The publication of Louis Althusser's autobiography, The Future Lasts Forever, shattered the myth of Althusser as austere structural Marxist. It not only illuminated the private life of this public thinker, but suggested that his previously published works could be read very differently. Louis Althusser is the first major overview of Althusser's work since the publication in French of thousands of pages of essays, books and letters unknown before 1990, and makes a strong case for a radical reconsideration of his work in the light of this new material. Focusing particularly on Althusser's writings on art, theatre and literature (as well as those of Althusser's collaborator, Pierre Macherey), Warren Montag traces the contradictory development of Althusser's thought from the early sixties to his autobiography. Additional material includes an annotated bibliography of texts by and on Althusser, and the book also features a previously untranslated essay by the theorist on Brecht and Marx.

Louis Althusser (Transitions, 62)

Literature & Fiction

Montag, Warren

British & Irish

Red Globe Press

Louis Althusser (Transitions, 1)

The Other Adam Smith: Popular Contention, Commercial Society, and the Birth of Necro-Economics

The Other Adam Smith represents the next wave of critical thinking about the still under-examined work of this paradigmatic Enlightenment thinker. Not simply another book about Adam Smith, it allows and even necessitates his inclusion in the realm of theory in the broadest sense. Moving beyond his usual economic and moral philosophical texts, Mike Hill and Warren Montag take seriously Smith's entire corpus, his writing on knowledge, affect, sociability and government, and political economy, as constituting a comprehensive―though highly contestable―system of thought. We meet not just Smith the economist, but Smith the philosopher, Smith the literary critic, Smith the historian, and Smith the anthropologist. Placed in relation to key thinkers such as Hume, Lord Kames, Fielding, Hayek, Von Mises, and Agamben, this other Adam Smith, far from being localized in the history of eighteenth-century economic thought or ideas, stands at the center of the most vibrant and contentious debates of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The Other Adam Smith

Business & Money

Hill, Mike

Economics

Stanford University Press

New Spinoza (Volume 11) (Theory Out Of Bounds)

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Univ. of Minnesota Press

Althusser and His Contemporaries: Philosophy's Perpetual War (Post-Contemporary Interventions)

Althusser and His Contemporaries alters and expands understanding of Louis Althusser and French philosophy of the 1960s and 1970s. Thousands of pages of previously unpublished work from different periods of Althusser's career have been made available in French since his death in 1990. Based on meticulous study of the philosopher's posthumous publications, as well as his unpublished manuscripts, lecture notes, letters, and marginalia, Warren Montag provides a thoroughgoing reevaluation of Althusser's philosophical project. Montag shows that the theorist was intensely engaged with the work of his contemporaries, particularly Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and Lacan. Examining Althusser's philosophy as a series of encounters with his peers' thought, Montag contends that Althusser's major philosophical confrontations revolved around three themes: structure, subject, and beginnings and endings. Reading Althusser reading his contemporaries, Montag sheds new light on structuralism, poststructuralism, and the extraordinary moment of French thought in the 1960s and 1970s.

History & Criticism

Duke University Press Books

With Hobbes and Locke, Spinoza is arguably one of the most important political philosophers of the modern era, a premier theoretician of democracy and mass politics. In this revised and augmented English translation of his 1985 classic, Spinoza et la Politique, Etienne Balibar presents a synoptic account of Spinoza’s major works, admirably demonstrating relevance to his contemporary political life. Balibar carefully situates Spinoza’s major treatises in the period in which they were written. In successive chapters, he examines the political situation in the United Provinces during Spinoza’s lifetime, Spinoza’s own religious and ideological associations, the concept of democracy developed in the Theologico-Political Treatise, the theory of the state advanced in the Political Treatise and the anthropological basis for politics established in the Ethics.

Spinoza and Politics (Radical Thinkers)

Balibar, Étienne

Verso Books

No major figure of the English Augustan period has generated stronger and more contradictory views than Jonathan Swift. Scourge of the Whig ascendancy in his own day, vilified by the Victorians, celebrated by Yeats, he has in recent years become a significant bone of contention for prominent figures on the left like E.P. Thompson and Perry Anderson. In this highly original and subtle new study, Warren Montag situates Swift in relation to the ideological and political currents of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—in particular to what Montag perspicaciously identifies as the long crisis of the British state. Swift’s perspective, he argues, was determined less by his personality or psychology than by his position as an Anglican cleric. The church, an instrument of the Tudor and Stuart absolutist state, lapsed into institutional and ideological crisis after the Stuart’s fall. In Montag’s view, Swift’s writings were a defense of this increasingly indefensible institution. Swift employed satire because only in the negative representations of this literary form could the now effectively ‘unthinkable’ doctrines of the Church be made to appear. Opening with a historical survey of the crisis of English absolutism and the Anglican Church, Montag then gives a definitive account of the specific conflicts in philosophy against which Swift’s Anglican orthodoxy was aligned. Detailed examinations of Swift’s two prose masterpieces, A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver’s Travels, follow. Historically and philosophically informed, The Unthinkable Swift contributes not only to our understanding of a seminal figure in English literary history but also to the study of historical ideologies, in particular the once dominant religious tradition at the dawn of the first modern capitalist state.

The Unthinkable Swift: Spontaneous Philosophy of a Church of England Man

This book seeks to show, against the grain of English language commentary, that Spinoza is neither a Cartesian nor a liberal but precisely the most thoroughgoing materialist in the history of philosophy. The work begins by examining Spinoza’s notion of the materiality of writing, a notion developed through his examination of scripture. It then postulates the three fundamental principles of Spinoza’s philosophy: there can be no liberation of the mind without a liberation of the body, and no liberation of the individual without a collective liberation, and that the written form of these propositions itself possesses a corporeal existence, not as the realization or materialization of a pre-existing mental, spiritual intention, but as a body among other bodies. Ultimately, the book prompts us to consider Spinoza’s philosophy anew, by replacing questions like “Who has read it?” and “Of those, how many of us have understood it?” with “What material effects has it produced, not only on or in minds, but on bodies as well?” and “To what extent has it moved bodies and what has it moved them to?”

Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and His Contemporaries

Verso

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Books by Montag, Warren