Jean-Paul Sartre is a man who lived half his life in the limelight of extreme notoriety. An intellectual who already in 1945 had to protest against attempts aimed at institutionalizing the writer, turning his works into 'national goods', exclaiming: 'it is not pleasant to be treated in one's lifetime as a public monument'. What must be equally unpleasant is to be constantly subjected to abuse. And the fact is that no writer in his lifetime has been the target of so (...) many attacks, from the most varied and rather powerful quarters, as Jean-Paul Sartre. What are the reasons? How should we approach the work of this man, our contemporary? (shrink)

István Mészáros was one of the greatest political theorists of the twentieth century. Left unfinished at the time of his death, Beyond Leviathan is written on the magisterial scale of his previous book, Beyond Capital, and meant to complement that work. It focuses on the transcendence of the state, along with the transcendence of capital and alienated labor, while traversing the history of political theory from Plato to the present. Aristotle, More, Machiavelli, and Vico are only a few of the (...) thinkers discussed in depth. The larger objective of this work is no less than to develop a full-fledged critique of the state, in the Marxian tradition, and set against the critique of capital. Not only does it provide, for the first time, an-all-embracing Marxian theory of the state, it gives new political meaning to the notion of "the withering away of the state." In his definitive, final work, Mészáros seeks to illuminate the political preconditions for a society of substantive equality and substantive democracy. In his scholarly and personal introduction, John Bellamy Foster traces the gestation of this masterwork and its place in the history of political theory. (shrink)

As John Bellamy Foster writes in his foreword to the present book, “István Mészáros is one of the greatest philosophers that the historical materialist tradition has yet produced. His work stands practically alone today in the depth of its analysis of Marx’s theory of alienation, the structural crisis of capital, the demise of Soviet-style post-revolutionary societies, and the necessary conditions of the transition to socialism. His dialectical inquiry into social structure and forms of consciousness—a systematic critique of the prevailing forms (...) of thought—is unequaled in our time.” Mészáros is the author of magisterial works like Beyond Capital and Social Structures of Forms of Consciousness, but his work can seem daunting to those unacquainted with his thought. Here, for the first time, is a concise and accessible overview of Mészáros’s ideas, designed by the author himself and covering the broad scope of his work, from the shortcomings of bourgeois economics to the degeneration of the capital system to the transition to socialism. (shrink)

In Marxism, the material base of society is responsible for a number of structural restraints on the appearance, functioning, and evolution of the superstructure. At the same time, the superstructure, too, and especially ideology, exercises considerable influence on developments in the base, and in certain conditions can prove decisive in transforming the relations that constitute the base. While history is radically open ended and, therefore, nothing is absolutely certain, knowledge of such conditions is a necessary first step toward a socialist (...) reordering of society. (shrink)