Reviews for Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought

The average rating for Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-07-15 00:00:00 John Fallon Henri Lefebvre is best known in the English-reading world for his later works laying some of the foundations for cultural studies, his inspiration of and links with the Situationists and his writings on space and cities, all of which is fabulous work but it is a shame that is overshadows some of his earlier work, including his time while still (kind of) in favour in the Communist Party of France. This superb short book published in 1938 draws together much of that work, and for those of us schooled in the stultifying Stalinist orthodoxy of Diamat (dialectical materialism) a deeply unsettling piece. Whereas Diamat solidified the world into an inexorable set of law-bound steps towards (state) socialism, Lefebvre's is an invigorating case for a humanist outlook which in its first section (about ⅔ of the text) explores in a sympathetic but deeply critical manner both the Hegelian dialectic and Marx's critical reformation of it. The second section (which many will find demanding) explores and extends Marx & Engels's (separately and together) humanist philosophy and politics of human action, drawing on, for instance, Engels' Dialectics of Nature but also on Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Some critics will (and have) suggested that approaches of the kind Lefebvre develops here are misguided in that they are over-reliant on the (so-called) 'Early Marx', before Capital and the like, but to my mind this work is better understood as laying the humanist basis for the later more explicitly political economic analyses. The discussion of Hegel, focussing on the development and form of the Hegelian dialectic and its adaptation by Marx & Engels, is close to the traditions of analytical philosophy, highlighting the logic structure of the Hegelian dialectic along with the language use throughout as well as the structure and form of responses as they emerge from work by Marx and Engels. I found this more straightforward, but then I understand the philosophical style and have a sound grasp of the Hegelian dialectic and well as the Marx & Engels texts discussed. The second section is more challenging (or at least for me) as it draws on and explores the making of 'man' as a critique of alienation through the integration of dialectical understandings of the 'natural' and the 'social' world in a way that makes humanity the agent of its own creation trough struggles for liberation and socialism. These are not the 'inexorable' laws of Stalinist Diamat but a humanistic assertions of our abilities as humans to free ourselves from the partial existence of our lives under capitalism. This section, drawing on Marx's work on alienation and the vital need to overcome that in the development of a humanist path to liberation, takes Marx's work further by exploring the dialectical relationship between human's engagement with the natural world (drawing the Engels) and the development of 'species being' in Marx's vision of a non-alienated existence; this is a sophisticated and exciting discussion of Marxist theory. This is a book the merits multiple visits, especially the second section, in that it challenges the rigid simplicities of Diamat as well as the excessive rationalism that dominated Marxist and socialist thinking in the 2nd half of the twentieth century, while in asserting a materialist outlook it also challenges many of the flights of fancy in contemporary uses of Marxist thinking. It is a valuable addition to any theoretical reading.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-05-28 00:00:00 Michael Sarosiak هو تقريبًا أي حاجة ليها علاقة بهيجل و المنطق مش بقدر أستوعبها بشكل ما، مش عارف السبب فيّ ولا في هيجل نفسه! هقرأ كتاب زكريا إبراهيم لهيجل و هشوف