Bøger af Norman Geras

The author focuses on the figure of the bystander, from the destruction of Jews in Europe, as well as to more recent atrocities, to consider the moral consequences of looking on without active response at persecution and great suffering.

Norman Geras's writings on Marxist thought are appreciated for their clarity of presentation and power of argument. In this new book, he responds to two challenges facing socialists today: to remedy areas of theoretical deficiency, and to resist at the same time the less salutary pressures of intellectual fashion and reaction.Discourses in Extremity first discusses the moral dimension of problems such as famine, injustice and tyranny, examining the balance of Marxism's strengths and weaknesses here by comparison with libertarian and liberal discourses. In a powerful new essay, Geras then exposes inadequacies in the socialist discussion of justifiable means of revolutionary change, suggesting as a remedy the need to learn from an alternative tradition of thought about human conflict. Geras engages both with classic statements of liberalism and socialism from Locke to Trotsky and with more recent argument by Steven Lukes, Robert Nozick, Peter Singer and Michael Walzer.The second part of the volume enters a debate—over the status of Marxism and so-called 'post-Marxism'—that has aroused widespread interest. In a painstaking critique of ideas of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Geras rebuts their account of the Marxist tradition and the discourse-based perspective they would have displace it, criticizing the arbitrariness and excess within their own discourse.

This study examines with the work of Richard Rorty - a proponent of human, radical liberalism - to explore the paradoxes of a philosophy which rejects any determinate view of human nature. It deals with questions of importance to ethical philosophy.

This is the first academic study to address ancient Egypt as it was appropriated across disparate literary modes during the Victorian era. Drawing on texts by canonical authors while illuminating new sources and understudied works, it brings the highbrow and the popular into conversation, addressing contemporary ideas of race, gender and religion.

';Marx did not reject the idea of a human nature. He was right not to do so.'That is the conclusion of this passionate and polemical new work by Norman Geras. In it, he places the sixth of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach under rigorous scrutiny. He argues that this ambiguous statementwidely cited as evidence that Marx broke with all conceptions of human nature in 1845must be read in the context of Marx's work as a whole. His later writings are informed by an idea of a specifically human nature that fulfills both explanatory and normative functions.The belief that Marx's historical materialism entailed a denial of the conception of human nature is, Geras writes, ';an old fixation, which the Althusserian influence in this matter has fed upon Because this fixation still exists and is misguided, it is still necessary to challenge it.' One hundred years after Marx's death, this timely essaycombining the strengths of analytical philosophy and classical Marxismrediscovers a central part of his heritage.

This is an accessible and informative guide to the evolution of the concept of crimes against humanity- a hugely influential concept which has had a marked impact on modern international politics, law and ethics.