Bertell Ollman, Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in a Capitalist Society

Bertell Ollman, Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in a Capitalist Society

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In this book, the most thorough account of Marx's theory of alienation yet to have appeared in English, Professor Ollman reconstructs the theory from its constituent parts and offers it as a vantage point from which to view the rest of Marxism. The book further contains a detailed examination of Marx's philosophy of internal relations, the much neglected logical foudation of his method, and provides a systematic account of Marx's conception of human nature. Because of its almost unique concern with helping readers understand Marx's unusual use of language, Alienation has proven very popular in university courses on Marxism on both undergraduate and graduate levels. The first edition was widely reviewed, and in this new edition Professor Ollman replies to his critics in 'More on internal relations,' published here as Appendix II. In addition to this new appendix the author now provides a more systematic discussion of Marx's theory of ideology, elements of which were formerly dispersed throughout the book. He also attempts to set the treatment of political alienation within the broader framework of Marx's theory of the state as a model of how an approach based on internal relations can be used to integrate various apparently contradictory interpretations of Marx's views.

Sean Sayers, Marx and Alienation: Essays on Hegelian Themes

Sean Sayers, Marx and Alienation: Essays on Hegelian Themes

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What does Marx mean by 'alienation'? What role does the concept play in his critique of capitalism and his vision of a future society?

Marx and Alienation deals in depth with some of the most important philosophical assumptions of Marx's work. It sets Marx's account of alienation and its overcoming in the context of the Hegelian philosophy from which it derives, and discusses it in relation to contemporary debates and controversies. It challenges other recent accounts of Marx's theory, and shows that knowledge of Hegel's philosophy is essential for an understanding of central themes in Marx's philosophy.

Marx and Alienation explains and discusses Marx's ideas in an original and accessible fashion and makes a major contribution to Marxist philosophy.

Peter Singer, Marx: A Very Short Introduction

Peter Singer, Marx: A Very Short Introduction

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Peter Singer identifies the central vision that unifies Marx's thought, enabling us to grasp Marx's views as a whole. He sees him as a philosopher primarily concerned with human freedom, rather than as an economist or a social scientist. In plain English, he explains alienation, historical materialism, the economic theory of Capital, and Marx's ideas of communism, and concludes with an assessment of Marx's legacy.

Peter Singer, Hegel: A Very Short Introduction

Peter Singer, Hegel: A Very Short Introduction

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Hegel is regarded as one of the most influential figures on modern political and intellectual development. After painting Hegel's life and times in broad strokes, Peter Singer goes on to tackle some of the more challenging aspects of Hegel's philosophy. Offering a broad discussion of Hegel's ideas and an account of his major works, Singer explains what have often been considered abstruse and obscure ideas in a clear and inviting manner.

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (1991)

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (1991)

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Repetitious spaces are the outcome of repetitive gestures (those of the workers) associated with instruments which are both duplicable and designed to duplicate. It is in their nature as things and products co conceal that truth. Not they only don’t speak at all: they use their own language, the language of things and products, to tout the satisfaction they can supply and the needs they can meet; they use it too to lie, to dissimulate not only the amount of social labour that they can contain, not only the productive labour that they embody, but also the social relationships of exploitation and domination on which they are founded. Things lie, and when, having become commodities, they lie in order to conceal their origin, namely social labour, they tend to set themselves up as absolutes. Let us consider a primary aspect, the simplest perhaps, of the history of space as it proceeds from nature to abstraction. Imagine a time when each people that had managed to measure space had its own units of measurement, usually borrowed from the parts of the body: thumb’s, breadths, cubits, feet, palms, and so on. The spaces of one group, like their measures of duration, must have been unfathomable to all others. A mutual interference occurs here between natural peculiarities of space and the peculiar nature of a given human group. But how extraordinary to think that the body should have been part and parcel of so idiosyncratically gauged a space. The body’s relationship to space, a social relationship of an importance quite misapprehended in later times, still retained in those early days an immediacy which would subsequently degenerate and be lost: space, along with the way it was measured and spoken of, still held up to all the members of a society an image and a living reflection of their own bodies.

—Lefebvre, The Production of Space (1991)