By Terry Eagleton
In this pithy, warmhearted, and intensely humorous publication, Eagleton melds an outstanding out of date roast with real admiration for his associates "across the pond."
Americans have lengthy been fascinated by the oddness of the British, however the English, says literary critic Terry Eagleton, locate their transatlantic friends simply as unusual. in simple terms an alien race could admiringly seek advice from a colleague as “aggressive,” use superlatives to explain every thing from one’s puppy puppy to one’s rock assortment, or converse often of being “empowered.” Why, asks Eagleton, needs to we broadcast our children’s tuition grades with bumper stickers asserting “My baby Made the respect Roll”? Why don’t we delight in the indispensability of the teapot? And why needs to we stay so irritatingly confident, even if all indicators element to failure?
On his quirky trip in the course of the language, geography, and nationwide personality of the U.S., Eagleton proves to be instantly a casual and totally idiosyncratic advisor to our abnormal race. He solutions the questions his compatriots have consistently had yet (being British) dare no longer ask, like why americans willingly upward push on the morning time, even on Sundays, or why we publicly chastise cigarette people who smoke as though we’re all spokespeople for the medical professional general.
In this pithy, warmhearted, and intensely humorous e-book, Eagleton melds a superb out of date roast with actual admiration for his pals “across the pond.”
Read or Download Across the Pond: An Englishman's View of America PDF
Best marxism books
For a New Critique of Political Economy
The catastrophic fiscal, social and political challenge of our time demands a brand new and unique critique of political financial system - a rethinking of Marx's undertaking within the very varied stipulations of twenty-first century capitalism.
Stiegler argues that this present day the proletarian has to be reconceptualized because the fiscal agent whose wisdom and reminiscence are confiscated through machines. This new experience of the time period ‘proletarian' is better understood by means of connection with Plato's critique of exteriorized reminiscence. via bringing jointly Plato and Marx, Stiegler can convey how a generalized proletarianization now encompasses not just the muscular method, as Marx observed it, but in addition the fearful approach of the so-called artistic employees within the info industries. The proletarians of the previous are disadvantaged in their useful knowledge, while the latter are shorn in their theoretical perform, and either be afflicted by a confiscation of the very probability of a real paintings of living.
But the mechanisms at paintings during this new and accentuated type of proletarianization are the very mechanisms which may spur a reversal of the method. this sort of reversal may suggest a very important contrast among one's existence paintings, originating in otium (leisure dedicated to the recommendations of the self), and the activity, consisting in a negotium (the negotiation and calculation, more and more constrained to non permanent expectations), resulting in the need of a brand new belief of monetary value.
This brief textual content deals an outstanding advent to Stiegler's paintings whereas while representing a political name to fingers within the face of a deepening fiscal and social crisis.
The Communist Necessity: Prolegomena To Any Future Radical Theory
“There was once a time after we proclaimed that we have been a part of a stunning and fragmented chaos of affinity teams, conflicted businesses, disorganized rebels, all of whom have been by some means a part of an identical social flow that used to be more than the sum of its components. We have been extra effectively a disorganized mob of enraged plebeians shaking our fists at a disciplined imperial military.
This learn is split into 3 components: the classical culture; Althusser and after; and smooth debates. It contains chapters on classification attention, ideology and utopia, and the epistemology of sociology, the paintings of Georg Lukas, Karl Mannheim and Lucien Goldman respectively.
Marxism and Materialism: A Study in Marxist Theory of Knowledge
Argument that Marx has a realist ontology and a correspondence thought of fact. His perspectives are in comparison to either Hegel's and Kant's. This interpretation departs from extra Hegelian, 'idealist' interpretations that frequently depend on false impression a number of the paintings of the early Marx. there's additionally a dialogue and partial defence of Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.
Additional info for Across the Pond: An Englishman's View of America
Example text
Antonio Partnership with Engels: the materialist move In the middle and late 1840s, Marx framed the analytical basis of his later theoretical program. Responding to early capitalist industrialization and the creation of a heavily exploited, impoverished working class, youngHegelians Moses Hess and Friedrich Engels became Communists and shifted their focus from philosophical issues to economic inequality. Engels’s study of the English working class (1845) was an especially important work. Marx shifted his focus to a more empirical approach to inequality, and Engels became his lifelong collaborator.
By contrast with the view of today’s economists that market competition, supply and demand, entrepreneurship, and consumer choice are decisive, Marx stressed capitalism’s complex fusion of powerful, new productive forces with top-down, precisely planned, complex social cooperation and systematic, exactly Introduction 27 calculable methods of extraction. But he emphasized most strongly the relationship between the historically specific ruling class and the class of direct producers – capitalists and wageworkers (or bourgeoisie and proletariat).
Describing the cooperating masons as “omnipresent” and having “hands and eyes before and behind,” Marx implied that cooperative activity gives rise to new capacities that do not exist at the individual level per se. He stated that: Just as the offensive power of a squadron of cavalry . . is essentially different from the sum of the offensive . . powers of the individual cavalry . . taken separately, so the sum total of the mechanical forces exerted by isolated workmen differs from the social force that is developed, when many hands take part simultaneously by one and the same undivided operation, such as raising a heavy weight, turning a winch, or removing an obstacle.