Description
Book SynopsisSocial criticism has enjoyed a renaissance in the past few years. The anti-globalization protests at Seattle and Genoa and the great marches against the war in Iraq have put contestation of capitalism and imperialism back on the political and intellectual agenda.
Trade Review"Sharp, lucid and wide-ranging,
The Resources of Critique subjects modern political theory to the test of a robust materialism, and in doing so constitutes a vital contribution to such a theory in its own right."
Terry Eagleton, University of Manchester
Table of ContentsIntroduction
Part I: Four Kinds of Impasse
1. Modernity and its Promises: Habermas and Bidet
1.1 Between sociological suspicion and the rule of law: Jürgen Habermas
1.2 With and against Marx and Rawls: Jacques Bidet
2. Between Relativism and Universalism: French Critical Sociology
2.1 Capitalism and its critiques: Boltanski and Chiapello
2.2 The dialectic of universal and particular: Pierre Bourdieu
3. Touching the Void: Badiou and iek
3.1 The exception is the norm
3.2 Miracles do happen: the ontology of Alain Badiou
3.3 Unreal: Slavoj iek and the proletariat
4. The Generosity of Being: Antonio Negri
4.1 All is grace
4.2 Negri's Grundrisse: revolutionary subjectivity versus Marxist 'objectivism'
4.3 The refusal of transcendence
Part II: Three Dimensions of Progress
5. A Critical Realist Ontology
5.1 The story so far
5.2 Dimensions of realism
6. Structure and Contradiction
6.1 Realism about structures
6.2 The primacy of contradiction
6.3 A dialectic of nature?
7. Justice and Universality
7.1 From fact to value
7.2 Equality and well-being
7.3 Why equality matters
8. Conclusion
