Product Description: Sociology is an established academic discipline but there has been continuing debate over its status as a science and the nature of its subject matter. This led to the emergence of a phenomenological sociology and to critiques of positivist sociology...read more

"The Melancholy Science" is Gillian Rose s investigation into TheodorAdorno s work and legacy. Rose uncovers the unity discernableamong the many fragments of Adorno s oeuvre, and argues that hisinfluence has been to turn Marxism into a search for style. The attempts of Adorno, Lukacs and Benjamin to develop a Marxisttheory of culture centred on the concept of reification are contrasted, and the ways in which the concept of reification has come to bemisused are exposed. Adorno s continuation for his own time ofthe Marxist critique of philosophy is traced through his writings onHegel, Kierkegaard, Husserl and Heidegger. His opposition to theseparation of philosophy and sociology is shown by examination ofhis critique of Durkheim and Weber, and of his contributions to thedispute over positivism, his critique of empirical social research andhis own empirical sociology. Gillian Rose shows Adorno s most important contribution to be hisfounding of a Marxist aesthetic that offers a sociology of culture, asdemonstrated in his essays on Kafka, Mann, Beckett, Brecht andSchonberg. Finally, Adorno s Melancholy Science is revealed tooffer a sociology of illusion that rivals both structural Marxism andphenomenological sociology as well as the subsequent work of theFrankfurt School."

"The heart of history, for Heidegger, is not a sequence of occurrences but the eruption of significance at critical junctures that bring us into our own by making all being, including our being, into an urgent issue. In emergency, being emerges."―from The Emergency of BeingThe esoteric Contributions to Philosophy, often considered Martin Heidegger's second main work after Being and Time, is crucial to any interpretation of his thought. Here Heidegger proposes that being takes place as "appropriation." Richard Polt's independent-minded account of the Contributions interprets appropriation as an event of emergency that demands to be thought in a "future-subjunctive" mode. Polt explores the roots of appropriation in Heidegger's earlier philosophy; Heidegger's search for a way of thinking suited to appropriation; and the implications of appropriation for time, space, human existence, and beings as a whole. In his concluding chapter, Polt reflects critically on the difficulties of the radically antirationalist and antimodern thought of the Contributions.Polt's original reading neither reduces this challenging text to familiar concepts nor refutes it, but engages it in a confrontation―an encounter that respects a way of thinking by struggling with it. He describes this most private work of Heidegger's philosophy as "a dissonant symphony that imperfectly weaves together its moments into a vast fugue, under the leitmotif of appropriation. This fugue is seeded with possibilities that are waiting for us, its listeners, to develop them. Some are dead ends―viruses that can lead only to a monolithic, monotonous misunderstanding of history. Others are embryonic insights that promise to deepen our thought, and perhaps our lives, if we find the right way to make them our own."

Product Description: This volume contains the first complete translations of Wilhelm Reich’s writings from his Marxist period. Reich, who died in 1957, had a career with a single goal: to find ways of relieving human suffering. And the same curiosity and courage that led him from medical school to join the early pioneers of Freudian psychoanalysis, and then to some of the most controversial work of this century—his development of the theory of the orgone—led him also, at one period of his life, to become a radical socialist...read more

Product Description: Following his hugely popular book, The Wisdom of Donkeys, Andy Merrifield breathes new life into the Marxist tradition.Magical Marxism demands something more of traditional Marxism - something more interesting and liberating. It asks that we imagine a Marxism that moves beyond debates about class, the role of the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat...read more

Product Description: Crisis and Change Today provides a solid introduction to Marxist social theory. The work's unique voice is expressed in its Socratic-dialogic approach, structured around forty questions that students have about society and social change...read more

Product Description: The Description for this book, Marxism and Domination: A Neo-Hegelian, Feminist, Psychoanalytic Theory of Sexual, Political, and Technological Liberation, will be forthcoming.

Product Description: Political Sociology