Sean Sayers

Sidney: Court Maxims. Edited and introduced by Hans Blom, Eco Haitsma‐Muller and Ronald Janse. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge/New York/Melbourne: Cambridge University Press: 1996). xxxix + 216 pp., £35.00 cloth, £12.95 paper.The Politics of Women's Work: The Paris Garment Trades, 1750–1915. By Judith G. Coffin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 289 pp., $35/£28.50 cloth.Rethinking the Political: Gender, Resistance, and the State. By Barbara Laslett, Johanna Brenner, and Yesim Arat, eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) 498 pp., $39.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background. By Paul Avrich (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 265 pp., $14.95.Changing the Rules: Psychology in the Netherlands 1900–1985. By Trudy Dehue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), ix + 204 pp., £30.00/$49.95 cloth.The Love Affair as a Work of Art. By Dan Hofstadter (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), xxii + 314 pp., $24.00.Music in the Castle: Troubadours, Books and Orators in Italian Courts of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Centuries. By F. Alberto Gallo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 147 pp., $45.00/£35.95 cloth, $19.95/£15.95 paper.Imperialism and Its Contradictions. By V. G. Kiernan, ed. by Harvey J. Kaye (London/New York: Routledge, 1995), xii + 218 pp., £11.99 paper.Cholera in Post‐Revolutionary Paris, A Cultural History. By Catherine J. Kudlick, Studies in the History of Society & Culture, 25 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), xiv + 293 pp., $40.00/£30.00 cloth.Legal Medicine in History. Edited by Michael Clarke and Catherine Crawford, Cambridge History of Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), xi + 364 pp.,£40.00 cloth.The Reign of Henry VIII: Politics, Policy and Piety. Edited by Diarmaid MacCulloch (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), pp. vii + 313 pp., $45.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.Realism, Utopia, and the Mushroom Cloud: Four Activist Intellectuals and Their Strategies for Peace, 1945–1989. By Michael Bess (Chicago/London: Chicago University Press, 1993), xxviii + 322 pp., £15.95/$22.95 paper.Focus: Margarete Steffin, The Brecht Yearbook 19. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994, vii + 387 pp., n.p.g. paper.After MacIntyre: Critical Perspectives on the Work of Alasdair Maclntyre. Edited by John Horton and Susan Mendus (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), x + 322 pp., £45.00 cloth, £12.95 paper.Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States and Citizenship. Edited by Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 308 pp., $16.95 paper.Liberalism's Crooked Circle: Letters to Adam Michnik. By Ira Katznelson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), xx + 192 pp., n.p.g.After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist. By Clifford Geertz (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 198 pp., $22.95.French Literary Fascism: Nationalism, Anti‐Semitism, and the Ideology of Culture. By David Carroll (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), ix+ 299 pp. £29.95.Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals, Edited by Richard Schacht, Philosophical Traditions Series, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), xxl + 479pp.Critical Heidegger. Edited by Christopher Macann (London/New York: Routledge, 1996), 284pp., £40.00/£12.99.The God Within: Kant, Schelling, and Historicity. By Emil L. Fackenheim, edited by John Burbidge (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 252 pp., $75.00/£56.00 cloth.The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848. By Paul W. Schroeder (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), xxii + 894 pp., £45.00/$49.95.Dueling: The Cult of Honor in Fin‐de‐Siècle Germany. By Kevin McAleer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), xiii + 268 pp., H.B., n.p.g.Hegel's Social Philosophy: The Project of Reconciliation. By Michael O. Hardimon (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), vii + 278 pp., $18.95 paper.The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England. By William Calin (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), xvi + 508 pp., $29.95 paper.Extreme‐Occident: French Intellectuals and America. By Jean Philippe Mathy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) 305 pp., U.K. and Eire, $13.50 paper/£39.50 cloth. All other countries except U.S.A., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, $19.50 paper/$56.25 cloth.The Combing of History. By David William Cohen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), xxv + 264 pp., £38.25/$55.25 cloth, £14.25/ $20.75 paper.Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life. By Theodore M. Porter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), xiv + 310 pp., $24.95/£19.95 cloth.Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States. By Matthew Frye Jacobson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 321 pp., $45.00 cloth.The Confessions and Correspondence, including the Letters to Malesherbes. The Collected Writings of Rousseau, Volume 5. Edited by Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters and Peter G. Stillman, translated by Christopher Kelly (Hanover/London: University Press of New England, 1995), xxxvi + 700 pp., $60.00 cloth.Heidegger, Dilthey and the Crisis of Historicism. By Charles R. Bambach (Ithaca/London: Cornell University, 1995), xii + 297 pp., $46.75 cloth, $20.85 paper.Three Discourses: A Critical Modern Edition of Newly Identified Work of the Young Hobbes. Edited by Noel B. Reynolds and Arlene Saxonhouse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) pp. ix + 181 pp., $27.50/£21.95. cloth.Telemachus: Son of Ulysses. By Francois de Fenelon, edited and translated by Patrick Riley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 340 pp., £40.00/$59.95 cloth, £14.95/$19.95 paper.Nietzsche's Case: Philosophy as/and Literature. By Bernd Magnus, Jean‐Pierre Mileuv, Stanley Stewart (London: Routledge, 1994), xi + 284 pp., £12.99 paper.Maltese Political Development 1798–1864, A Documentary History. By Henry Fredo (Malta: Interprint, 1993) xv+ 921 pp., n.p.g.Monastic and Religious Orders in Britain, 1000–1300. By Janet Burton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xi + 354 pp., $69.95 cloth, $18.95/£12.95 paper.Louis VIII: Le Lion. By Gerard Silvery (Paris: Fayard, 1995), 473 pp., 150.00 FF, paper.The Music of the Heavens: Kepler's Harmonic Astronomy. By Bruce Stephenson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 260 pp.The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation. Edited by David Cesarani (London: Routledge, 1994) 318 pp., £35.00 cloth, ISBN 0415–09954–4.Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History. By William H. McNeill (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), viii + 198 pp., $22.00 cloth.Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. By Pierre Hadot, translated and edited by Arnold Davidson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), viii + 309 pp., n.p.g.Appetites and Identities: An Introduction to the Social Anthropology of Western Europe. By Sara Delamont (London/New York: Routledge, 1995), 254 pp., $59.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.Reformation to Revolution: Politics and Religion in Early Modern England. Edited by Margot Todd (London: Routledge, 1995), xiii + 279 pp., £11.99 paperback.Novalis: Signs of Revolution. By William Arctander O'Brien (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1995), viii + 376 pp., £47.95 cloth/£ 17.95 paper.Chopin at the Boundaries: Sex, History and Musical Genre. By Jeffrey Kallberg (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 301 pp., $45.00.Holland and the Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century: the Politics of Particularism. By J. L. Price (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 312 pp., $52.00/£35.00 cloth.Aspects of British Political History, 1815–1914. By Stephen J. Lee (London/New York: Routledge, 1994), viii + 375 pp., n.p.g.Sentimental Narrative and the Social Order in France, 1760–1820. By David L. Denby (Cambridge Studies in French, 47) (Cambridge University Press, 1994), xi + 281 pp., £37.50. ISBN 0 52143086 0Platonism and the English Imagination. Edited by Anna Baldwin and Sarah Hutton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xv + 357 pp., £40.00/ $59.95 cloth. ISBN 0–521–40308–1.Art and Eloquence in Byzantium. By Henry Maguire 2d ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 111 figs. + xxiii + 148 pp., $18.95 paper.Money and Magic: A Critique of the Modern Economy in the Light of Goethe's Faust. By H.‐ C. Binswanger, with a postcript by Irving Fetscher, translated by I. E. Harrison. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 132 pp. $24.75 cloth.Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue. By Heinrich Meier, translated by J. Harvey Lomax (Chicago/ London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 156 pp., $19.95/£15.95 cloth, ISBN: 0–226–51889–2Men, Ideas and Tanks: British Military Thought and Armoured Forces, 1903–1939. By J. P. Harris (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), viii + 342 pp., £40.00 cloth, £14.99 paper.Une histoire du paradis, II: Mille ans de bonheur. By Jean Delumeau. (Paris: Fayard, 1995), 496 pp., 150.00 FF, paper.Narrative Ethics. By Adam Zachary Newton (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), xi + 335 pp., $39.95.War and Economy in the Third Reich. By R. J. Overy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 390 pp., n.p.g.Between Reformed Scholasticism and Pan‐Protestantism: Jean‐Alphonse Turretin (1671–1737) and Enlightened Orthodoxy at the Academy of Geneva. By Martin I. Klauber (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1994), 244 pp., £29.95.The Writing of Melancholy. Modes of Opposition in Early French Modernism. By Ross Chambers, translated by Mary Seidman Trouille (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), xiv + 239 pp., $29.95 cloth.Idle Hands: The Experience of Unemployment, 1790–1990. By John Burnett (London/New York: Routledge, 1994), ix + 368 pp., £14.99 paper.The American Radical. Edited by Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Harvey J. Kaye (New York/London: Routledge, 1994), 380 pp., £14.99 paper.

For Marx, work is the fundamental and central activity in human life and, potentially at least, a ful lling and liberating activity. Although this view is implicit throughout Marx’s work, there is little explicit explanation or defence of it. The fullest treatment is in the account of ‘estranged labour’ [entfremdete Arbeit] in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts;1 but, even there, Marx does not set out his philosophical assumptions at length. For an understanding of these, one must turn to Hegel. Marx is quite explicit about his debt to Hegel in this respect.

For the past decade, the government has been ruthlessly pursuing free market policies. It has introduced market forces into many walks of life previously protected from them; and it has vigorously promoted the values of the `enterprise culture'. The economic and social consequences of these policies have been dramatic and profound. On the one hand, there has been a radical economic `restructuring': a ruthless sweeping away of much that was old and inefficient, and a considerable streamlining and modernizing of the economy. In the process, however, the lives of countless individuals have been disrupted. Communities, and even whole regions, have been devastated. Millions have been thrown out of work, or forced into new and often uncongenial occupations.

Radical Philosophy was born in the aftermath of the student movement of the 1960s. At that time, philosophy in British universities was very conservative and traditional. Ordinary language philosophy, the analytical approach, and the empiricist tradition were absolutely dominant. However, the student movement of the 1960s had opened young people's minds to a whole new range of radical ideas and issues. These were dismissed as not worthy of study, and excluded from discussion in philosophy departments.

Marx's concepts of individual and society have their roots in Hegel's philosophy. Like recent communitarian philosophers, both Marx and Hegel reject the idea that the individual is an atomic entity, an idea that runs through liberal social philosophy and classical economics. Human productive activity is essentially social. However, Marx shows that the liberal concepts of individuality and society are not simply philosophical errors; they are products and expressions of the social alienation of free market conditions. Marx's theory develops from Hegel's account of "civil society," and uses a framework of historical development similar to Hegel's. However, Marx uses the concept of alienation to criticize the liberal, communitarian and Hegelian conceptions of modern society and to envisage a form of individuality and community that lies beyond them

Since 2007, capitalism has been going through its greatest crisis since the 1930s or before. In 2008, the banking system was saved from meltdown (at least for the time being) only by extensive government intervention in the USA, Britain, and a number of other countries. Stock markets all over the world plummeted. Then the crisis spread to the ‘real’ economy. A long and deep recession followed. Only now are we perhaps beginning to see what may – or may not – be fragile signs of recovery. Capitalism, it is sometimes said, has been on the verge of collapse

Whether the policies of the Thatcher and Reagan years brought any overall economic benefits is doubtful; that they have had high social costs is now quite evident. The unfettered pursuit of self-interest has weakened social bonds and led to social decay and disintegration on a scale which is causing alarm right across the political spectrum. Until recently such concerns were voiced only from the left, but now the right is also waking up to them: witness, for example, the Conservatives' recent and mercifully inept `back to basics' campaign. Communitarians like Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Walzer, Charles Taylor and Michael Sandel, have attempted to articulate these ideas in philosophical terms and develop a critique of `liberal' individualist social theory on this basis. Against this background, their view that community is a reality and a value has great intuitive appeal. However, the more one goes into it, the more problematic it seems to become.