This title was first published in 2000: This engaging book suggests that Marx was right to reject 'utopian socialism' on the grounds that it undermined the principles of proletarian self-emancipation and self-determination. As a theoretician of the proletarian class, Marx sought to capture the spirit of revolution in a manner which precluded the need for utopian philanthropy and the messianic elitism which invariably accompanied it. In a powerful and original central argument, the book suggests that the categories which together define Marx’s own 'utopia' were nothing more than theoretical by-products of the models employed by Marx in order to supersede the need for utopianism. As such, Marx was an 'accidental' utopian. Rather than legitimating utopianism, however, the author argues that this conclusion reinforces the need to develop Marx’s anti-utopian project further. Emphasising the contemporary relevance of Marx’s original critique, the conclusion suggests that the future of socialism lies in its ability to harness, not the spirit of utopia, but the spirit of adventure.

Develops a critique of utopianism through a comparison of the works of Karl Marx and F. A. Hayek, challenging conventional views of both Marxian and Hayekian thought.

Utopia has long been banished from political theory, framed as an impossible—and possibly dangerous—political ideal, a flawed social blueprint, or a thought experiment without any practical import. Even the "realistic utopias" of liberal theory strike many as wishful thinking. Can politics think utopia otherwise? Can utopian thinking contribute to the renewal of politics? In Political Uses of Utopia, an international cast of leading and emerging theorists agree that the uses of utopia for politics are multiple and nuanced and lie somewhere between—or, better yet, beyond—the mainstream caution against it and the conviction that another, better world ought to be possible. Representing a range of perspectives on the grand tradition of Western utopianism, which extends back half a millennium and perhaps as far as Plato, these essays are united in their interest in the relevance of utopianism to specific historical and contemporary political contexts. Featuring contributions from Miguel Abensour, Étienne Balibar, Raymond Geuss, and Jacques Rancière, among others, Political Uses of Utopia reopens the question of whether and how utopianism can inform political thinking and action today.

The grounding assumption of this book is that an element of utopianism is a necessity in any political thinking, and that a self-conscious utopianism can generate a richer level of theory and practice. The text then follows the chequered career of utopianism in the Marxist tradition.

A new biography of Karl Marx, tracing the life of this titanic figure and the legacy of his work Karl Marx remains the most influential and controversial political thinker in history. He died quietly in 1883 and a mere eleven mourners attended his funeral, but a year later he was being hailed as "the Prophet himself" whose name and writings would "endure through the ages." He has been viewed as a philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, even a literary craftsman. But who was Marx? What informed his critiques of modern society? And how are we to understand his legacy? In Marx and Marxism, Gregory Claeys, a leading historian of socialism, offers a wide-ranging, accessible account of Marx's ideas and their development, from the nineteenth century through the Russian Revolution to the present. After the collapse of the Soviet Union his reputation seemed utterly eclipsed, but now a new generation is reading and discovering Marx in the wake of the recurrent financial crises, growing social inequality, and an increasing sense of the injustice and destructiveness of capitalism. Both his critique of capitalism and his vision of the future speak across the centuries to our times, even if the questions he poses are more difficult to answer than ever.

The relation between Hegel and Marx is among the most interpreted in the history of philosophy. Given the contemporary renaissance of Marx and Marxist theories, how should we re-read the Hegel-Marx connection today? What place does Hegel have in contemporary critical thinking? Most schools of Marxism regard Marx's inversion of Hegel's dialectics as a progressive development, leaving behind Hegel's idealism by transforming it into a materialist critique of political economy. Other Marxist approaches argue that the mature Marx completely broke with Hegel. By contrast, this book offers a wide-ranging and innovative understanding of Hegel as an empirically informed theorist of the social, political, and economic world. It proposes a movement 'from Marx to Hegel and back', by exploring the intersections where the two thinkers can be read as mutually complementing or even reinforcing one another. With a particular focus on essential concepts like recognition, love, revolution, freedom, and the idea of critique, this new intervention into Hegelian and Marxian philosophy unifies the ethical content of Hegel's philosophy with the power of Marx's social and economic critique of the contemporary world.

In Radical Utopianism and Cultural Studies, John Storey looks at the concept of utopianism from a cultural studies perspective and argues that radical utopianism can awaken the political promise of cultural studies. Between the Preface and the Postscript, there are seven chapters that explore different aspects of radical utopianism. The book begins with a definition of what radical utopianism means, with its productive combination of defamiliarization and desire. From there, it considers Thomas More’s invention of the concept of utopia with its double articulation of what is and what could be, Herbert Marcuse’s utopian rereading of Sigmund Freud’s concept of repression, Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers, the Paris Commune, and the Haight-Ashbury counterculture. In the final chapter, Storey examines two versions of utopian capitalism: retro and post. Although the main focus here is on Donald Trump’s presidential election campaign and Paul Mason’s recent bestseller Postcapitalism, the chaper begins with a brief discussion of Karl Marx on capitalism. Each chapter, in a different way, argues that radical utopianism defamiliarizes the manufactured naturalness of the here and now, making it conceivable to believe that another world is possible. This book provides an ideal introduction to utopianism for students of cultural studies as well as students within a number of related disciplines such as sociology, literature, history, politics, and media studies.

I am. We are. That is enough. Now we have to start. These are the opening words of Ernst Bloch's first major work, The Spirit of Utopia, written mostly in 1915-16, published in its first version just after the First World War, republished five years later, 1923, in the version here presented for the first time in English translation. The Spirit of Utopia is one of the great historic books from the beginning of the century, but it is not an obsolete one. In its style of thinking, a peculiar amalgam of biblical, Marxist, and Expressionist turns, in its analytical skills deeply informed by Simmel, taking its information from both Hegel and Schopenhauer for the groundwork of its metaphysics of music but consistently interpreting the cultural legacy in the light of a certain Marxism, Bloch's Spirit of Utopia is a unique attempt to rethink the history of Western civilizations as a process of revolutionary disruptions and to reread the artworks, religions, and philosophies of this tradition as incentives to continue disrupting. The alliance between messianism and Marxism, which was proclaimed in this book for the first time with epic breadth, has met with more critique than acclaim. The expressive and baroque diction of the book was considered as offensive as its stubborn disregard for the limits of "disciplines." Yet there is hardly a "discipline" that didn't adopt, however unknowingly, some of Bloch's insights, and his provocative associations often proved more productive than the statistical account of social shifts. The first part of this philosophical meditation--which is also a narrative, an analysis, a rhapsody, and a manifesto--concerns a mode of "self-encounter" that presents itself in the history of music from Mozart through Mahler as an encounter with the problem of a community to come. This "we-problem" is worked out by Bloch in terms of a philosophy of the history of music. The "self-encounter," however, has to be conceived as "self-invention," as the active, affirmative fight for freedom and social justice, under the sign of Marx. The second part of the book is entitled "Karl Marx, Death and the Apocalypse." I am. We are. That's hardly anything. But enough to start.

This collection assembles some of Herbert Marcuse’s most important work and presents for the first time his responses to and development of classic Marxist approaches to revolution and utopia, as well as his own theoretical and political perspectives. This sixth and final volume of Marcuse's collected papers shows Marcuse’s rejection of the prevailing twentieth-century Marxist theory and socialist practice - which he saw as inadequate for a thorough critique of Western and Soviet bureaucracy - and the development of his revolutionary thought towards a critique of the consumer society. Marcuse's later philosophical perspectives on technology, ecology, and human emancipation sat at odds with many of the classic tenets of Marx’s materialist dialectic which placed the working class as the central agent of change in capitalist societies. As the material from this volume shows, Marcuse was not only a theorist of Marxist thought and practice in the twentieth century, but also proves to be an essential thinker for understanding the neoliberal phase of capitalism and resistance in the twenty-first century. A comprehensive introduction by Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce places Marcuse’s philosophy in the context of his engagement with the main currents of twentieth century philosophy while also providing important analyses of his anticipatory theorization of capitalist development through a neoliberal restructuring of society. The volume concludes with an afterword by Peter Marcuse.