What was 'revolutionary' in the process by which the thirteen North American colonies affirmed their independence? What is it about that 'revolution' that still colours the way in which Americans engage in politics? Dick Howard, author of The Marxian Legacy, Defining the Political and The Politics of Critique uses a similar framework to look at America. What is the political, how does a critique of the present become a politics for the future, and especially, what becomes of radical politics once it abandons the economistic promises of Marxism? This book originally published in French, as part of the political debate leading up to the bi-centenary of the French Revolution, was awarded the 'Prix Littraire de l'Association France-tats-Unis.' The present English edition includes a new Introduction and an Afterword relating the author's argument to the two crucial novelties of American politics: the invention of a party system, and the institution of judicial review.

Instances of corruption, extremism, and public distrust have increasingly raised the question of political legitimacy in recent years. The author examines the issue by looking at the conditions necessary for a "rule of law" to exist. He argues that in a democracy the greater the powers given to a political leader, the greater that leader's responsibilities toward society. In order to enjoy legitimacy therefore, our rulers must assume these responsibilities and be held accountable for them. This book will be of interest to political and social theorists and political philosophers.

This collection presents a broad and compelling overview of the most recent work by a world-renowned figure in contemporary thought. Starting from an inquiry that grows out of the specific context of a society that is experiencing uncertainty as to its ways of living and being, its goals, its values, and its knowledge, one that has been incapable, so far, of adequately understanding the crisis it is undergoing, Castoriadis sets as his task the elucidation of this crisis and its conditions.
The book is in four parts: Koinonia, Polis, Psyche, Logos. The opening section begins with a general introduction to the author's views on being, time, creation, and the imaginary institution of society and continues with reflections on the role of the individual psyche in racist thinking and acting and on the retreat from autonomy to generalized conformity in postmodernism. The second part is a critique of those who now belittle and distort the meaning of May '68 and other movements of the sixties as well as the French Revolution. The fate of the "project of autonomy" is considered here in the light of the Greek and the modern "political imaginary," the "pulverization of Marxism-Leninism," and a recent alleged "return of ethics" (Habermas, Rawls, McIntyre, Solzhenitsyn, Havel).
In part three, Castoriadis shows how psychoanalysis, like politics, can contribute to the project of individual and collective autonomy and challenges Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, and others in his report on "The State of the Subject Today." This section also presents his most current lines of psychoanalytic research and thought on the "human nonconscious" in the body and on the problem of the psychoanalysis of psychotic subjects, where an alternative coherence on the level of meaning offers a constant challenge to the task of psychoanalytic interpretation.
Castoriadis's highly original investigations of the unruly place of the imagination in Western philosophy round out the book. He examines how Aristotle's original aporetic discovery and cover-up of the imagination were repeated by Kant, Freud, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty.

Instances of corruption, extremism, and public distrust have increasingly raised the question of political legitimacy in recent years. The author examines the issue by looking at the conditions necessary for a "rule of law" to exist. He argues that in a democracy the greater the powers given to a political leader, the greater that leader's responsibilities toward society. In order to enjoy legitimacy therefore, our rulers must assume these responsibilities and be held accountable for them. This book will be of interest to political and social theorists and political philosophers.

This posthumous book represents the first publication of one of the seminars of Cornelius Castoriadis, a renowned and influential figure in twentieth-century thought. A close reading of Plato's "Statesman," it is an exemplary instance of Castoriadis's pragmatic, pertinent, and discriminating approach to thinking and reading a great work: "I mean really reading it, by respecting it without respecting it, by going into the recesses and details without having decided in advance that everything it contains is coherent, homogeneous, makes sense, and is true."
Castoriadis brings out what he calls "The Statesman"'s "quirky structure," with its three digressions, its eight incidental points, and its two definitions, neither of which is deemed good. He does not hesitate to differ with the text, to show that what is, in appearance, secondary is really essential, and that the denunciation of the Sophists accommodates itself quite well to the use of sophistical procedures. Castoriadis shows how "The Statesman" takes us into the heart of what is distinctive in the late Plato: blending, acceptance of the mixed, of the intermediate.
These transcriptions of Cornelius's afford the reader an opportunity to discover his trenchant, convincing, energetic, provocative, and often droll voice. Here is a hitherto unknown Castoriadis, who reflects as he speaks, collects himself, corrects himself, and doesn't hesitate to revisit key points. In short, this is Castoriadis's thinking in action.

The street riots that swept through France in the fall of 2005 focused worldwide attention on the plight of the country's immigrants and their living conditions in the suburbs many of them call home. These high-density neighborhoods were constructed according to the principles of functionalist urbanism that were ascendant in the 1960s. Then, as now, the disparities between the planners' utopian visions and the experiences of the inhabitants raised concerns, generating a number of sociological studies of the "new towns." One of the most sophisticated and significant of these critiques is Jean-Francois Augoyard's "Step by Step, "which was originally published in France in 1979 and famously influenced Michel de Certeau's analysis of everyday life. Its examination of social life in the rationally planned suburb remains as cogent and timely as ever.
"Step by Step" is based on in-depth interviews Augoyard conducted with the inhabitants of l'Arlequin, a new town on the outskirts of Grenoble. A resident of l'Arlequin himself, Augoyard sought to understand how his neighbors used its passages, streets, and parks. He begins with a detailed investigation of the inhabitants' daily walks before going on to consider how the built environment is personalized through place-names and shared memories, the ways in which sensory impressions define the atmosphere of a place and how, through individual and collective imagination, residents transformed l'Arlequin from a concept into a lived space.
In closely scrutinizing everyday life in l'Arlequin, "Step by Step" draws a fascinating portrait of the richness of social life in the new towns and sheds light on the current living conditions of France'simmigrants.
Jean-Francois Augoyard is professor of philosophy and musicology and doctor of urban studies at the Center for Research on Sonorous Space and the Urban Environment at the School of Architecture of Grenoble.
David Ames Curtis is a translator, editor, writer, and citizen activist.
Francoise Choay is professor emeritus in the history and theory of architecture at the University of Paris VIII and Cornell University and the author of numerous books and essays.

Pierre Vidal-Naquet, internationally celebrated author of Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust, here takes readers on a fascinating journey through key phases of Jewish history over more than two millennia. Drawing on a vast reservoir of historical knowledge, Vidal-Naquet unravels a series of myths and ideologies that have become entangled with Jewish history over the centuries. The Jews covers subjects as deep in the past as the Jewish encounter with Hellenization in the second century B.C.E., and as current as modern-day Israeli-Palestinian relations. The Jews opens in the classical period, looking in particular at the work of Flavius Josephus, who wrote the original account of the events at Masada. Resisting the powerful currents of ideological orthodoxy, Vidal-Naquet examines what he views as Israeli nationalist distortions of the historical and archaeological record at Masada. In the promotion of an ideal of Jewish unity in the ancient world, he contends, some have chosen to ignore evidence of pluralism, civil strife, and the power of the Diaspora experience in the Jewish past. The book continues with an engaging discussion of the era of Jewish emancipation in Europe, during the French Revolution and thereafter, in which Vidal-Naquet explores the complex meanings of emancipation and assimilation. Employing previously unexamined material written by Alfred Dreyfus himself, he continues with a reevaluation of the Dreyfus affair, the episode of anti-Semitism and betrayal that shook France at the turn of the century. The Jews explores books, films, and eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust, including works by Arno Mayer, Claude Lanzmann, and Primo Levi. The booklooks also at a recently published wartime journal by Vidal-Naquet's father, written in the years before he was deported. Vidal-Naquet is equally concerned with the disturbing phenomenon of Holocaust denial, pointing to the question of the gas chambers as central to refuting revisionist claims. The book closes with a personal account of growing up in Vichy France: integrating the tools of historiography with his own vivid memories of the war years, Vidal-Naquet recounts in moving detail the Occupation and the fateful day the Gestapo arrived at his home to take away his parents.

"Political and Social Writings: Volume 3, 1961-1979" was first published in 1992. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This work offers an extraordinary wealth and variety of writings from the crucial years that followed the publication of Castoriadis's landmark text, "Modern Capitalism and Revolution." The "new orientation" he proposed for the Socialisme ou Barbarie group centered on the emerging roles of women, youth, and minorities in the growing challenge to established society in the early sixties. Resistance within the group to this new orientation led Castoriadis to criticize the "neopaleo- Marxism" of Jean-Francois Lyotard and others who ultimately left Socialisme ou Barbarie. A heightened concern for ethnological issues culminated in what might be called, to the embarrassment of today's "poststructuralists," Castoriadis's "premature antistructuralism."

Additional texts examine the dissolution of the group itself and analyze the May 1968 rebellion of workers and students - who, according to their own testimony, were inspired by ideas developed in the group's journal. Also included were many of Castoriadis's still-relevant political writings from the seventies, which were developed in tandem with the more explicitly philosophical work now found in "The Imaginary Institution of Society and Crossroads in the Labyrinth." "Political and Social Writings: Volume 3" provides key elements for a radical renewal of emancipatory thought and action while offering an irreplaceable and hitherto missing perspective on postwar French thought.

"Political and Social Writings: Volume 1, 1946-1955" was first published in 1988. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

A series of writings by the man who inspired the students of the Workers' Rebellion in May of 1968.

"Given the rapid pace of change in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and the radical nature of these transformations, the work of Cornelius Castoriadis, a consistent and radical critic of Soviet Marxism, gains renewed significance. . . . these volumes are instructive because they enable us to trace his rigorous engagement with the project of socialist construction from his break with Trotskyism to his final breach with Marxism . . . and would be read with profit by all those seeking to comprehend the historical originality of events in the USSR and Eastern Europe." -Contemporary Sociology"

"Political and Social Writings: Volume 2, 1955-1960 " was first published in 1988. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

A series of writings by the man who inspired the students of the Workers' Rebellion in May of 1968.

"Given the rapid pace of change in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and the radical nature of these transformations, the work of Cornelius Castoriadis, a consistent and radical critic of Soviet Marxism, gains renewed significance....these volumes are instructive because they enable us to trace his rigorous engagement with the project of socialist construction from his break with Trotskyism to his final breach with Marxism. . . and would be read with profit by all those seeking to comprehend the historical originality of events in the USSR and Eastern Europe." -"Contemporary Sociology"

Writing involves risks--the risk that one will be misunderstood, the risk of being persecuted, the risks of being made a champion for causes in which one does not believe, this risk of inadvertently supporting a reader's prejudices, to name a few. In trying to give expression to what is true, the writer must "clear a passage within the agitated world of passions," an undertaking that always to some extent fails: writers are never the master of their own speech.
In "Writing: The Political Test, "France's leading political philosopher, Claude Lefort, illuminates the process by which writers negotiate difficult path to free themselves from the ideological and contextual traps that would doom their attempts to articulate a new vision. Lefort examines writers whose works provide special insights into this problem of risk, both literary artists and political philosophers. Among them are Salman Rushdie, Sade, Tocqueville, m Machiavelli, Leo Strauss, Orwell, Kant, Robespierre, Guizot, and Pierre Clastres. In Tocqueville, for example, Lefort finds that the author's improvisatory and open-ended expression represents the character of the democratic experience. Orwell's work on totalitarianism shows up the totalitarian subject's complicity in this political regime. And Rushdie is remarkable for his solid attack on relativism. With the character and fate of the political forms of modernity, democracy, and totalitarianism a central theme, Lefort concludes with some reflections on the collapse of the Soviet Union.
This intriguing and accessible exploration of literature's political aspects and political philosophy's literary ones will be welcomed by those who have been stymied by current efforts to bridge these two fields. Taken together, the essays in this volume also stand as an intellectual autobiography of Lefort, making it an excellent introduction to his work for less experience students of political theory or philosophy.