Synopses & Reviews
The extended critical interview is especially flexible as a form, by turns tenacious and glancing, elliptical or sustained, combining argument and counter-argument, reflection, history and memoir with a freedom normally denied to its subjects in conventional writing formats.
Lives on the Left brings together sixteen such interviews from
New Left Review in a group portrait of intellectual engagement in the twentieth century and since.
Four generations of intellectuals discuss their political histories and present perspectives, and the specialized work for which they are, often, best known. Their recollections span the century from the Great War and the October Revolution to the present, ranging across Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. Psychoanalysis, philosophy, the gendering of private and public life, capital and class formation, the novel, geography, and language are among the topics of theoretical discussion. At the heart of the collection, in all its diversity of testimony and judgement, is critical experience of communism and the tradition of Marx, relayed now for a new generation of readers.
Lives on the Left includes interviews with Georg Lukács, Hedda Korsch, Jean-Paul Sartre, Dorothy Thompson, Jiri Pelikan, Ernest Mandel, Luciana Castellina, Lucio Colletti, K. Damodaran, Noam Chomsky, David Harvey, Adolfo Gilly, João Pedro Stédile, Asada Akira, Wang Hui and Giovanni Arrighi.
New Left Review was founded in 1960 in London, which has remained its base ever since. In fifty years of publication, it has won an international reputation as an independent journal of socialist politics and ideas, attracting readers and contributors from every part of the world. A Spanish-language edition is published bi-monthly from Madrid.
Review
"It is hard not to be intimidated by
New Left Review. For many, the journal functions like a kind of older brother whom we look up to--more serious, better informed, better traveled, stronger, irreplaceable.
When so much of even the so-called 'serious' media is given over to celebrity-fueled ephemera and the recycling of press releases and in-house gossip; and when the academic world is struggling to mitigate the worst effects of funding-driven overproduction and careerist modishness; and when national and international politics seem to consist of bowing to the imperatives of 'the market' while avoiding public relations gaffes; then we need more than ever a 'forum' like NLR.
It is up to date without being merely journalistic; it is scholarly but unscarred by citation-compulsion; and it is analytical about the long-term forces at work in politics rather than obsessed by the spume of the latest wavelet of maneuvering and posturing. That's what I admire above all about NLR: its intellectual seriousness--its magnificently strenuous attempt to understand, to analyze, to theorize." The Guardian
Synopsis
Four generations of intellectuals discuss their political histories and present perspectives, and the specialized work for which they are, often, best known. These recollections span the one hundred years from the eve of the Great War to the present, ranging across Europe East and West, the Americas, Africa and Asia. Psychoanalysis, philosophy, the gendering of private and public life, capital and class formation, the novel past and future, geography, and the theory and philosophy of language are among the associated areas of intellectual exchange. At the heart of the collection, in all its diversity of testimony and interpretation, reflection and affirmation, is a critical experience of communism and the tradition of Marx.
The extended critical interview is perhaps uniquely flexible as a form, by turns tenacious and glancing, elliptical or sustained, combining argument and counter-argument, reflection, history and memoir with a freedom usually denied to its subjects in conventional articles and books. This volume brings together fifteen such interviews from New Left Review to illuminate the record of intellectual engagement on the Left in the twentieth century and since.
Lives on the Left brings the voices of the intellectual left to a new generation of readers. included here are Georg Lukács, Hedda Korsch, Jean-Paul Sartre, Dorothy Thompson, Ernest Mandel, Luciana Castellina, Noam Chomsky, David Harvey, João Pedro Stedile, Wang Hui, Giovanni Arrighi and others.
Synopsis
Voices of Sartre, Lukács, Chomsky, Harvey and others in conversation with New Left Review.
About the Author
Francis Mulhern is Associate Editor of New Left Review. His books include The Moment of ‘Scrutiny’, Culture/Metaculture and the edited collection Lives on the Left: Interviews with New Left Review.Giovanni Arrighi (1937-2009) was Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. His books included The Long Twentieth Century and Adam Smith in Beijing, and his work appeared in many publications, including New Left Review.Asada Akira is a critic and curator and the current head of the Graduate School at the Kyoto University of Art and Design. His first book, published in 1983, was Structure and Power: Beyond Semiotics. Since then he has published, among other things, Beyond "the End of History" and The End of Cinema's Century. He was co-editor of Hihyokukan ("Critical Space").Luciana Castellina has been a leading figure of the Italian Left since the 1960s. She co-founded the Partito di Unit