Terry and Jerry

This week on CW, we consider the ideas of two of Britain’s leading intellectuals of the past generation. Ciaran Guilfoyle reviews Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith and Revolution, and argues that his polemic goes beyond a corrective to the vulgar counterposition of religion to Enlightenment and instead surrenders the very possibility of human autonomy. And George Hoare argues in a review of Jerry Cohen’s posthumously published Why Not Socialism? that the case made by the late ‘analytical Marxist’ for socialism divorced from history is fundamentally flawed. Meanwhile in London theatre, Giulia Merlo reviews Martin Crimp’s new version of Bruckner’s Pains of Youth and Clean Break’s This Wide Night.

4 December 2009