This paper engages with radical democratic theory in light of the so-called ‘return of the people’ taking place in contemporary political discourse. I argue that the return of the people should not be seen only as a return of politics strictly speaking, but also as a process by which elements of the social that had previously been excluded from politics enter the political sphere. Framing the problem in this way calls for a view to how politics is circumscribed, distinguished from (...) the social but also, at various moments, broken open. At the same time, I call for paying increased attention to how the notion of the people takes shape beyond the political sphere, off the metaphorical political stage. By examining how the people is constructed in cultural and social movements, off the political stage, we can better understand the form taken by the people when it appears in politics. (shrink)

Karel Kosík (1926-2003) was one of the most remarkable Czech Marxist philosophers of the twentieth century. His reputation as a creative thinker is owed largely to his philosophical 'blockbuster' Dialectics of the Concrete, first published in Czechoslovakia in 1963. In reintroducing Kosík's philosophy to English-speaking readers, we show that Kosík's work is important not only as a leading intellectual document of the Prague Spring, but also as an original theoretical contribution with international impact that sheds light on the meaning of (...) labour and praxis, democracy and economic structure, dialectics and the crises of modernity. (shrink)

Every year the deeds of Central European dissidents fade further away from living memory. In the rip-roaring power plays that followed 1989, new regimes trumpeted the myth of heroic anti-socialists who sacrificed their well-being for the sake of “democratic” capitalism. Since there was obviously nothing heroic about the deeds of the new elites—privatizing into their own pockets, giving the rest of public property to foreign firms, throwing workers out of work and the unemployed onto the streets, and so on—it was (...) important to remind the public that this was all the endpoint of a grand struggle whose righteousness few could.. (shrink)