Search results for ""author istvan meszaros""

Istvan Meszaros is a world-renowned philosopher and critic. He left his native Hungary after the Soviet invasion of 1956. He is professor emeritus at the University of Sussex, where he held the chair of philosophy for fifteen years. Among his many books are Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness Volumes I and II, The Work of Sartre, The Structural Crisis of Capital, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time, Beyond Capital: Toward a Theory of Transition, and Marx's Theory of Alienation. As John Bellamy Foster writes in his foreword to the present book, "Istvan Meszaros 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." Meszaros 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 Meszaros'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.

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5th Edition with new preface. This book focuses on the origins of Marx's thought and on his early writings especially The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. It was a winner of the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize. 'In the hands of a creative thinker conviction and passion can give wings to the freedom struggle. Meszaros' book is a 'winger' - one of the most far-reaching books of on the subject of Marx's theory of alienation since Lukacs' seminal Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein." [History and Class Consciousness] The Review of Metaphysics. 'Immensely learned and well-read" Times Literary Supplement

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Istvan Meszaros is a world-renowned philosopher and critic. He left his native Hungary after the Soviet invasion of 1956. He is professor emeritus at the University of Sussex, where he held the chair of philosophy for fifteen years. Among his many books are Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness Volumes I and II, The Work of Sartre, The Structural Crisis of Capital, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time, Beyond Capital: Toward a Theory of Transition, and Marx's Theory of Alienation. As John Bellamy Foster writes in his foreword to the present book, "Istvan Meszaros 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." Meszaros 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 Meszaros'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.

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In Beyond Capital, the internationally esteemed Marxist philosopher István Mészáros provides a major contribution to the task of reassessing the socialist alternative and the conditions for its realization in the light of twentieth-century developments and disappointments. Mészáros brings original Marxist thinking to bear on the most fundamental issue facing the left: how to move theoretically Beyond Capital—beyond the project that Marx began and which he articulated under a specific form of commodity capitalism, as well as beyond the power of capital itself. Steeped in the philosophical roots and revolutionary world outlook of early Marxism, broad in scope and stunning in its erudition, Beyond Capital brilliantly challenges the European-based conceptual framework of socialist theory and begins the urgent task of elaborating a new socialist theory of transition.

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An extraordinary new work by the leading Marxian philosopher of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, "The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time" represents a breakthrough in the development of socialist thought. It can be seen both as a companion volume to his earlier pathbreaking "Beyond Capital" and a major theoretical contribution in its own right. Its focus is on the "decapitation of historical time" in today's capitalism and the necessity of a new "socialist time accountancy" as a revolutionary response to the debilitating present.Extending Meszaros' earlier analysis of capitalism as a social-metabolic system caught in an irreversible structural crisis, it represents a crushing refutation of the view that "there is no alternative" to the current social order. Meszaros' wide-ranging analysis explores the forces behind the expansion of world inequality, the return of imperial interventionism, the growing structural crisis of the capitalist state, and the widening planetary ecological crisis - along with the new hope offered by the reemergence of concrete socialist alternatives.At the heart of his book is an examination of the preconditions of Latin America's historic Bolivarian journey, which is producing new revolutionary transformations in Venezuela, Bolivia, and elsewhere. "The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time" is a work of great political and philosophical importance, one that defines the challenges and burdens facing all those who are committed to a more rational, more egalitarian future.

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