This collection of essays is addressed to the legacy of Enlightenment thought, with respect to eighteenth-century notions of human nature, human rights, representative democracy or the nation-state, and with regard to the barbarism, including the Holocaust, allegedly unleashed by eighteenth-century ideals of civilization. Each author offers an interpretation of modern or postmodern philosophy against the background of a so-called Enlightenment Project, envisaged as the conceptual ghost that haunts modernity.

This study engages with the work of Richard Rorty - an influential champion of human, radical liberalism - to explore the paradoxes of a philosophy which rejects any determinate view of human nature. It begins by considering Rorty's thesis concerning rescuer behaviour during the Holocaust. Measuring it against existing research on the subject and testimony of rescuers themselves, the author questions Rorty's use of their moral example as a challenge to universalist assumptions.

A powerful work of moral and political philosophy.The idea which I shall present here came to me more or less out of the blue. I was on a train some five years ago, on my way to spend a day at Headingley and I was reading a book about the death camp at Sobibor... The particular, not very appropriate, conjunction involved for me in this train journey... had the effect of fixing my thoughts on one of the more dreadful features of human coexistence, when in the shape of a simple five-word phrase the idea occurred to me. In The Contract of Mutual Indifference, Norman Geras discusses a central...

This book tells the story of the emergence of the concept of crimes against humanity. It examines its origins, the ethical assumptions underpinning it, its legal and philosophical boundaries, and some of the controversies connected with it. A brief historical introduction is followed by an exploration of the various meanings of the term 'crimes against humanity' that have been suggested; a definition is proposed linking it to the idea of basic human rights. The book looks at some problems with the boundaries of the concept, the threshold for its proper application and the related issue of...

An important contribution to our understanding of twentieth-century Marxism

During the first decades of the twentieth century, Rosa Luxemburg was the leader of the workers' movement in Poland and Germany. She made a remarkable contribution to socialist theory and practice, yet her legacy remains in dispute. In this book Norman Geras interrogates and refutes the myths that have developed around her work. She was an opponent of socialist participation in the First World War and, as Geras shows, her views on socialist strategy in Russia were closer to Lenin's than any other leader's....

"Marx did not reject the idea of a human nature. He was right not to do so."

That is the conclusion of this passionate and polemical new work by Norman Geras. In it, he places the sixth of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach under rigorous scrutiny. He argues that this ambiguous statement--widely cited as evidence that Marx broke with all conceptions of human nature in 1845--must be read in the context of Marx's work as a whole. His later writings are informed by an idea of a specifically human nature that fulfills both explanatory and normative functions.

The belief that Marx's...