Voices of Sartre, Lukács, Chomsky, Harvey and others in conversation with New Left Review
Francis Mulhern (born 1952) comes from Enniskillen in Northern
Ireland. He was educated at University College Dublin and the
University of Cambridge. His books include The Moment of 'Scrutiny'
and Culture/Metaculture. He is Associate Editor of New Left Review.
Adolfo Gilly (1928-2023) was a professor of history and politics at
the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and the author of the
classic study La revolución interrumpida (in English, The Mexican
Revolution), which was conceived and written while he was
imprisoned. Asada Akira is a critic and curator and the current
head of the Graduate School at the Kyoto University of Art and
Design. His first book, published in 1983, was Structure and Power:
Beyond Semiotics. Since then he has published, among other things,
Beyond "the End of History" and The End of Cinema's Century. He was
co-editor of Hihyokukan ("Critical Space"). David Harvey teaches at
the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and is the
author of many books, including Social Justice and the City, The
Condition of Postmodernity, The Limits to Capital, A Brief History
of Neoliberalism, Spaces of Global Capitalism, and A Companion to
Marx's Capital. His website is http://davidharvey.org" Dorothy
Thompson taught in the School of History in the University of
Birmingham, where she wrote a series of highly regarded books about
Chartism and other topics in nineteenth-century British
history-among them, Early Chartists, Chartism in Wales and Ireland,
Outsiders: Class, Gender and Nation and Queen Victoria: Gender and
Power. Her edited volume Over Our Dead Bodies: Women Against the
Bomb testified to her engagement in post-war peace movements.
For more on Dorothy and Edward Thompson visit their website. Ernest
Mandel (1923-95), historian, economist and activist, was a leading
figure in the Fourth International from 1945 and was the author of
a number of books, including Late Capitalism, Marxist Economic
Theory, Long Waves of Capitalist Development, and The Meaning of
the Second World War. Georg Lukács (1885-1971) was a Hungarian
Marxist philosopher and literary critic. Most scholars consider him
to be the founder of the tradition of Western Marxism. He
contributed the ideas of reification and class consciousness to
Marxist philosophy and theory, and his literary criticism was
influential in thinking about realism and about the novel as a
literary genre. He served briefly as Hungary's Minister of Culture
following the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Giovanni
Arrighi (1937-2009) was Professor of Sociology at Johns
Hopkins University. His books include The Long Twentieth Century,
Adam Smith in Beijing, and, with Beverly Silver, Chaos and
Governance in the Modern World System. His work has appeared in
many publications, including New Left Review-who published an
interview on his life-long intellectual trajectory in
March-April 2009
(http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2771)., and in
Nov-Dec 2009 ("http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2814) - and there
are more accounts on his memorial website:
http://www.sympathytree.com/giovanniarrighi1937/. Hedda Korsch
(1890-1982) helped form the German Communist Parth (KPD) and was a
teacher at the University of Jena in the early 1920s. She also
worked in experimental schools and the Soviet Trade Mission in
Berlin, until KPD leaders had her dismissed because of her
relationship to the Marxist theorist Karl Korsch. Jean-Paul Sartre
was a philosopher, novelist, public intellectual, biographer,
playwright and founder of the journal Les Temps modernes. Born in
Paris in 1905, Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1964 - and turned it down. His books include Nausea, Intimacy, The
Flies, No Exit, The Freud Scenario, War Diaries, Critique of
Dialectical Reason, and the monumental treatise Being and
Nothingness. He died in 1980. Jiri Pelikan (1923-1999) was the head
of the Czech Students' Union and later served in the Central
Committee and parliamentary group of the Czech Communist Party. He
was a prominent actor in the movement that culminated in the Prague
Spring of 1967-68. In his later years in exile, Pelikan published
the émigré magazine Listy, and collaborated with Charter 77. His
struggle for socialist reform in Czechoslovakia made him the target
of a letter-bomb attack and a kidnap attempt. From 1979 to 1989, he
sat for the Italian Socialist Party in the European Parliament.
João Pedro Stédile is an advocate for agrarian reform in Brazil,
both as a writer and as a leader of the Landless Workers' Movement
(MST), of which he was a co-founder. His numerous publications
include the three-volume A Questão Agraria no Brasil. K. Damodaran
(1904-1976) was a prolific writer came to Marxism after early
experience of militancy and imprisonment in the cause of Indian
independence. He was one of the founders of the Kerala unit of the
Communist Party of India (CPI) and went on to serve on the party's
National Council and Central Executive, and in the Rajya Sabha, the
upper house of the Indian legislature. Luciana Castellina has been
a leading figure of the Italian Left since the 1960s. She
co-founded the Partito di Unità Proletaria per il communismo (PdUP)
and the Movimento dei Comunisti Unitari (CU). She was a member of
the European parliament from 1979 to 1999 and has been at different
times the editor of Nuovo Generazione, il manifesto and
Liberazione. Lucio Colletti (1924-2001) served on the editorial
board of Società, the cultural journal of the Italian Communist
Party (PCI). After his split with PCI, he became a staunch left
critic of its political and cultural orthodoxy. In his final years,
he shifted to the right, joining the camp of Silvio Berlusconi and
serving as parliamentary deputy as part of Forza Italia. Noam
Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and Laureate Professor at the University of
Arizona. Author of American Power and the New Mandarins and
Manufacturing Consent (with Ed Herman), among many other books, he
is a linguist, historian, philosopher, and cognitive scientist who
has risen to prominence in the American consciousness as a
political activist and the nation's foremost public intellectual.
Wang Hui is a professor in the Department of Chinese Language and
Literature at Tsinghua University in Beijing, where he currently
lives. He studied at Yangzhou University, Nanjing University and
the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He has also been a visiting
professor at NYU and other universities in the U.S. In 1989, he
participated in the Tiananmen Square Protests and was subsequently
sent to a poor inland province for compulsory "re-education" as
punishment for his participation. He developed a leftist critique
of government policy and came to be one of the leading proponents
of the Chinese New Left in the 1990s, though Wang Hui did not
choose this term. Wang was named as one of the top 100 public
intellectuals in the world in 2008 by Foreign Policy.
The biography of the review cannot be reduced to a formula: its
experience so far has been too rich and too contradictory... It is
up to date without being merely journalistic; it is scholarly but
unscarred by citation-compulsion; and it is analytical about the
long-term forces at work in politics rather than obsessed by the
spume of the latest wavelet of manoeuvring and posturing... That's
what I admire above all about NLR: its intellectual seriousness-its
magnificently strenuous attempt to understand, to analyse, to
theorise.
*Guardian*
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