychological phenomena have a meaning and a rationality. Phenomenological (Laing) and hermeneutic (Ricoeur) accounts are criticized. Freud argues that there is a continuity between ration…Read more
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15Review of Kevin Anderson, Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism: A Critical Study (review)Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 34 72-76. 1996.
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106Alienation as a critical conceptInternational Critical Thought 1 (3): 287-304. 2011.This paper discusses Marx’s concept of alienated (or estranged) labour, focusing mainly on his account in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. This concept is frequently taken to be a moral notion based on a concept of universal human nature. This view is criticized and it is argued that the concept of alienation should rather be interpreted in the light of Hegelian historical ideas. In Hegel, alienation is not a purely negative phenomenon; it is a necessary stage of human develop…Read more
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Review of J. Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (review)Explorations in Knowledge 1 (1): 251-255. 1986.
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78Identity and CommunityJournal of Social Philosophy 30 (1): 147-160. 1999.The concepts of identity and community have recently been the subject of a good deal of debate in social philosophy, much of it focused on the ideas of writers like MacIntyre, Taylor, Walzer. These philosophers are often referred to as `communitarians', though they do not constitute a united school and none of them identifies himself as such. Nevertheless, there are good reasons 1 for grouping them together, for they share some important elements of common ground. In their different ways, each d…Read more
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64Has Marxism a future, now that communism has collapsed throughout Eastern Europe and is in crisis everywhere else? It is often said that Marxism is discredited and refuted by these events: they signify the triumph of capitalism and the free market, the `end of history'. At the other extreme, some Marxists in the West would like to believe that history has not yet begun. For them, socialism is still a distant dream. The old regimes of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had nothing to do with tru…Read more
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109Marxism and the Dialectical Method: A Critique of G.A. CohenRadical Philosophy 36 (36): 4-13. 1984.The dialectical method, Marx Insisted, was at the basis of his account of society. In 1858, in a letter to Engels, he wrote: In the method of treatment the fact that by mere accident I again glanced through Hegel's Logic has been of great service to me... If there should ever be the time for such work again, I would greatly like to make accessible to the ordinary human intelligence, in two or three printer's sheets, what is rational in the method which Hegel discovered.1 But he never did find th…Read more
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10Review of GWF Hegel, Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy - Translators Knox,TM, Miller,AV (review)Philosophical Books 27 (3): 146-148. 1986.
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52Forces of Production and Relations of Production in Socialist SocietyRadical Philosophy 24 (24): 19-26. 1980.It seems evident that class differences and class struggle continue to exist in socialist societies; that is to say, in societies like the Soviet Union and China, which have undergone socialist revolutions and in which private property in the means of production has been largely abolished. I shall not attempt to prove this proposition here; rather it will form my starting point. For my purpose in this paper is to show how the phenomenon of class in socialist society can be understood and interpr…Read more