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Political and Social Writings
Volume 1, 1946-1955
Cornelius CastoriadisDavid Ames Curtis, EditorTranslated by David Ames Curtis
University of Minnesota Press, 1988

Political and Social Writings: Volume 1, 1946–1955 was first published in 1988. 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.

A series of writings by the man who inspired the students of the Workers' Rebellion in May of 1968.

"Given the rapid pace of change in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and the radical nature of these transformations, the work of Cornelius Castoriadis, a consistent and radical critic of Soviet Marxism, gains renewed significance. . . . these volumes are instructive because they enable us to trace his rigorous engagement with the project of socialist construction from his break with Trotskyism to his final breach with Marxism . . . and would be read with profit by all those seeking to comprehend the historical originality of events in the USSR and Eastern Europe." –Contemporary Sociology

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Political and Social Writings
Volume 2, 1955-1960
Cornelius CastoriadisDavid Ames Curtis, EditorTranslated by David Ames Curtis
University of Minnesota Press, 1988

Political and Social Writings:Volume 2, 1955–1960 was first published in 1988. 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.

A series of writings by the man who inspired the students of the Workers' Rebellion in May of 1968.

"Given the rapid pace of change in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and the radical nature of these transformations, the work of Cornelius Castoriadis, a consistent and radical critic of Soviet Marxism, gains renewed significance....these volumes are instructive because they enable us to trace his rigorous engagement with the project of socialist construction from his break with Trotskyism to his final breach with Marxism. . . and would be read with profit by all those seeking to comprehend the historical originality of events in the USSR and Eastern Europe." –Contemporary Sociology

[more]

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Political and Social Writings
Volume 3, 1961-1979
Cornelius CastoriadisDavid Ames Curtis, EditorTranslated by David Ames Curtis
University of Minnesota Press, 1992

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.
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