Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher, cultural theorist and public intellectual. He is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, visiting professor at New York University and a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana's Department of Philosophy. He primarily works on continental philosophy and political theory, as well as film criticism and theology.
Raymond Henry Williams was a Welsh socialist writer, academic, novelist and critic influential within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the media and literature contributed to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts. Some 750,000 copies of his books were sold in UK editions alone, and there are many translations available. His work laid foundations for the field of cultural studies and cultural materialism.
W. W. Norton & Company is an American publishing company based in New York City. Established in 1923, it has been owned wholly by its employees since the early 1960s. The company is known for its Norton Anthologies and its texts in the Norton Critical Editions series, both of which are frequently assigned in university literature courses.
Ernesto Laclau was an Argentine political theorist and philosopher. He is often described as an 'inventor' of post-Marxist political theory. He is well known for his collaborations with his long-term partner, Chantal Mouffe.
Chantal Mouffe is a Belgian political theorist, formerly teaching at University of Westminster.
Verso Books is a left-wing publishing house based in London and New York City, founded in 1970 by the staff of New Left Review and includes Tariq Ali and Perry Anderson on its board of directors.
The Putney Debates, which took place from 28 October to 8 November 1647, were a series of discussions over the political settlement that should follow Parliament's victory over Charles I in the First English Civil War. The main participants were senior officers of the New Model Army who favoured retaining Charles within the framework of a Constitutional monarchy, and radicals such as the Levellers who sought more sweeping changes, including One man, one vote and freedom of conscience, particularly in religion.
Francis Rory Peregrine "Perry" Anderson is a British intellectual, historian and essayist. His work ranges across historical sociology, intellectual history, and cultural analysis. What unites Anderson's work is a preoccupation with Western Marxism.
Sheila Rowbotham is an English socialist feminist theorist and historian.
The New Communist movement (NCM) was a diverse left-wing political movement during the 1970s and 1980s. The NCM were a movement of the New Left that represented a diverse grouping of Marxist–Leninists and Maoists inspired by Cuban, Chinese, and Vietnamese revolutions. This movement emphasized opposition to racism and sexism, solidarity with oppressed peoples of the third-world, and the establishment of socialism by popular revolution. The movement, according to historian and NCM activist Max Elbaum, had an estimated 10,000 cadre members at its peak influence.
Simon Critchley is an English philosopher and the Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York, USA.
Peter Hallward is a political philosopher, best known for his work on Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze. He has also published works on post-colonialism and contemporary Haiti. Hallward is a member of the editorial collective of the journal Radical Philosophy and a contributing editor to Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.
Shlomo Sand is an Israeli Emeritus Professor of History at Tel Aviv University.
False necessity, or anti-necessitarian social theory, is a contemporary social theory that argues for the plasticity of social organizations and their potential to be shaped in new ways. The theory rejects the assumption that laws of change govern the history of human societies and limit human freedom. It is a critique of "necessitarian" thought in conventional social theories which hold that parts of the social order are necessary or the result of the natural flow of history. The theory rejects the idea that human societies must be organized in a certain way and that human activity will adhere to certain forms.
The Democratic Paradox is a collection of essays by the Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe, published in 2000 by Verso Books. The essays offer further discussion of the concept of radical democracy that Mouffe explored in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, co-authored by Ernesto Laclau. In this collection, Mouffe deals with the specific conflicts between the post-Marxist democratic theory that she and Laclau theorized in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy and the competing democratic theories proposed by Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls. Verso's UK blog characterizes The Democratic Paradox as Mouffe's most accessible review of her perspectives on radical democracy.
According to the political theorist Alan Johnson, there has been a revival of serious interest in communism in the 21st century led by Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou. Other leading contemporary communist theorists are Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Alessandro Russo, Angela Davis, Owen Hatherley, Andreas Malm, Jose Maria Sison, Étienne Balibar, Jodi Dean, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Mike Davis, John Holloway, J. Moufawad-Paul, Paul O'Connell, John Narayan, Silvia Federici, Richard Seymour, Jeremy Gilbert, Mark Fisher, China Miéville, Vijay Prashad, Seumas Milne, Michael Richmond, Isabelle Garo, Nicholas Thoburn, Barnaby Raine, Azfar Shafi, as well as Alberto Toscano, Terry Eagleton, and Bruno Bosteels.
Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work is a 2015 monograph by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, published by Verso Books.
Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics is a 2016 book by Irish writer Richard Seymour, published by Verso Books. The book examines the political conditions which contributed to the rise of UK opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn during 2015 Labour leadership election, and attempts to predict the future of Corbyn, the Labour Party, and leftist politics in coming years.
Real utopian sociology is an emancipatory social science created and practiced by Erik Olin Wright, a utopian studies scholar. The apparent contradiction in its name is intentional: this sociology seeks to find existing utopian projects and evaluate their potential to replace systems of domination, particularly as an anti-capitalism strategy. Simply put, real utopian sociology is the study of feasible utopian models for society and pathways to achieve them.
Critique of Economic Reason is a 1989 book by the French philosopher André Gorz. The book is a comprehensive examination of the assumptions and values underlying the dominant economic ideologies of the modern world, and a call for a reevaluation of the way we think about social life. The book is also a critique of work and a historicisation of the concept of work as well as a rejection of Marx "utopia of work".