Synopses & Reviews
Renowned historian Perry Anderson takes on leading conservative, liberal and socialist thinkers in this iconoclastic volume.In today's drastic reconfiguration of the world of ideas, how best should we treat its leading forces? Spectrum offers a critical survey of the ideas of rival intellectual groupings from the far right, the liberal center, and the Marxist left, rarely considered in the same optic. The book opens with a comparative examination of four remarkable minds of the radical right: Michael Oakeshott, Friedrich Hayek, Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt. In the liberal and social-democratic center, it considers John Rawls, Jurgen Habermas, and Norberto Bobbio. On the Marxist left, it assesses the work of three major historians: Edward Thompson, Robert Brenner and Eric Hobsbawm, and a great philologist, Sebastiano Timpanaro.
Synopsis
The focus of Spectrum is the range of contemporary ideas that runs from conservative to liberal to radical conceptions of state and society, rarely considered in the same optic. It looks at the theories of major minds of the twentieth-century Right, including Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss and Friedrich von Hayek; liberal philosophers such as John Rawls, Jurgen Habermas and Norberto Bobbio; and significant figures in the culture of the Left: the historians Edward Thompson, Robert Brenner and Eric Hobsbawm; the classicist Sebastiano Timpanaro; the sociologist Goran Therborn; the novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The book concludes with some comparative observations on the two leading intellectual periodicals of the UK and USA, the London Review of Books and New York Review of Books; and a piece of family history.
Synopsis
Perry Anderson, eminent historian of the New Left, assesses the competing claims of rival intellectual groupings from the far right, the liberal centre and the Marxist left.
About the Author
Perry Anderson is the author of, among other books, Spectrum, Lineages of the Absolutist State, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, Considerations on Western Marxism, English Questions, The Origins of Postmodernity, and The New Old World. He teaches history at UCLA and is on the editorial board of New Left Review.