Postmodern Socialism
Romanticism, City and State
Traces and critiques the perspectives generated by juxtaposing postmodernity and socialism.
Opinion
'It is therefore a valuable gift to have a clear and concise book which has maintained the balance between and acute awareness of the limits in history and affirmed the need of keeping the horizons of critical thinking open. Beilharz's new book has provided us with such a useful pedagogical text.'
Nickos Papastergiadis, University of Manchester
About this Title
Have our lives changed as dramatically in these postmodern times as we are led to believe? One of the ironies is that we still face many of the same problems as earlier generations. Socialist arguments, now widely viewed as discredited, addressed questions still very much with us.
These 'social' questions--injustice, poverty, living and work conditions--arose from a nineteenth-century recognition of complex problems created mainly in cities. At the same time socialism emerged from a romantic stream of Enlightenment concerned with nature and simplicity. Paradoxically, postmodernism has its roots in the same tensions. Questions of scale, of simplicity and complexity, of city and country, remain with us. The juxtaposition of postmodernity and socialism generates illuminating perspectives on the way we live now. Postmodern Socialism traces and criticises these perspectives.
Table of Contents
Preface; 1. Introduction; 2. Postmodernity--Before and After Answering the question: what is postmodernism?, Questioning the answer: what is postmodernism?, Posing the question: what is modernity?; 2. Modernity's Smile What is Enlightenment?, What is romanticism?, Reason, politics and poetry; 4. Socialisms, Sublime and Sensible Socialists and Communists, Socialism and romanticism, Socialism and the Social Question, After socialism; 5. Fin de siècle/déja vu Fin de siècle--the turn, Sublime, decline, Simmel and the city, Futurism and the city; 6. The City--Pastoral and Present Urbs and suburbs, Cities in modernity, Jerusalem and the bush, City and community; 7. The Dualisation of the World Dualisation: imperialism?, Imperialism as uneven development, Dualisation and place, The remnants of discipline; 8. Fin de socialisme? A Marx for the 1990s?, After Marx; Bibliography; Index
About the Author
Peter Beilharz has taught at Monash University, the University of Melbourne and the Phillip Institute, and is currently Reader in Sociology at La Trobe University. A co-founder of the international journal of social theory, Thesis Eleven, he is the author of Labour's Utopias (1992) and Transforming Labor (1994).
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