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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
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