Political and Social Writings

This volume offers a wealth and variety of writings from the crucial years that followed the publication of Castoriadis' landmark text, "Modern Capitalism and Revolution". The "new orientation" he proposed for the "Socialisme ou Barbarie" group centred on the emerging roles of women, youth, and minorities in the growing challenge to established society in the early sixties; a critique of the "neopaleo-Marxism" of Jean-Francois Lyotard and others who ultimately left "Socialisme ou Barbarie"; and a heightened concern for ethnological issues, culminating in what might be called, to the embarrassment of today's "poststructuralists", Castoriadis' "premature antistructuralism" (1964-65). Also included in this volume are the dissolution of the group itself (1967) and Castoriadis's analyses of the May 1968 student and worker rebellion. Also published by the University of Minnesota Press, the first two volumes of "Political and Social Writings" cover the period from 1946 to 1955 ("From a Critique of Bureaucracy to the Positive Content of Socialism") and from 1956 to 1960 ("From the Workers' Struggle against Bureaucracy to Revolution in the Age of Modern Capitalism"). With the publication of this final volume, one of the last translation gaps in Castoriadis's writings has been filled.