Marx for Our Time : Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique

by BENSAID, DANIELELLIOTT, GREGORY

• ISBN13: 9781859847121
• ISBN10: 1859847129
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-10-17
• Publisher: Verso

Summary

Without denying the contradictory character of Marx s thought, the French philosopher Daniel Bensaid sets out to demonstrate that it was not a philosophy of the end of history, an empirical sociology of classes, or a positive science of economics positing an inexorable progress towards an ineluctable communism. Instead, Marx's 'critique of political economy' encompassed three great critiques of the scientific and political canons of its age -- historical reason, sociological rationality and scientific positivism -- which make this 19th-century thinker relevant to the 21st century of global capitalism. Indeed, we find here a 'post-postmodern Marx' inhabiting a contemporary world replete with contingency, crisis and contradiction. Bensaid's book is an invitation to rediscover our foremost contemporary thinker, Karl Marx.

Author Biography

Daniel Bensaid teaches philosophy at the University of Paris VIII.

Table of Contents

Preface to the English Edition: The Archipelago of a Thousand Marxisms	ix
The Inaudible Thunder	1	(6)
Part I -- From the Sacred to the Profane: Marx's Critique of Historical Reason	7	(88)
A New Way of Writing History	9	(31)
Time Out of Joint (On Analytical Marxism)	40	(29)
A New Appreciation of Time	69	(26)
Part II -- Struggle and Necessity: Marx's Critique of Sociological Reason	95	(106)
Classes, or The Lost Subject	97	(25)
Class Struggle is No Game (Marx contra Game Theory and Theories of Justice)	122	(41)
Whatever Happened to Class?	163	(38)
Part III -- The Order of Disorder: Marx's Critique of Scientific Positivism	201	(160)
Doing Science Differently	203	(36)
A New Immanence	239	(22)
The Distress of Historical Logic	261	(27)
Choreographies of Chaos	288	(24)
The Torment of Matter (Contribution to the Critique of Political Ecology)	312	(49)
Bibliography	361	(14)
Index	375