Organized as a series of tightly linked, comparative assessments, Mapping the West European Left provides a guide to the state of the left in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Spain. While all the essays are detailed historical compositions--setting recent crises and dilemmas in a longer perspective reaching back into the postwar settlement--they articulate original insights into the contemporary political conjuncture.

Why did Swedish social democracy lose hegemony and direction while its Norwegian counterpart showed unexpected resilience? What was the...

Erudite, witty and often controversial, "The London Review of Books" informs and entertains its readers with a fortnightly dose of the best and liveliest of all things cultural.
This anthology brings together some of the most memorable pieces from recent years, includes Alan Bennett s Diary, Christopher Hitchens on Bill Clinton s presidency, Terry Castle s hotly-debated reading of Jane Austen s letters, Jerry Fodor taking issue with Richard Dawkins on evolution, Victor Kiernan on treason, Jenny Diski musing on death, Stephen Frears adventures in Hollywood, Linda Colley on Nancy Reagan,...

Traces the genesis, consolidation and consequences of the postmodern idea. Beginning in the Hispanic world of the 1930s, the text takes the reader through to the 70s, when Lyotard and Habermas gave the idea of postmodernism wider currency and finally the 90s, with the work of Fredric Jameson.

What have been the major changes in the intellectual landscape of the left since the mid seventies? Have they on balance represented an emancipation or a retreat for socialist culture as a whole? In the Tracks of Historical Materialism looks at some of the paradoxes in the evolution of Marxist thought in this period. It starts by considering the remarkable and variegated growth of historical materialism in the Anglo-American world, spreading across a broad field from history to economics, politics to literature, sociology to philosophy. By contrast, the same years have seen a drastic...

This synoptic essay considers the nature and evolution of the Marxist theory that developed in Western Europe, after the defeat of the proletarian rebellions in the West and the isolation of the Russian Revolution in the East in the early 1920s. It focuses particularly on the work of Lukacs, Korsch and Gramsci; Adorno, Marcuse and Benjamin; Sartre and Althusser; and Della Volpe and Colletti, together with other figures within Western Marxism from 1920 to 1975. The theoretical production of each of these thinkers is related simultaneously to the practical fate of working-class struggles and to...

A set of reflections on British society and culture, this volume falls into two principal parts. The first consists of a pair of essays published in new Left Review in the 1960s. Origins of the Present Crisis - which suggested a general schema for the analysis of class and power in modern Britain and their relation to its decline; and Components of National Culture, which looked at the pattern of intellectual disciplines associated with the post-war political consensus. One premise of these accounts was a conception of bourgeois revolution, whose critique is sketched in a short intermezzo...

The texts in this volume offer critical assessments of a number of leading figures in contemporary intellectual life, who are in different ways thinkers at the intersection of history and politics. They include Roberto Unger, advocate of plasticity; the historians of antiquity and of revolution, Geoffrey de Ste. Croix and Isaac Deutscher; the philosophers of liberalism, Norberto Bobbio and Isaiah Berlin; the sociologists of power, Michael Mann and W.G. Runciman; the exponents of national identity, Andreas Hillgruber and Fernand Braudel; the ironists of science, Max Weber and Ernest Gellner;...