Melbourne, 1971: radical counterculture, hippies, opposition to the Vietnam War and consumerism. The birth of Oz blues rock. Influenced by American blues after Robert Johnson, parallel to developments with Paul Butterfield, the Bluesbreakers and Canned Heat, Chain's music also developed in distinct ways, taking on a style later referred to as Oz blues, or Oz indigo. The emergence of prog rock and the consolidation of blues rock globally made for interesting times. Rock shifted beyond the b...

Stuart Macintyre was an eminent figure within the world of Australian history scholarship for 45 years. This collection of essays and responses revisits and extends this extraordinary life of achievement and engagement. Leading scholars write here of Macintyre's contribution to understanding radicalism and communism, postwar reconstruction, education and civics, universities, liberalism, historiography and the history wars. They also tell us about collegiality and friendship. The practice ...

Zygmunt Bauman was one of the most important social theorists of recent decades. He did major work on the Holocaust, the postmodern and much else, up to fifty-eight books in English on almost as many topics. In this book, Australian sociologist Peter Beilharz, Bauman’s collaborator for thirty years, recounts the details of their relationship, simultaneously charting the changes that have occurred in academic life from the 1980s to today. Friendship was one of the bonds that made Bauman and...

'An alluvial goldfield of social theorists - nuggets lying around all over the place.'Bob ConnellWho's who in the social theory zoo? This book introduces some of the leading social theorists in short, lively entries by leading Australian scholars. Social Theory covers thinkers from Althusser to Williams, by locals from Alexander to Yeatman.For beginner and enthusiast alike, it gives a sense of the state of the art in classical and modern social theory.Social...

This book seeks to explore the understanding of Fabianism of both the Webbs and the Fabian Women’s Group and how this understanding shaped their views regarding such gender-centred issues as the family wage; protective labour law; and women’s place in the welfare state, the home and the labour market.

First published in 1992. The collapse of communist rule in Eastern Europe has led to a widespread view that socialism is a dead, or at least dying, force. Labour’s Utopias argues that this assumption is based on the popular conception that socialism’s various traditions are simply different means to a common end. The author looks at three strands of socialism – Bolshevism, Fabianism and German Social Democracy – in order to assess whether this argument is justified, concluding tha...

This collection of essays examines the life and thought of Agnes Heller, who rose to international acclaim as a Marxist dissident in Eastern Europe, then went on to develop one of the most comprehensive oeuvres in contemporary philosophy, putting forward a distinctive ethical theory and analyses of a vast range of topics covering most every philosophical area. Here, philosophers, sociologists, journalists, and political scientists contextualize, compare and assess different elements of Hel...

First published in 1987. Trotskyists have long dominated the revolutionary tradition on the Western left. Written from a critical socialist standpoint, this book provides an analysis of Trotskyism and argues that Trotskyism is increasingly irrelevant as a means of achieving socialism. It argues that, as the realisation grows that the revolutionary tradition and the authoritarianism which necessarily result from it are wrong, the importance of the problem of the transition to socialism incr...

From tabloid exposes of child prostitution to the grisly tales of Jack the Ripper, narratives of sexual danger pulsated through Victorian London. Expertly blending social history and cultural criticism, Judith Walkowitz shows how these narratives reveal the complex dramas of power, politics, and sexuality that were being played out in late nineteenth-century Britain, and how they influenced the language of politics, journalism, and fiction.Victorian London was a world where long-st...

The thinkers who have been most influential on the attitudes of the New Left are examined in this study by one of the leading critics of leftist orientations in modern Western civilization. Scruton begins with a ruthless analysis of New Leftism and concludes with a critique of the key strands in its thinking. He conducts a reappraisal of such major left-wing thinkers as: E. P. Thompson, Ronald Dworkin, R. D. Laing, Jurgen Habermas, Gyorgy Lukacs, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Z...

Critical Theory emerged in the 1920s from the work of the Frankfurt School, the circle of German-Jewish academics who sought to diagnose-and, if at all possible, cure-the ills of society, particularly fascism and capitalism. In this book, Stephen Eric Bronner provides sketches of leading representatives of the critical tradition (such as George Lukács and Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse and Jurgen Habermas) as well as many of its seminal texts and empirical...

Janet Ajzenstat is one of Canada's most respected thinkers on the moral and philosophical foundations of responsible government and Confederation. Discovering Confederation is a study of political science over the last forty years through the intellectual lens of her career.Ajzenstat details her academic journey, from her early years as a hopeful, radical activist in the 1960s, through her graduate studies at McMaster University and the University of Toronto, her commitmen...