Books published by Verso Books

Presents a serious challenge to the rise of Hindu fundamentalism, and exposes the right-wing and racist agenda of the BJP which wants to overturn India's secular constitution and escalate hostilities with neighbouring Muslim Pakistan.

This work is commonly held to be the foundational text for Western Marxism. As Stalinism took over in Russia, Lukacs was subjected to attacks for "deviation". In the 1920s he wrote a response to this, which remained unpublished at the time. The manuscript was later found in Moscow and published.

The author focuses on the figure of the bystander, from the destruction of Jews in Europe, as well as to more recent atrocities, to consider the moral consequences of looking on without active response at persecution and great suffering.

Philosophy of Praxisexamines the work of four Marxist thinkers, the early Marx and Lukcs, and the Frankfurt School philosophers Adorno and Marcuse. The book holds that fundamental philosophical problems are in reality social problems, abstractly conceived. This argument has two implications: on the one hand, philosophical problems are significant insofar as they reflect real social contradictions; on the other hand, philosophy cannot resolve the problems it identifies because only social revolution can eliminate their social causes.Feenberg's Lukacs, Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory was an intellectual history of these discussions.Philosophy of Praxisis an update of that classic theoretical work, which details how the discussion has been taken up by contemporary schools of thought, including Marxist political theory and continental philosophy.

Traces the genesis, consolidation and consequences of the postmodern idea. Beginning in the Hispanic world of the 1930s, the text takes the reader through to the 70s, when Lyotard and Habermas gave the idea of postmodernism wider currency and finally the 90s, with the work of Fredric Jameson.

Pierre Bourdieu, one of the most influential critical social theorists of the second half of the twentieth century, once described sociology as "a combat sport." This collection of his writings on politics and social science from the Algerian War of Independence bears out that this vision was enduring throughout his life.

In the most comprehensive study of Jacques Lacan yet to be published in English, David Macey challenges many of the assumptions that have come to surround Lacan’s work. He shows that key elements of Lacanian thought relate not to structuralism, as is often claimed, but to surrealism, Bataille and the early French phenomenologists. The famous ¿return to Freud¿ is shown to mask Lacan’s adherence to a psychiatric tradition and to trends within French psychoanalysis which were opposed by Freud himself.A detailed and challenging reading of work by Lacan and his associates on femininity reveals its reliance upon a virulently sexist discourse and upon an iconography derived from surrealism. The view that Lacanian psychoanalysis has a positive contribution to make to feminism and to theories of gender and sexual difference is contested. As well as providing a new and provocative reading of Lacan’s work, Lacan in Contexts is an important contribution to psychoanalytic history and to the history of French intellectual life.

In this book, the author turns her attention to the deconstruction of pictures closer to home - photographs from her own childhood and images from her shared ethnographic past - to trace a trajectory from personal to collective acts of memory.

The student protests of 1968, followed by the Hot Autumn factory strikes of 1969, shook the foundations of the Italian Republic. They also prepared the way for a whole decade of intense and widespread social conflict—a decade in which militant social movements arose with new aspirations, centered on protagonists such as women, young people and the unemployed. States of Emergency provides a vivid reconstruction of the events and movements of that period—from the students of 1968 to the Autonomists of 1977.The book’s title evokes both the emergence of new social subjects and the crises they provoked in the social order. But Lumley also looks at the paradoxes and contradictions of the movements, their creative potential and ultimate failure. The political debates which they initiated soon became part of the agenda of the Left internationally.Drawing on the work of theorists such as Umberto Eco, Alberto Melucci, Norberto Bobbio and Antonio Negri, States of Emergency is a vital contribution not only to Italy’s social history but to contemporary political discussion.

Ranging from an exploration of the English, French and Russian revolutions and their treatment by revisionist historiography, to the debates and themes arising from attempts to downplay revolution's role in history, this work also engages with several prominent revisionist historians, including Orlando Figes, Conrad Russell and Simon Schama.

A classic work by the founding father of existentialism, describing his philosophy and its relationship to Marxism.

Reconstructing Marxism explores fundamental questions about the structure of Marxist theory and its prospects for the future. The authors maintain that the disintegration of the old theoretical unity of classical Marxism is in part responsible for what is commonly called the ¿crisis of Marxism.¿ Only a reconstructed Marxism can come to terms with this disintegration.Addressing a range of problems in historical materialism and class analysis, the authors compare historical materialism with Darwinian evolutionary theory, and identify what is distinctively ¿historical¿ in Marx’s theory of history. Through an evaluation of G.A. Cohen’s defense and Anthony Giddens’s critique of historical materialism they suggest what a plausible, yet still Marxist, theory of history might be. They analyze the relationship of micro-analysis to macro theory and the assignment of causal primacy in explanations, and present a general assessment of the current state of Marxist theory and the prospects for its analytical reconstruction.Distinguished by the clarity of its presentation, the analytical rigor of its argument and its concern with fundamental philosophical and sociological issues, Reconstructing Marxism advances, at this critical juncture in the history of Marxism, a challenging new research program.

This volume illuminates a neglected moment in cultural and political history. The essays look at the relationship between black anti-colonialist movements in the Caribbean and the surrealist European movements of the 1930s and 1940s. Michael Richardson is the author of "Georges Batailles".

This book demonstrates how the denial of truth about the Palestinians by governments and the media in the West has led to the current impasse in Middle East politics. The book attempts to redress a sustained crime against historical truth in order to make a more rational future possible.

"Rumba on the River" presents a snapshot of an era when the currents of a tradition and modernization collided to produce unique music along the banks of the Congo River. It is the story of Twin capitals engulfed in political struggle, and the vibrant music that flowered amidst the ferment.

The characteristic form taken by English Marxism since the war has been the study of history. No writer exemplifies its achievements better than Edward Thompson, whose Making of the English Working Class is probably the most influential single work of historical scholarship by a socialist today. An editor of The New Reasoner in 195759, a founder of the New Left in 1960, now an eloquent champion of civil rights, Thompson has most recently aroused widespread interest with the appearance of his Poverty of Theory, which combines philosophical and political polemic with Louis Althusser, and powerful advocacy of the historian’s craft. Arguments Within English Marxism is an assessment of its central theses that relates them to Thompson’s major historical writings themselves. Thus the role of human agencythe part of the conscious choice and active willin history is discussed through consideration of its treatment in The Making of the English Working Class. The problems of base and superstructure in historical materialism, and of affiliation to values in the past, are reviewed in the light of Whigs and Hunters. The claims of utopian imagination are illustrated from the findings of William Morris. Questions of socialist strategy are broached in part through the articles now collected in Writing by Candlelight. Exploring at once differences and convergences between New Left Review and one of its founders, the essay concludes by suggesting the virtues of diversity within a common socialist culture.

In this text, the author proposes a new future for socialism based on a redefinition of market socialism. He argues for a modified version of socialism, not necessarily based on public ownership, but founded on equality of opportunity and political influence.