Political and Social Writings: Recommencing the Revolution : From Socialism to the Autonomous Society

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-François 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.

David Ames Curtis--writer, editor, translator, and activist--is on the board of editorial advisers of Thesis Eleven. His work appears in U.S., European, and Australian books and journals.