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

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