George Hoare
The omission of Amis
This adaptation fails to engage with the nature of the novel; where insight and dramatic irony are necessary, jokes and feelings are watered down by what must be a thorough misunderstanding of the entire project.
With some scraps, please
Can we construct a radical politics which takes into account the complexities and contradictions in contemporary culture and does not end up anti-humanist or with a thinly-veiled contempt for ‘the masses’?
Ahistorical analysis
Cohen’s mental project is clearly within the bounds of analytical political philosophy, and distorts his view of socialism at a number of key points, rendering it sophisticated but an ultimately unconvincing response to the question of why not socialism.
The End of Left and Right?
The end of Left and Right, if it has occurred, needs to be taken seriously. It amounts to no less than the collapse of a way of looking at, and doing, ‘politics’.
What does the ruling class do when it rules?
It is key that Therborn’s historicisation of the class character of the state remains valid, even if we are forced to consider how the situation now looks thirty years on.
Urbanisation without industrialisation
Excremental surplus, Davis argues, is the primordial urban contradiction. Even eight generations after Engels’ depiction of latrines in working class Manchester, shit still cakes the lives of the urban poor—‘a virtual objectification of their social condition, their place in society’, Davis quotes another urban theorist.
Radical Oxford Blues
If anything came out of the Forum at all, however, it was a snapshot of the radical state of confusion on the left today, combining nostalgia for the themes and slogans of the past with many of the prejudices of the present.
