Download or read book The Wager of Lucien Goldmann written by Mitchell Cohen and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-08 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Wager of Lucien Goldmann, Mitchell Cohen provides the first full-length study of this major figure of postwar French intellectual life and champion of socialist humanism. While many Parisian leftists staunchly upheld Marxism's "scientificity" in the 1950s and 1960s, Lucien Goldmann insisted that Marxism was by then in severe crisis and had to reinvent itself radically if it were to survive. He rejected the traditional Marxist view of the proletariat and contested the structuralist and antihumanist theorizing that infected French left-wing circles in the tumultuous 1960s. Highly regarded by thinkers as diverse as Jean Piaget and Alasdair MacIntyre, Goldmann is shown here as a socialist who, unlike many others of his time, refused to portray his aspirations for humanity’s future as an inexorable unfolding of history’s laws. He saw these aspirations instead as a wager akin to Pascal’s in the existence of God. “Risk,” Goldmann wrote in his classic study of Pascal and Racine, The Hidden God, “possibility of failure, hope of success, and the synthesis of the three in a faith which is a wager are the essential constituent elements of the human condition.” In The Wager of Lucien Goldmann, Cohen retrieves Goldmann’s achievement—his “genetic structuralist” method, his sociology of literature, his libertarian socialist politics. Originally published in 1994. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book The Hidden God written by Lucien Goldmann and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2016-07-12 with total page 650 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This remarkable text, first published in 1964, was a landmark of its era and remains, in the words of Michael Lwy, a work of "remarkable richness." Drawing on Georg Lukcs' History and Class Consciousness, Lucien Goldmann applies the concept of "world visions" to flesh out the similarities between Pascal's Penses and Kant's critical philosophy, contrasting them with the rationalism of Descartes and the empiricism of Hume. For Goldmann, a leading exponent of the most fruitful method of applying Marxist ideas to literary and philosophical problems, the "tragic vision" marked an important phase in the development of European thought, as it moved from rationalism and empiricism to the dialectical philosophy of Hegel, Marx and Lukcs. Here he offers a general approach to the problems of philosophy, of literary criticism, and of the relationship between thought and action in human society.
Download or read book The Wager of Lucien Goldmann written by Professor Mitchell Cohen and published by . This book was released on 1994-01-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Wager of Lucien Goldmann, Mitchell Cohen provides the first full-length study of this major figure of postwar French intellectual life and champion of socialist humanism. While many Parisian leftists staunchly upheld Marxism's "scientificity" in the 1950s and 1960s, Lucien Goldmann insisted that Marxism was by then in severe crisis and had to reinvent itself radically if it were to survive. He rejected the traditional Marxist view of the proletariat and contested the structuralist and antihumanist theorizing that infected French left-wing circles in the tumultuous 1960s. In fact, the popularity of such trends in the Left Bank was one reason why Goldmann's own name and work were eclipsed - this despite the acclaim of thinkers as diverse as Jean Piaget and Alasdair MacIntyre, who called him "the finest and most intelligent Marxist of the age." As Cohen shows in this brilliant reconstruction of Goldmann's life and thought, he was a socialist who, unlike many others of his time, refused to portray his aspirations for humanity's future as an inexorable unfolding of history's laws, but saw them rather as a wager akin to Pascal's in the existence of God. "Risk," Goldmann wrote in his classic study of Pascal and Racine, The Hidden God, "possibility of failure, hope of success, and the synthesis of the three in a faith which is a wager are the essential constituent elements of the human condition." In The Wager of Lucien Goldmann, Cohen retrieves Goldmann's achievement - his "genetic structuralist" method, his sociology of literature, his libertarian socialist politics.
Download or read book Princeton Readings in Political Thought written by Mitchell Cohen and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-31 with total page 778 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thoroughly updated and substantially expanded edition of an acclaimed anthology This is a thoroughly updated and substantially expanded new edition of one of the most popular, wide-ranging, and engaging anthologies of Western political thinking, one that spans from antiquity to the twenty-first century. In addition to the majority of the pieces that appeared in the original edition, this new edition features exciting new selections from more recent thinkers who address vital contemporary issues, including identity, cosmopolitanism, global justice, and populism. Organized chronologically, the anthology brings together a fascinating array of writings--including essays, book excerpts, speeches, and other documents—that have indelibly shaped how politics and society are understood. Each chronological section and thinker is presented with a brief, lucid introduction, making this a valuable reference as well as reader. A thoroughly updated and substantially expanded edition of an acclaimed anthology of political thought Features a wide range of thinkers, including Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, Christine de Pizan, Machiavelli, Luther, Calvin, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Swift, Hume, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Jefferson, Burke, Olympes de Gouges, Wollstonecraft, Kant, Hegel, Bentham, Mill, de Tocqueville, Frederick Douglass, Lincoln, Marx, Nietzsche, Lenin, John Dewey, Gaetano Mosca, Roberto Michels, Weber, Emma Goldman, Freud, Einstein, Mussolini, Arendt, Hayek, Franklin D. Roosevelt, T. H. Marshall, Orwell, Leo Strauss, de Beauvoir, Fanon, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Havel, Fukuyama, Mitchell Cohen, Habermas, Foucault, Rawls, Nozick, Walzer, Iris Marion Young, Martha Nussbaum, Peter Singer, Amartya Sen, and Jan-Werner Müller Includes brief introductions for each thinker
Download or read book Luk cs and Heidegger written by Lucien Goldmann and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusses upon two of the twentieth century's most important philosophers, Gyorgy Lukacs and Martin Heidegger
Download or read book Bourdieu in Question New Directions in French Sociology of Art written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-11-27 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Bourdieu in Question: New Directions in French Sociology of Art, Jeffrey A. Halley and Daglind E. Sonolet offer to English-speaking audiences an account of the very lively Francophone debates over Pierre Bourdieu’s work in the domain of the arts and culture, and present other directions and perspectives taken by major French researchers who extend or differ from his point of view, and who were marginalized by the Bourdieusian moment. Three generations of research are presented: contemporaries of Bourdieu, the next generation, and recent research. Themes include the art market and value, cultural politics, the reception of artworks, theory and the concept of the artwork, autonomy in art, ethnography and culture, and the critique of Bourdieu on literature. Contributors are: Howard S. Becker, Martine Burgos, Marie Buscatto, Jean-Louis Fabiani, Laurent Fleury, Florent Gaudez, Jeffrey A. Halley, Nathalie Heinich, Yvon Lamy, Jacques Leenhardt, Cécile Léonardi, Clara Lévy, Pierre-Michel Menger, Raymonde Moulin, Jean-Claude Passeron, Emmanuel Pedler, Bruno Péquignot, Alain Quemin, Cherry Schrecker, Daglind E. Sonolet.
Download or read book God Owes Us Nothing written by Leszek Kolakowski and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-11-09 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: God Owes Us Nothing reflects on the centuries-long debate in Christianity: how do we reconcile the existence of evil in the world with the goodness of an omnipotent God, and how does God's omnipotence relate to people's responsibility for their own salvation or damnation. Leszek Kolakowski approaches this paradox as both an exercise in theology and in revisionist Christian history based on philosophical analysis. Kolakowski's unorthodox interpretation of the history of modern Christianity provokes renewed discussion about the historical, intellectual, and cultural omnipotence of neo-Augustinianism. "Several books a year wrestle with that hoary conundrum, but few so dazzlingly as the Polish philosopher's latest."—Carlin Romano, Washington Post Book World "Kolakowski's fascinating book and its debatable thesis raise intriguing historical and theological questions well worth pursuing."—Stephen J. Duffy, Theological Studies "Kolakowski's elegant meditation is a masterpiece of cultural and religious criticism."—Henry Carrigan, Cleveland Plain Dealer
Download or read book Essays on Method in the Sociology of Literature written by Lucien Goldmann and published by Telos Press Publishing. This book was released on 1980 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Cultural Creation in Modern Society written by Lucien Goldmann and published by Telos Press, Limited. This book was released on 1976 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Devil in History written by Vladimir Tismaneanu and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2014-03-14 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Devil in History is a provocative analysis of the relationship between communism and fascism. Reflecting the author’s personal experiences within communist totalitarianism, this is a book about political passions, radicalism, utopian ideals, and their catastrophic consequences in the twentieth century’s experiments in social engineering. Vladimir Tismaneanu brilliantly compares communism and fascism as competing, sometimes overlapping, and occasionally strikingly similar systems of political totalitarianism. He examines the inherent ideological appeal of these radical, revolutionary political movements, the visions of salvation and revolution they pursued, the value and types of charisma of leaders within these political movements, the place of violence within these systems, and their legacies in contemporary politics. The author discusses thinkers who have shaped contemporary understanding of totalitarian movements—people such as Hannah Arendt, Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, Albert Camus, François Furet, Tony Judt, Ian Kershaw, Leszek Kolakowski, Richard Pipes, and Robert C. Tucker. As much a theoretical analysis of the practical philosophies of Marxism-Leninism and Fascism as it is a political biography of particular figures, this book deals with the incarnation of diabolically nihilistic principles of human subjugation and conditioning in the name of presumably pure and purifying goals. Ultimately, the author claims that no ideological commitment, no matter how absorbing, should ever prevail over the sanctity of human life. He comes to the conclusion that no party, movement, or leader holds the right to dictate to the followers to renounce their critical faculties and to embrace a pseudo-miraculous, a mystically self-centered, delusional vision of mandatory happiness.
Download or read book Marxism and Ethics written by Paul Blackledge and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-14 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marxism and Ethics is a comprehensive and highly readable introduction to the rich and complex history of Marxist ethical theory as it has evolved over the last century and a half. Paul Blackledge argues that Marx's ethics of freedom underpin his revolutionary critique of capitalism. Marx's conception of agency, he argues, is best understood through the lens of Hegel's synthesis of Kantian and Aristotelian ethical concepts. Marx's rejection of moralism is not, as suggested in crude materialist readings of his work, a dismissal of the free, purposive, subjective dimension of action. Freedom, for Marx, is both the essence and the goal of the socialist movement against alienation, and freedom's concrete modern form is the movement for real democracy against the capitalist separation of economics and politics. At the same time, Marxism and Ethics is also a distinctive contribution to, and critique of, contemporary political philosophy, one that fashions a powerful synthesis of the strongest elements of the Marxist tradition. Drawing on Alasdair MacIntyre's early contributions to British New Left debates on socialist humanism, Blackledge develops an alternative ethical theory for the Marxist tradition, one that avoids the inadequacies of approaches framed by Kant on the one hand and utilitarianism on the other.
Download or read book Criticism of Theology written by Roland Boer and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010-12-17 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through a lively and thorough critical commentary, Criticism of Theology engages with some of the most significant Marxists who are fascinated by religion: Max Horkheimer, E.P. Thompson, G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, Michael Löwy, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Antonio Negri.
Download or read book The Political Unconscious written by Fredric Jameson and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-03 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fredric Jameson, in The Political Unconscious, opposes the view that literary creation can take place in isolation from its political context. He asserts the priority of the political interpretation of literary texts, claiming it to be at the center of all reading and understanding, not just a supplement or auxiliary to other methods current today. Jameson supports his thesis by looking closely at the nature of interpretation. Our understanding, he says, is colored by the concepts and categories that we inherit from our culture's interpretive tradition and that we use to comprehend what we read. How then can the literature of other ages be understood by readers from a present that is culturally so different from the past? Marxism lies at the foundation of Jameson's answer, because it conceives of history as a single collective narrative that links past and present; Marxist literary criticism reveals the unity of that uninterrupted narrative. Jameson applies his interpretive theory to nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts, including the works of Balzac, Gissing, and Conrad. Throughout, he considers other interpretive approaches to the works he discusses, assessing the importance and limitations of methods as different as Lacanian psychoanalysis, semiotics, dialectical analysis, and allegorical readings. The book as a whole raises directly issues that have been only implicit in Jameson's earlier work, namely the relationship between dialectics and structuralism, and the tension between the German and the French aesthetic traditions. The Political Unconscious is a masterly introduction to both the method and the practice of Marxist criticism. Defining a mode of criticism and applying it successfully to individual works, it bridges the gap between theoretical speculation and textual analysis.
Download or read book Closing of the American Mind written by Allan Bloom and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-06-30 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The brilliant, controversial, bestselling critique of American culture that “hits with the approximate force and effect of electroshock therapy” (The New York Times)—now featuring a new afterword by Andrew Ferguson in a twenty-fifth anniversary edition. In 1987, eminent political philosopher Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind, an appraisal of contemporary America that “hits with the approximate force and effect of electroshock therapy” (The New York Times) and has not only been vindicated, but has also become more urgent today. In clear, spirited prose, Bloom argues that the social and political crises of contemporary America are part of a larger intellectual crisis: the result of a dangerous narrowing of curiosity and exploration by the university elites. Now, in this twenty-fifth anniversary edition, acclaimed author and journalist Andrew Ferguson contributes a new essay that describes why Bloom’s argument caused such a furor at publication and why our culture so deeply resists its truths today.
Download or read book Specters of Marx written by Jacques Derrida and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-10-12 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prodigiously influential, Jacques Derrida gave rise to a comprehensive rethinking of the basic concepts and categories of Western philosophy in the latter part of the twentieth century, with writings central to our understanding of language, meaning, identity, ethics and values. In 1993, a conference was organized around the question, 'Whither Marxism?’, and Derrida was invited to open the proceedings. His plenary address, 'Specters of Marx', delivered in two parts, forms the basis of this book. Hotly debated when it was first published, a rapidly changing world and world politics have scarcely dented the relevance of this book.
Download or read book Biography of a Blunder written by Dileep Edara and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2016-02-29 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Engaging with a critical analysis of the base and superstructure thesis, regarding which a surprising number of reputed Marxist thinkers betray a perpetual ambivalence – by frequently deploying it in a variety of contexts, but simultaneously airing various reservations about it – this book proposes a radical departure from the presently predominant understanding of it. The popular view of the base as comprising economics, and superstructure as encompassing almost all other spheres of social life, is criticised as “panoramic”, or “panoptic”, or the “extended” version, to which Marx’s rigorously defined base of production relations and superstructure of politico-legal spheres is juxtaposed. Revisiting Marx’s formulations in his famous 1859 Preface, described here as his purloined letters, the study rehabilitates his restricted version, and upholds its conceptual superiority over its extended avatar that is currently ubiquitous. The substitution of Marx’s restricted version with the widely believed extended version of the thesis is characterised here as a blunder, and this book traces the biography of this blunder, through the intricate and tortuous theoretical developments that traverse a transnational and multidisciplinary territory, constituting the history of Marxism. The last chapter argues for a paradigm shift, in favour of the mode of production thesis, in order to redeem the holistic vision of Marx. This shift is necessitated by the extenuation of the status of the base and superstructure thesis that results from the restoration of Marx’s restricted version. This chapter grapples with the issues involved in preparing the ground for that shift. It also contends that, although these theoretical shifts are never formulated in a conscious and conclusive manner – as is done here – the best practices in Marxist analyses are always inspired by the methodological implications of the mode of production thesis, and, for this reason, the thesis is claimed to be the “conceptual unconscious of Marxism”.
Download or read book The Politics of Opera written by Mitchell Cohen and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-08 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wide-ranging look at the interplay of opera and political ideas through the centuries The Politics of Opera takes readers on a fascinating journey into the entwined development of opera and politics, from the Renaissance through the turn of the nineteenth century. What political backdrops have shaped opera? How has opera conveyed the political ideas of its times? Delving into European history and thought and music by such greats as Monteverdi, Lully, Rameau, and Mozart, Mitchell Cohen reveals how politics—through story lines, symbols, harmonies, and musical motifs—has played an operatic role both robust and sotto voce. This is an engrossing book that will interest all who love opera and are intrigued by politics.
