The theorists of art and film commonly depict the modern audience as aesthetically and politically passive. In response, both artists and thinkers have sought to transform the spectator into an active agent and the spectacle into a communal performance.In this follow-up to the acclaimed The Future of the Image, Ranci�re takes a radically different approach to this attempted emancipation. First asking exactly what we mean by political art or the politics of art, he goes on ...

Following the disappearance of the Soviet Union, scholars across the political spectrum tackled the world-historical significance of the end of communism. This book addresses the balance-sheets of modern political history offered by three writers -- Francis Fukuyama, Eric Hobsbawm and Perry Anderson -- comparing them with the future projected by Marx in The Communist Manifesto.Gregory Elliott argues that Marx is central to all three accounts and that, along with the Manifesto, they...

From the early rumblings of the French revolution, at the start of the long nineteenth century, to the fall of the Soviet bloc at the close of the short twentieth century, historian Eric Hobsbawm is possibly the foremost chronicler of the modern age.Hobsbawm was a chronicler of revolutions, labour history, Empire, and conflicts; whose writings have informed the historical consciousness of scholars and general readers alike. From colonialism to capitalism, his trilogy of histories, ...

Written by one of political theory's leading thinkers, The Philosophy of Marx examines all the key areas of Marx's writings in their wider historical and theoretical context-including the concepts of class struggle, ideology, humanism, progress, determinism, commodity fetishism, and the state. Etienne Balibar opens a gateway into the thought of one of history's great minds.In this updated edition to this now classic work, Balibar has added a substantial introduction and ne...

Following the locust years of the neo-liberal revolution, social democracy was the great victor at the fin-de-si�cle elections. Today, parties descended from the Second International hold office throughout the European Union, while the Right appears widely disorientated by the dramatic "modernisation" of a political tradition dating back to the nineteenth century.The focal point of Gerassimos Moschonas's study is the emergent "new social democracy" of the twenty-first cent...

Exploring the genesis of neoliberalism, and the political and economic circumstances of its deployment, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval dispel numerous common misconceptions. Neoliberalism is neither a return to classical liberalism nor the restoration of "pure" capitalism. To misinterpret neoliberalism is to fail to understand what is new about it: far from viewing the market as a natural given that limits state action, neoliberalism seeks to construct the market and use it as a model f...

One hundred years after the Russian Revolution the Soviet Union remains the most extraordinary, yet tragic, attempt to create a society beyond capitalism. Yet its history was one that for a long time proved impossible to write.In The Soviet Century, Moshe Lewin follows this history in all its complexity, guiding us through the inner workings of a system which is still barely understood. In the process he overturns widely held beliefs about the USSR's leaders, the State-Par...

As the crisis of capitalism unfolds, the need for alternatives is felt ever more intensely. The struggle between radical movements and the forces of reaction will be merciless. A crucial battlefield, where the outcome of the crisis will in part be decided, is that of theory.Over the last twenty-five years, radical intellectuals across the world have produced important and innovative ideas. The endeavour to transform the world without falling into the catastrophic traps of the past ...

War and Revolution identifies and takes to task a reactionary trend among contemporary historians. It is a revisionist tendency discernible in the work of authors such as Ernst Nolte, who traces the impetus behind the Holocaust to the excesses of the Russian Revolution; or Fran�ois Furet, who links the Stalinist purges to an "illness" originating with the French Revolution.In this vigorous riposte to those who would denigrate the history of emancipatory struggle, Losurdo c...

In this definitive historical investigation, Italian author and philosopher Domenico Losurdo argues that from the outset liberalism, as a philosophical position and ideology, has been bound up with the most illiberal of policies: slavery, colonialism, genocide, racism and snobbery.Narrating an intellectual history running from the eighteenth through to the twentieth centuries, Losurdo examines the thought of preeminent liberal writers such as Locke, Burke, Tocqueville, Constant, Be...

In The Future of the Image, Jacques Ranci�re develops a fascinating new concept of the image in contemporary art, showing how art and politics have always been intrinsically intertwined. He argues that there is a stark political choice in art: it can either reinforce a radical democracy or create a new reactionary mysticism. For Ranci�re there is never a pure art: the aesthetic revolution must always embrace egalitarian ideals.

In this fascinating new exploration of Samuel Beckett's work, Pascale Casanova argues that Beckett's reputation rests on a pervasive misreading of his oeuvre, which neglects entirely the literary revolution he instigated. Reintroducing the historical into the heart of this body of work, Casanova provides an arresting portrait of Beckett as radically subversive-doing for writing what Kandinsky did for art-and in the process presents the key to some of the most profound enigmas of Beckett's ...