This insightful Handbook reviews the key frameworks guiding political scientists and historians of political thought. Comprehensive in scope, it covers historical methodology, traditions, epochs, and classic authors and texts, spanning from ancient Greece until the nineteenth century.
Elucidating the evolution and current state of the field, the Handbook emphasizes the value of studying the history of political ideas to gain a critical perspective on our own embedded cultural predispositions. Authors analyze various intellectual schools, such as Stoicism, Christianity, Islam, Liberalism, Republicanism, and Libertarianism, and discuss hermeneutical strategies to reading historical texts, including approaches from the Cambridge School and the Straussians. Providing a broad overview of Western political ideas, an international range of contributors also demonstrate cognizance of global theoretical movements and their significance for historical inquiry. They reexamine the standard canon of political thinkers in light of topics such as gender, colonization, and race, exploring the ideas of, amongst others, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Wollstonecraft, and Marx.
Accessible to undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as established scholars, this Handbook is a crucial resource for academics in political science, philosophy, intellectual history, and economics, as well as scholars who study economic thought, law and politics. It will also appeal to scholars seeking a clear understanding of the key concepts that continue to influence contemporary theory and research across the social sciences.
A strikingly original account of Theodor Adorno’s work as a critique animated by happiness.
“Gordon’s confidently gripping and persistently subtle interpretation brings a new tone to the debate about Adorno’s negativism.”—Jürgen Habermas
Theodor Adorno is often portrayed as a totalizing negativist, a scowling contrarian who looked upon modern society with despair. Peter E. Gordon thinks we have this wrong: if Adorno is uncompromising in his critique, it is because he sees in modernity an unfulfilled possibility of human flourishing. In a damaged world, Gordon argues, all happiness is likewise damaged but not wholly absent. Through a comprehensive rereading of Adorno’s work, A Precarious Happiness recovers Adorno’s commitment to traces of happiness—fragments of the good amid the bad. Ultimately, Gordon argues that social criticism, while exposing falsehoods, must also cast a vision for an unrealized better world.
The three texts published here were written in the mid-1970s….
Here I explain how these came about.
Back in 1974, I was teaching on a Modern Politics and History degree at Manchester. This involved modern historians from the History Department and members of POLSIS, the politics department. There was some concern that the academics from the two departments did not communicate with each other but taught their respective courses quite separately.
It was suggested that one way to address this problem would be to organise joint seminars on subjects of shared concern. The running was made by Terry Ranger of the History department. His initiative, which turned out to be a one-off achievement, took the form of organising three seminars discussing two recently published books by Perry Anderson: Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolute State. In each seminar, Mike Evans of POLSIS considered questions of Marxist theory and method involved in the particular historical problems under consideration. He was then followed by an historian. In the second seminar, Ian Kershaw (best known now as an historian of the Third Reich, especially his biography of Hitler, but, at the time, a lecturer in medieval economic history) criticised Anderson’s arguments about the feudal mode of production and the transition from feudalism to capitalism. So, the first two seminars were devoted to the slimmer, first volume. I was the historian tasked subjecting the whole of the Lineages book to critique in the third seminar. What is more, Ranger invited Anderson to attend that seminar. (Mischievously, Ranger did not introduce us to each other before the seminar began and challenged me to recognise Anderson – whom I had never met before – from how he listened to my critique! It was obvious who he was within about 30 seconds.) We had a very good discussion.
I previously grumbled about how hard it was to navigate Jean-Paul Sartre’s Situations. I went looking for an essay in the French, only to find it was in one volume of the original edition and a different volume of the revised edition. I then found this wasn’t an isolated example, but that the second edition broke with Sartre’s own organisation and went with a more chronological one, including many essays he hadn’t. There are good reasons for that, but calling it Situations again seems needlessly confusing. Chroniques might have been clearer.
Finding an essay in English translation can also be a challenge. There are multiple, overlapping but not entirely comprehensive collections of his essays in English. Some essays have been translated more than once; others it seems not at all.
This page is an attempt to make sense of the first few volumes of the first edition, with links to the useful French Wikipedia articles and Gallimard pages which give details of material in the second editions, and a list of the places where essays are available in English. I’ve not yet included the Seagull thematic volumes, which include many of these pieces. And I’m sure I’ve missed some of the pieces which appeared in journals or other collections. Corrections and additions welcome. As with the other resource pages on this site, this is intended to be a work in progress.
A photograph of seven volumes of the first edition, taken from an auction site.
Firsthand is an exploration—both suspenseful and comic—of the creative process in research writing. The book takes the reader through the ins and outs of a specific research journey, from combing through libraries and archives to the intellectual challenges involved with processing information that contradicts established ideas. More fundamentally, it addresses the somewhat mysterious portion of the intellectual process: the creative and serendipitous aspects involved in arriving at a fruitful research question in the first place.
Keith Gandal combines this scholarly detective story with a comic personal narrative about how a midlife crisis accidentally sent him on a journey to write a research monograph that many in his profession—including at times himself—were dubious about. While researching how Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner faced their forgotten crises of masculinity, Gandal discovers that his own crisis is instrumental to his creative process. Incorporating stories from Gandal’s comic romp through the hyper-competitive world of middle-aged men’s tennis, adopting pitbulls, and discussing Michel Foucault, Firsthand gives readers an inside look at how to acquire accurate knowledge—about the world, about history, and about oneself.
This volume wants to restore the depth and contradictions – both theoretical and biographical, political and speculative – of Alexandre Kojève. An author who wrote a lot, but published very little – leaving thousands of pages destined for oblivion or research. And research, after so much Kojèvian mythology, has recently opened up. Many have begun to delve into archives, translate unpublished works, and seek new sources. The contributions in this book start from this need: to study the entire corpus of Kojève, combining hermeneutical and philological approaches, reconstructing the biographical path with an investigation of intellectual alliances and hostilities.
The table of contents is in the images below – clicking on each will bring up a larger image.
While the explicit Althusserian engagement with Marx’s Capital remained largely limited to Reading Capital, after 1968, Nick Nesbitt argues, this theoretical intervention remained insistent, adopting the form of a general theory of materialist dialectic. The book thus analyzes the Althusserianist theory of a materialist dialectic across diverse sites including Althusser’s unpublished archive, Macherey’s exposition of Spinoza’s Ethics, and Badiou’s Logics of Worlds, while simultaneously bringing this fully-developed theory of materialist dialectic to bear anew on the reading of Capital itself, to show that Spinoza’s influence on Marx is far greater–and that of Hegel increasingly diminishing–than has been previously thought.
Why the neglected third volume of Capital holds the key to Marx’s theory of value
The Automatic Fetish traces Marx’s analysis of capital, step by step, through the material compiled posthumously as the third volume of Capital. Identifying the critique of value as the central through line of the entire work, Beverley Best elaborates a theory of movement through which the capital machine generates social forms of appearance as the inversion of its inner operating mechanisms. Neither a return to basics nor a new-fangled reconstruction, The Automatic Fetish eschews novelty to show once again that Marx rewards careful study.
– ‘If I had to choose one book that would make the case for the relevance of Marx’s critique of political economy to the humanities, this might very well be it’ Colleen Lye, co-editor of After Marx – ‘The contribution of The Automatic Fetish is hard to exaggerate’ Nicholas Brown, author of Autonomy – ‘Will make a significant contribution to the wider field of materialist theory’ Joshua Clover, author of Riot. Strike. Riot – ‘In Best’s hands, Capital becomes not only fascinating but useful, down to its last detail. Written with clarity, focus, and urgency, Best has “unreconstructed” Marx for our times’ Richard Dienst, author of The Bonds of Debt – ‘A groundbreaking book’ Werner Bonefeld, author of A Critical Theory of Economic Compulsion – ‘That rare work of theory whose practical implications just sing out loud … Surely among the most useful books on Capital III ever written’ Christopher Nealon, author of The Matter of Capital – ‘Brilliant, eloquent, and precise. Best has given us one of the most profound re-readings of Capital to have appeared in a generation and an essential source’ Neil Larsen, author of Determinations
This collection offers readers a guide to analyzing historical texts and objects using a diverse selection of sources in early modern medicine. It provides an array of interpretive strategies while also highlighting new trends in the field.
Each chapter serves as a study of a different type of source, including the benefits and limitations of that source and what it can reveal about the history of medicine. Contributors provide practical strategies for locating and interpreting sources, putting texts and objects into conversation, and explaining potential contradictions. A wide variety of sources, including account books, legal records, and personal letters, provide new opportunities for understanding early modern medicine and developing skills in historical analysis. Together, the chapters highlight emerging methodologies and debates, while covering a range of themes in the field, from reproductive health to hospital care to household medicine.
With wide geographical breadth, this book is a valuable resource for students and researchers looking to understand how to better engage with primary sources, as well as readers interested in early modern history and the history of medicine.
I just looked for an essay in one of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Situations. What a chaotic mess the different editions and translations are. The English text with the title Situations (1965) is a partial translation of volume IV. Qu’est-ce que la littérature? [What is Literature?] is in volume II of the first edition, and volume III of the later more chronological one, and available as a separate text in French and English. The English collection Literary and Philosophical Essays picks essays from volumes I and III. The reprint edition of Situations I as Critiques littéraires is of the first edition, not the updated one; the English Critical Essays is a complete translation of the first edition, but not the second edition which came out the same year as the translation. Situations philosophiques reprints texts from different volumes. Situations V has the subtitle Colonialisme et néo-colonialisme, and is translated as Colonialism and Neocolonialism, but I don’t think the English is of the updated version. The first edition of Situations III is translated as The Aftermath of War, but there is also a volume with the same press called Post-War Reflections, which has just the first two parts. There are also a bunch of thematic volumes with Seagull that translate many of these essays – but follow neither Sartre’s initial organisation nor the more chronological second edition. I’m sure there are more confusions.
[update 21 June 2024: a more systematic outline of contents and translations is here.]
The French wikipedia pages are useful – start with Situations I and follow the Chronologie for the other nine volumes. This says what is in the first and later edition of each volume, But has any ever tried to do a bibliography of where the essays are translated? My quick sense is that some essays are available in more than one translation, and certainly in more than one English collection, but that there are other essays which haven’t been translated. I was only, initially, looking for one piece, but it’s opened up what seems to be a really chaotic situation…
Update: Modern Times has some of the essays – some available elsewhere, others not. Portraits is a complete translation of the first edition of SituationsIV. Thanks to Patrick ffrench for the information on the first. The essay I was looking for, “Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur?” is in Situations III in the first edition and II in the second.
Update 17 and 18 June: my quick take on what should have been done is this. By all means produce a chronological reordering of material, including other essays, but do it systematically and don’t call it the same thing as the earlier French edition – Chroniques, for example. Or add supplemental essays to the existing arrangement. And with the translations, either do all new translations on a systematic basis, which seems to be what Seagull were doing initially, or translate the essays which are not already in English in thematic volumes. Chris Turner has done a huge amount of work with this, but the thematic volumes with Seagull look like they include a lot of previously translated material.
I know from the Foucault shorter essays how difficult it is – Essential Works reprinted a lot of previously available material, but without completely making any previous collection redundant, along with much new material. But its selection of material from Dits et écrits has made it difficult to propose a more systematic version – so many of the ‘best’ essays are already available, often in multiple collections. It has taken Richard Lynch’s bibliographical labours, now being updated by Daniele Lorenzini, to make sense of the English translations.
But from my initial look at the Sartre essays, it seems the case is even more complicated, as there are two French editions. I should also say I’m not against translations which select essays – that was done with a couple of Lefebvre collections I co-edited, for example. There are good reasons for this – not all the essays in a French collection are of the same interest for an Anglophone audience, choices might need to be made for cost, etc. But with Lefebvre we’ve tried to avoid reprinting essays which are already translated, usually only if they were incomplete initially or in hard-to-find places.
