Progressives need a fundamentally new approach to politics. They have been losing not just because conservatives have so much more money and power, but also because they have accepted the conservatives' framing of political debates. They have accepted a framing where conservatives want market outcomes whereas liberals want the government to intervene to bring about outcomes that they consider f…
A systematic, critical examination of Karl Marx's social theories and their philosophical presuppositions. Through extensive discussions of the texts Jon Elster offers a balanced and detailed account of Marx's views that is at once sympathetic, undogmatic and rigorous. Equally importantly he tries to assess 'what is living and what is dead in the philosophy of Marx', using the analytical resour…
The popularity of Levi-Strauss, in the words of the editors of this collection of current essays and reviews, resides "in his seeming rejection of history and humanism, in his refusal to see Western civilization as privileged and unique, in his view of the human mind as programmed, in his emphasis on form over content, and in his insistence that the savage mind is not inferior to the civilized.…
Hannah Arendt was one of the foremost political thinkers of the twentieth century, and her particular interests have made her one of the most frequently cited thinkers of our time. This volume examines the primary themes of her multi-faceted work, from her theory of totalitarianism and her controversial idea of the "banality of evil" to her classic studies of political action and her final refl…
"The Theory of Communicative Action" offers nothing less than a systematic reconstruction of the theoretical foundations and framework of critical social theory. In this second and final volume of the work, Habermas examines the relations between action concepts and systems theory and elaborates a framework for analyzing the developmental tendencies of modern societies. He discusses in detail t…