Simone de Beauvoir's Political Thinking

The first book devoted exclusively to Beauvoir’s politics

By exploring the life and work of the influential feminist thinker Simone de Beauvoir, this book shows how each of us lives within political and social structures that we can--and must--play a part in transforming. It argues that Beauvoir’s careful examination of her own existence can also be understood as a dynamic method for political thinking.

As the contributors illustrate, Beauvoir's political thinking proceeds from the bottom up, using examples from individual lives as the basis for understanding and transforming our collective existence. For example, she embraced her responsibility as a French citizen as making her complicit in the French war against Algeria. Here, she sees her role as an oppressor. In other contexts, she looks to the lives of individual women, including herself, to understand the dimensions of gender inequality.

This volume’s six tightly connected essays home in on the individual’s relationship to community, and how one’s freedom interacts with the freedom of other people. Here, Beauvoir is read as neither a liberal nor a communitarian. The authors focus on her call for individuals to realize their freedom while remaining consistent with ethical obligations to the community. Beauvoir's account of her own life and the lives of others is interpreted as a method to understand individuals in relations to others, and as within structures of personal, material, and political oppression. Beauvoir's political thinking makes it clear that we cannot avoid political action. To do nothing in the face of oppression denies freedom to everyone, including oneself.

Quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

Full eBooks: 

• The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (1949)

• Simone de Beauvoir: The Ethics of Ambiguity

Karl Marx's Political Writings: The Revolutions of 1848, Surveys from Exile, The First International and After (Vol. 1-3)

A shrinkwrapped three-volume set of Marx’s political writings: The key essays and texts on politics and history—including The Communist Manifesto, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, The Class Struggles of France, The Civil War In France and Critique of the Gotha Programme.

Karl Marx was not only the great theorist of capitalism, he was also a superb journalist, politician and historian. In these brand-new editions of Marx’s Political Writings we are able to see the depth and range of his mature work from 1848 through to the end of his life, from The Communist Manifesto to The Class Struggles in France and The Critique of the Gotha Programme.

The Revolutions of 1848: Political Writings
by Karl Marx

Edited by David Fernbach
Foreword by Tariq Ali

Volume 1 of Marx’s political writings, including The Communist Manifesto.

Volume 1: The Revolutions of 1848: Marx and Engels had already sketched out the principles of scientific communism by 1846. Yet it was from his intense involvement in the abortive German revolution of 1848 that Marx developed a profound practical understanding he would draw on throughout his later career. This volume includes his great call to arms—The Communist Manifesto—and also demonstrates Marx’s unsuccessful attempt to spur the German bourgeoisie to decisive action against absolutism. His articles offer trenchant analyses of events in France, Poland, Prague, Berlin and Vienna, while speeches set out changing communist tactics.


Surveys from Exile: Political Writings
by Karl Marx

Edited by David Fernbach
Foreword by Tariq Ali

Volume 2 of Marx’s political writings, including The Eighteenth Brumaire.

Volume 2: Surveys from Exile: In the 1850s and early 1860s Marx played an active part in politics, and his prolific journalism from London offered a constant commentary on all the main developments of the day. During this time Marx began to interpret the British political scene and express his considered views on Germany, Poland and Russia, the Crimean War and American Civil War, imperialism in India and China, and a host of other key issues. The Class Struggles in France develops the theories outlined in The Communist Manifesto into a rich and revealing analysis of contemporary events, while The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte contains equally stimulating reflections on Napoleon III’s coup d’etat of 1851.


The First International and After: Political Writings
by Karl Marx

Edited by David Fernbach
Foreword by Tariq Ali

Volume 3 of Marx’s political writings, including The Civil War In France.

Volume 3: The First International and After: The crucial texts of Marx’s later years—notably The Civil War in France and Critique of the Gotha Programme—count among his most important work. These articles include a searching analysis of the tragic but inspiring failure of the Paris Commune, as well as essays on German unification, the Irish question, the Polish national movement and the possibility of revolution in Russia. The founding documents of the First international and polemical pieces attacking the disciples of Proudhon and Bakunin and the advocates of reformism, by contrast, reveal a tactical mastery that has influenced revolutionary movements ever since.


Karl Marx studied law and philosophy at the universities of Bonn and Berlin, completing his doctorate in 1841. Expelled from Prussia in 1844, he took up residence first in Paris and then in London where, in 1867, he published his magnum opus Capital. A co-founder of the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864, Marx died in London in 1883.




Tariq Ali is a writer and filmmaker. He has written more than a dozen books on world history and politics—including Pirates of the Caribbean, Bush in Babylon, The Clash of Fundamentalisms and The Obama Syndrome—as well as five novels in his Islam Quintet series and scripts for the stage and screen. He is an editor of the New Left Review and lives in London.

130 Karl Marx Quotes & 30 Frederick Engels Quotes

The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act by Fredric Jameson

‘Every now and then a book appears which is literally ahead of its time ... The Political Unconscious is such a book ... it sets new standards of what a classic work is.’ – Slavoj Zizek

In this ground-breaking and influential study, Fredric Jameson explores the complex place and function of literature within culture. A landmark publication, The Political Unconscious takes its place as one of the most meaningful works of the twentieth century. First published: 1983.

Fredric Jameson (1934-). Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University and one of the most provocative and influential cultural critics of our age. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Ideas in Action: Political Tradition in the Twentieth Century by Stephen Eric Bronner

Imagine a world in which means and ends, theory and practice, ideals, values, and interests, are torturously disassociated and yet manifestly linked. That is the world of the 20th century as Stephen Eric Bronner vividly portrays it in his important new work. Now imagine a world in which new traditions mix with the old, creativity blends with commitment, and values from the past combine with bold visions of the future. Creating this new fusion, says Professor Bronner, is the challenge for the 21st century and it inspires "Ideas in Action". Contemporary political theory has become alienated from politics. It often neither discusses concrete political events nor touches the world of political action. That is an intellectual luxury the academy of the 21st century can ill-afford, and "Ideas in Action" offers an accessible way out of the box into which the canon of political theory and philosophy has been stuffed. With elegance and power, Bronner surveys 20th century political traditions. In the process, he places theories and thinkers in their social, historical, and political contexts. His sweeping presentation is organized into four imaginatively articulated phases that signal the direction of political thinking in the twentieth century. Offering distinctive interpretations and criticisms, presenting a new internationalist perspective, Bronner imbues the text with original voices and primary sources from the very canon he is reconfiguring. Careful notes of citation and explanation provide a pedagogical subtext that serves as a running bibliographic essay. All this and more makes "Ideas in Action" the perfect core or supplemental text for courses not only in political science, but philosophy, sociology, history, and cultural studies as well. "Ideas in Action" is a book for thinking people seeking to understand the past and shape the next millennium in terms of a new planetary outlook and a cosmopolitan sensibility. Students will enjoy reading the text, flock to the primary sources, and engage their class discussions with new knowledge and a new spirit. Professors will find a refreshing and original way to teach familiar material and assuredly use the text as a foil for arguments and debates on all sides of many issues.

Spinoza and Politics by Étienne Balibar

A rich analysis of Spinoza's key works within the context of his political, religious and ideological life. With Hobbes and Locke, Spinoza is arguably one of the most important political philosophers of the modern era, a premier theoretician of democracy and mass politics. In this revised and augmented English translation of his 1985 classic, Spinoza et la Politique, Etienne Balibar presents a synoptic account of Spinoza's major works, admirably demonstrating relevance to his contemporary political life.
Balibar carefully situates Spinoza's major treatises in the period in which they were written. In successive chapters, he examines the political situation in the United Provinces during Spinoza's lifetime, Spinoza's own religious and ideological associations, the concept of democracy developed in the Theologico-Political Treatise, the theory of the state advanced in the Political Treatise and the anthropological basis for politics established in the Ethics.

 

About the Author

Étienne Balibar is a French Marxist philosopher and the most celebrated student of Louis Althusser. He is also one of the leading exponents of French Marxist philosophy and the author of Spinoza and Politics, The Philosophy of Marx and co-author of Race, Nation and Class and Reading Capital.

Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction

Giorgio Agamben is a philosopher well known for his brilliance and erudition, as well as for the difficulty and diversity of his seventeen books. The interest which his Homo Sacer sparked in America is likely to continue to grow for a great many years to come. Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction presents the complexity and continuity of Agamben's philosophy—and does so for two separate and distinct audiences. It attempts to provide readers possessing little or no familiarity with Agamben's writings with points of entry for exploring them. For those already well acquainted with Agamben's thought, it offers a critical analysis of the achievements that have marked it.

"Leland de la Durantaye has not only offered an illuminating and provocative account of Agamben's most important work, he has also made this philosophical corpus appealing and accessible to a very broad audience—to all those interested in aesthetics, literature, ethics, and political theory. Carefully attuned to the multiple voices of Agamben's rich polyphony, in both a theoretical and historical sense, this book generously invites the reader to consider and reflect upon some of the most pressing issues in contemporary thought." —John Hamilton, New York University

"Readers of Giorgio Agamben have long yearned for a guide to his work. This book is just such a guide: comprehensive, erudite, reliable, up-to-date, accessible, and properly critical. Leland de la Durantaye traces meticulously the development of concepts and terms in Agamben's oeuvre and provides future scholarship with a sound footing."
—Wlad Godzic, University of California, Santa Cruz

Metapolitics by Alain Badiou

In this follow-up to his highly acclaimed volume Ethics, a searing critique of liberalism, Alain Badiou discusses the limits of political philosophy.
Metapolitics argues that one of the main tasks of contemporary thought is to abolish the idea that politics is merely an object for philosophical reflection. Badiou indicts this approach, which reduces politics to a matter of opinion, thus eliminating any of its truly radical and emancipatory possibilities.
Against this intellectual tradition, Badiou proposes instead the consideration of politics in terms of the production of truth and the affirmation of equality. He demands that the question of a possible "political truth" be separated from any notion of consensus or public opinion, and that political action be rethought in terms of the complex process that binds discussion to decision.

Starting from this analysis, Badiou critically examines the thought of anthropologist and political theorist Sylvain Lazarus, Jacques Ranciere's writings on workers' history and democratic dissensus, the role of the subject in Althusser, as well as the concept of democracy and the link between truth and justice.
This English edition includes a new preface from the author, as well as an introduction from the translator, Jason Barker.

Alain Badiou teaches philosophy at the École normale supérieure and the Collège international de philosophie in Paris. In addition to several novels, plays and political essays, he has published a number of major philosophical works, including Theory of the Subject, Being and Event, Manifesto for Philosophy, and Gilles Deleuze. His recent books include The Meaning of Sarkozy, Ethics, Metapolitics, Polemics, The Communist Hypothesis and Five Lessons on Wagner.