This is the first book to gather the key writings of the distinguished political theorist Norman Geras into a single volume, providing a comprehensive overview of the thinking of one of the most important Marxist philosophers in the post-war era. Among the essays included here are ‘The Controversy about Marx and Justice’, ‘The Duty to Bring Aid’, ‘Primo Levi and Jean Amery: Shame’ and the contentious ‘Euston Manifesto’, which lays down a set of central principles for the democratic left in the twenty-first century. The reader is rounded out with several posts from Geras’s much-loved and widely read ‘Normblog’, as well as companion essays by Alan Johnson and Terry Glavin, which explore how Geras’s philosophical concerns led to his more recent, trenchant critiques of the direction of left-wing politics.
Table of Content
Anthology introduction –Ben Cohen and Eve Garrard
Part I Marxism and liberalism
On Geras’s Marxism – Alan Johnson
1 Human Nature and Historical Materialism
2 That Most Complex Being
3 Minimum Utopia
4 The Controversy About Marx and Justice
5 What Does it Mean to be a Marxist?
6 The Euston Manifesto
7 The Reductions of the Left
Part II The longest hatred: antisemitism
8 Alibi Antisemitism
9 Marxists Before the Holocaust
10 Marx and antisemitism
Part III The responsibility to protect
11 The Duty to Bring Aid
12 Humanitarian Intervention
13 The War in Iraq
14 On Justifying Humanitarian Intervention in Syria
15 Burying Humanitarian Intervention
Part IV Normblog: the best of
Introduction – Ben Cohen and Eve Garrard
A Normblog decade
Too much Holocaust
Six theses on the death of Margaret Thatcher
A right denied to millions
Hymning Hizbollah
My Australia
Why does football matter?
Fiction like green vegetables
Jane Austen’s kick
It’s his party, you can cry if you want to
Ordinary women
Primo Levi and Jean Amery: shame
Fifteen great jazz albums
Thinking about war
To keep on keepin’ on
Epilogue: reflections on the work of Norman Geras – Terry Glavin
Norman Geras: the complete bibliography
Index
About the author
Eve Garrard is Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Manchester
Ben Cohen is a New-York based writer and a contributor to the Wall Street Journal, Tablet, Haaretz, Commentary and other publications
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