Description
Book SynopsisArgues that the collapse of European communism in 1989 should not be identified with a victory for capitalism and makes possible a wholesale reevaluation of democratic politics in the US and abroad. This book examines two hundred years of democratic political life - comparing America's experience as a democracy to that of France.
Trade ReviewIf Marxist theory is to survive the debacle of Marxist practice, it will have to transform itself in more than superficial ways into a credible defender of radical democracy. Drawing on more than three decades of experience as one of America's foremost interpreters of French and German critical theory, Dick Howard goes a long way towards meeting this challenge. The Specter of Democracy is a primer for twenty-first-century political critique and a welcome reminder that radicalism and responsibility need not be antithetical terms. -- Martin Jay, author of the The Dialectical Imagination
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Why Should We, and How Should We, Reclaim Marx? Part 1. Marxism and the Intellectuals 1. Marxism in the Postcommunist World 2. Can French Intellectuals Escape Marxism? 3. The Frankfurt School and the Transformation of Critical Theory into Cultural Theory 4. Habermas's Reorientation of Critical Theory Toward Democratic Theory 5. The Anticommunist Marxism of "Socialisme ou Barbarie" 6. Claude Lefort's Passage from Revolutionary Theory to Political Theory 7. From Marx to Castoriadis, and from Castoriadis to Us 8. From the Critique of Totalitarianism to the Politics of Democracy Part 2. Republican Democracy or Democratic Republics 9. The Burden of French History 10. Intersecting Trajectories of Republicanism in France and the United States 11. Reading U.S. History as Political 12. Fundamentalism and the American Exception Part 3. Back to Marx? 13. Philosophy by Other Means? Notes Index
