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HISTORICAL MATERIALISM BOOK SERIES NEW TITLES www.brill.nl/hm Exploring Marx's Capital Philosophical, Economic and Political Dimensions Jacques Bidet. Translated by David Fernbach. Preface to the English Edition by Alex Callinicos Publication year: 2007 Series: Historical Materialism Book Series, 14 ISBN-13 (i): 978 9004149 37 3 ISBN-10: 90 04 14937 6 Cover: Hardback Number of pages: xxiv, 328 pp. List price: € 129.00 / US$ 168.00 Jacques Bidet is Professor at the University of Paris-X, holding the chair of Political Philosophy and Theories of Society. His other publications include Théorie de la modernité(1990), John Rawls et la théorie de la justice (1995), Théorie générale, Théorie du droit, de l’économie et de la politique (1999) and Explication et reconstruction du 'Capital' (2004). This book, originally published in French under the title Que faire du Capital?, offers a new interpretation of Marx’s great work. It shows how the novelty and lasting interest of Marx’s theory arises from the fact that, as against the project of a ‘pure’ economics, it is formulated in concepts that have simultaneously an economic and a political aspect, neither of these being separable from the other. Jacques Bidet conducts an unprecedented investigation of Marx’s work in the spirit of the history of science, exploring it as a process of theoretical development. Traditional exegesis reads the successive drafts of Capital as if they were complementary and mutually illuminated one another. In actual fact, like any scientist, Marx only wrote a new version in order to correct the previous one. He started from ideas borrowed from Ricardo and Hegel, and between one draft and the next it is possible to see these being eliminated and restructured. This labour, moreover, was never fully completed. The author thus re-assesses Marx’s entire system in its set of constitutive categories: value, market, labour-power, classes, working class, exploitation, production, fetishism, ideology. He seeks to pin down the difficulties that these encountered, and the analytical and critical value they still have today. Bidet attaches the greatest importance to Marx’s order of exposition, which assigns each concept its place in the overall system, and makes the validity of the construction depend on the pertinence of its initial presuppositions. This is particularly the case with the relationship between market mechanism and capitalism – and thus also between the market and socialism. Althusser: The Detour of Theory The Detour of Theory Gregory Elliott Available Publication year: 2006 Series: Historical Materialism Book Series, 13 ISBN-13 (i): 978 9004153 37 0 ISBN-10: 90 04 15337 3 Cover: Hardback Number of pages: xxiv, 412 pp. List price: € 89.00 / US$ 116.00 Gregory Elliott was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, where he completed his D.Phil. on Louis Althusser in 1985. An independent translator and writer, his books include Perry Anderson: The Merciless Laboratory of History (1998). His most recent translation is Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism(2006). First published in 1987, Althusser, The Detour of Theory was widely received as the fullest account of its subject to date. Drawing on a wide range of hitherto untranslated material, it examined the political and intellectual contexts of Althusser’s ‘return to Marx’ in the mid-1960s; analysed the novel character of the Marxism developed in his major works; charted their author’s subsequent evolution, from his self-criticism to the proclamation of a ‘crisis of Marxism’; and concluded with a balance-sheet of Althusser’s contribution to historical materialism. For this second edition, Gregory Elliott has added a substantial postscript in which he surveys the posthumous edition of the French philosopher’s work published in the 1990s, from the early writings of the 1940s through to the late texts of the 1980s, relating the unknown Althusser revealed by them to the familiar figure of For Marx and Reading Capital, together with a comprehensive bibliography of Althusser’s oeuvre. A Marxist Philosophy of Language Jean-Jacques Lecercle. Translated by Gregory Elliott Publication year: 2006 Series: Historical Materialism Book Series, 12 ISBN-13 (i): 978 9004147 51 5 ISBN-10: 90 04 14751 9 Cover: Hardback Number of pages: viii, 240 pp. (English) List price: € 113.00 / US$ 153.00 Jean-Jacques Lecercle was educated at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. From 1999 to 2002 he was Research Professor in the English department at the University of Cardiff, and he is currently Professor of English at the University of Nanterre. He is the author of Interpretation as Pragmatics (Macmillan 1999), Deleuze and Language (Palgrave 2002) and The Force of Language (with Denise Riley, Macmillan 2004). The purpose of this book is to give a precise meaning to the formula: English is the language of imperialism. Understanding that statement involves a critique of the dominant views of language, both in the field of linguistics (the book has a chapter criticising Chomsky’s research programme) and of the philosophy of language (the book has a chapter assessing Habermas’s philosophy of communicative action). The book aims at constructing a Marxist philosophy of language, embodying a view of language as a social, historical, material and political phenomenon. Since there has never been a strong tradition of thinking about language in Marxism, the book provides an overview of the question of Marxism in language (from Stalin’s pamphlet to Voloshinov's book, taking in an essay by Pasolini), and it seeks to construct a number of concepts for a Marxist philosophy of language. The book belongs to the tradition of Marxist critique of dominant ideologies. It should be particularly useful to those who, in the fields of language study, literature and communication studies, have decided that language is not merely an instrument of communication. Marxism and Ecological Economics Toward a Red and Green Political Economy Paul Burkett Publication year: 2006 Series: Historical Materialism Book Series, 11 ISBN-13 (i): 978 9004148 10 9 ISBN-10: 90 04 14810 8 Cover: Hardback Number of pages: x, 358 pp. List price: € 72.00 / US$ 97.00 Paul Burkett, Ph.D. (1984) in Economics, Syracuse University, is Professor of Economics at Indiana State University, Terre Haute. His publications on Marxism and ecology include Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective (St. Martin's Press, 1999) and many articles in scholarly journals. This book undertakes the first general assessment of ecological economics from a Marxist point of view, and shows how Marxist political economy can make a substantial contribution to ecological economics. The analysis is developed in terms of four basic issues: (1) nature and economic value; (2) the treatment of nature as capital; (3) the significance of the entropy law for economic systems; (4) the concept of sustainable development. In each case, it is shown that Marxism can help ecological economics fulfill its commitments to multi-disciplinarity, methodological pluralism, and historical openness. In this way, a foundation is constructed for a substantive dialogue between Marxists and ecological economists. For further details on the book series and other titles, go to www.brill.nl/hm The Editors Historical Materialism Faculty of Law and Social Sciences SOAS, University of London Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square London WC1H 0XG, United Kingdom [log in to unmask] http://www.brill.nl/hima http://www.brill.nl/hm