Philosophy Books - Page 8

Marx, Hayek, and Utopia (S U N Y Series in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences)

Chris Matthew Sciabarra

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Recommended; a very nice study of a useful subject. 4 out of 5 stars.
4 of 5 people found this review helpful.

Utopianism is a term which conjures up many thoughts. It is most often used to mean the designing of plans for society which are unrealizable according to their own standards of value. While this is certainly a sound general usage, a more specific set of illustrations are useful to show the *roots* of utopianism. The roots of utopianism, the qualities that constitute utopian thought throughout history (from Plato to Rawls), are the specific fallacies of thought that show in utopianism - reification, dualism, constructivism, etc.

Sciabarra gives a sound exposition of the original critiques of utopianism by Karl Marx and F.A. Hayek and thus proceeds to show how two unique and radical thinkers were able to legitimately separate their radicalism from utopianism.

Beyond the issue of radicalism vs. utopianism Sciabarra's book is also a useful auxilliary to a comparison of historical similarities between radical thought of Hayek, Marx, and the theorists influenced by them.

Sciabarra's main original thesis here is that Marx and Hayek are related by their (implicit or explicit) commitment to a doctrine of internal relations which is also called dialectic. Dialectical analysis rejects many of the traditional ontological dualisms of political science - holism (organicism) vs. atomism, criticism vs. action and commits itself to examining the dynamic relationships that define the thought and action; therefore the being of things. Relationships are not external to agents, dialectically speaking, but they are internal to and inseparable from what it means to be an agent - a socially constituted being with realms of choice, consent, resistance, and emancipation available. Thus we can begin to eliminate the aforementioned haunting dualisms.

This book is also useful beyond presenting an original thesis. It offers some very accessible explanations of Marx and Hayek's thought on economics, psychology, and humanity's capability to collectively construct its own future. The last chapter also offers a discussion of the radical psychology of Habermas and Wainwright and it's applicability to radical projects - of the left or right.

Editorial Review:

This book develops a critique of utopianism through a provocative comparison of the works of Karl Marx and F. A. Hayek, thus engaging two vastly different traditions in critical dialogue. By emphasizing the methodological and substantive similarities between Marxian and Hayekian perspectives, it challenges each tradition's most precious assumptions about the other. Through this comparative analysis, the book articulates the crucial distinctions between utopian and radical theorizing.

Sciabarra examines the dialectical method of social inquiry common to both Marxian and Hayekian thought and argues that both Marx and Hayek rejected utopian theorizing because it internalizes an abstract, ahistorical, exaggerated sense of human possibility. The chief disagreement between Marx and Hayek, he shows, is not political but epistemological, reflecting their differing assumptions about the limits of reason.

Homo ludens (COLECCION HISTORIA) (Historias / History) (Spanish Edition)

Huizinga, Johan

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World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)

Cornelius Castoriadis

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Editorial Review:

This collection presents a broad and compelling overview of the most recent work by a world-renowned figure in contemporary thought. Starting from an inquiry that grows out of the specific context of a society that is experiencing uncertainty as to its ways of living and being, its goals, its values, and its knowledge, one that has been incapable, so far, of adequately understanding the crisis it is undergoing, Castoriadis sets as his task the elucidation of this crisis and its conditions.

The book is in four parts: Koinonia, Polis, Psyche, Logos. The opening section begins with a general introduction to the author’s views on being, time, creation, and the imaginary institution of society and continues with reflections on the role of the individual psyche in racist thinking and acting and on the retreat from autonomy to generalized conformity in postmodernism. The second part is a critique of those who now belittle and distort the meaning of May ‘68 and other movements of the sixties as well as the French Revolution. The fate of the “project of autonomy” is considered here in the light of the Greek and the modern “political imaginary,” the “pulverization of Marxism-Leninism,” and a recent alleged “return of ethics” (Habermas, Rawls, McIntyre, Solzhenitsyn, Havel).

In part three, Castoriadis shows how psychoanalysis, like politics, can contribute to the project of individual and collective autonomy and challenges Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, and others in his report on “The State of the Subject Today.” This section also presents his most current lines of psychoanalytic research and thought on the “human nonconscious” in the body and on the problem of the psychoanalysis of psychotic subjects, where an alternative coherence on the level of meaning offers a constant challenge to the task of psychoanalytic interpretation.

Castoriadis’s highly original investigations of the unruly place of the imagination in Western philosophy round out the book. He examines how Aristotle’s original aporetic discovery and cover-up of the imagination were repeated by Kant, Freud, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty.

El Hombre Mediocre / The Mediocre Man (Clasicos De Siempre / Always Classics) (Spanish Edition)

Jose Ingenieros

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Social Science under Debate: A Philosophical Perspective

Mario Bunge

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A fascinating, original synthesis and reference. 5 out of 5 stars.
10 of 12 people found this review helpful.

I am a colleague of the author and have used the book in my own work.

This book will be equally invaluable to those seriously working to understand society and improve it, and repentent postmodernists wishing to be cured of their affliction. The book covers, in a scholarly, systemic, and often humorous and entertaining manner, all the social sciences (including anthropology, demography, linguistics, economics, sociology, political science, culturology and history) and sociotechnologies (including the law, management science, normative economics, and action theory). The following are excerpts from various professional reviews:

From the dust jacket:

"We should welcome the book for its author, subject, and style" (Charles Tilly, Columbia University).

"The book is scholarly yet lively; comprehensive yet unified around a few central powerful ideas; profound yet entertaining reading with one bon mot after another; unorthodox yet constructive" (Joseph Agassi, Tel Aviv and York Universities).

"No one can read [this volume] without learning a great deal, and [it] could be used as backbone of a teaching course, or an intelligent person could use it in an initiation to each of the fields [covered by the book]. Clarity, erudition and range are the merits" (the late Ernest Gellner).

Editorial Review:

Mario Bunge, author of the monumental Treatise on Basic Philosophy, is widely renowned as a philosopher of science. In this new and ambitious work he shifts his attention to the social sciences and the social technologies. He considers a number of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, law, history, and management science.

Bunge contends that social science research has fallen prey to a postmodern fascination with irrationalism and relativism. He urges social scientists to re-examine the philosophy and the methodology at the base of their discipline. Bunge calls for objective and relevant fact-finding, rigorous theorizing, and empirical testing, as well as morally sensitive and socially responsible policy design.

Postmodernism and the Social Sciences: A Thematic Approach (Contemporary Social Theory)

Robert Hollinger

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Editorial Review:

The sudden and extensive growth of the body of postmodernist literature has created a daunting task for social science undergraduate students--to separate, assess, and digest those materials they will find meaningful before they have acquired the knowledge to make appropriate choices. In Postmodernism and the Social Sciences, Robert Hollinger presents a valuable compendium of postmodernist writing relating to the social sciences. He reviews key postmodern discussions on such critical topics as values, identity, the self and society, and compares postmodern thinking with the enlightenment project, modernism, modernity, Marxism, and critical theory. Hollinger's treatment of leading postmodern theorists such as Foucault, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, and how they have challenged traditional social scientific understanding make this an excellent volume for courses on social theory.

Reason in Action: Essays in the Philosophy of Social Science

Martin Hollis

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Editorial Review:

Did Adam and Eve act rationally in eating the fruit of the forbidden tree? That can seem to depend solely on whether they had found the best means to their ends, in the spirit of the "economic" theories of rationality. In these essays, culled in revised form from twenty-five years' work, Martin Hollis argues that social action cannot be understood by viewing human beings as abstract individuals with preferences in search of satisfaction, or by divorcing practical reason from questions of the rationality of norms, principles, practices and ends.

Postmodern Social Theory

George Ritzer

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Editorial Review:

George Ritzer's long-awaited text in Postmodern Social Theory is a readable and coherent introduction to the fundamental ideas and most important thinkers in postmodern social theory. Looking at this multidisciplinary field from a sociological perspective, Ritzer offers a modernist reading of the turbulent and often renegade world of postmodern thought, encouraging the reader to see how postmodernism offers a set of ideas that can invigorate and revitalize sociology and sociological theory.

Unreasonable Men: Theories of Masculinity (Male Orders)

Victor Seidler

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Editorial Review:

Seidler argues that the identification of masculinity with reason has played a central role in Western social theory and philosophy. Reason is defined in opposition to nature, and mind set against body, as men have learnt to take their reason for granted. This produces an "unreasonable" form of reason that men learn to use to legislate for others, before learning to speak more personally for themselves. This is part of the power that men can assume in relation to women, and which is embodied in dominant forms of social theory. Emotions and feelings are discounted as forms of knowledge, for they are deemed to be "personal" and "subjective" when contrasted with the "objectivity" and "impartiality" of reason. "Unreasonable Men" aims to demonstrate how an Enlightenment view of modernity excluded and silenced those whom it regarded as "others" for being closer to nature, thereby setting the terms in which "others" have to prove themselves rational to enter the "magic circle of humanity". Traditions of social theory carry both the dreams and demons of a modernity which could only recognize "injustice" and "oppression" as "real" and "objective" within the public world of men.

Modernity and Ambivalence

Zygmunt Bauman

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