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Lives on the Left: A Group Portrait
The extended critical interview is especially flexible as a form, by turns tenacious and glancing, elliptical or sustained, combining argument and counter-argument, reflection, history and memoir with a freedom normally denied to its subjects in conventional writing formats. Lives on the Left brings together sixteen such interviews from New Left Review in a group portrait of intellectual engagement in the twentieth century and since.
Four generations of intellectuals discuss their political histories and present perspectives, and the specialized work for which they are, often, best known. Their recollections span the century from the Great War and the October Revolution to the present, ranging across Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. Psychoanalysis, philosophy, the gendering of private and public life, capital and class formation, the novel, geography, and language are among the topics of theoretical discussion. At the heart of the collection, in all its diversity of testimony and judgement, is critical experience of communism and the tradition of Marx, relayed now for a new generation of readers.
Lives on the Left includes interviews with Georg Luk cs, Hedda Korsch, Jean-Paul Sartre, Dorothy Thompson, Jiri Pelikan, Ernest Mandel, Luciana Castellina, Lucio Colletti, K. Damodaran, Noam Chomsky, David Harvey, Adolfo Gilly, Jo o Pedro St dile, Asada Akira, Wang Hui and Giovanni Arrighi.
New Left Review was founded in 1960 in London, which has remained its base ever since. In fifty years of publication, it has won an international reputation as an independent journal of socialist politics and ideas, attracting readers and contributors from every part of the world. A Spanish-language edition is published bi-monthly from Madrid.
Four generations of intellectuals discuss their political histories and present perspectives, and the specialized work for which they are, often, best known. Their recollections span the century from the Great War and the October Revolution to the present, ranging across Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. Psychoanalysis, philosophy, the gendering of private and public life, capital and class formation, the novel, geography, and language are among the topics of theoretical discussion. At the heart of the collection, in all its diversity of testimony and judgement, is critical experience of communism and the tradition of Marx, relayed now for a new generation of readers.
Lives on the Left includes interviews with Georg Luk cs, Hedda Korsch, Jean-Paul Sartre, Dorothy Thompson, Jiri Pelikan, Ernest Mandel, Luciana Castellina, Lucio Colletti, K. Damodaran, Noam Chomsky, David Harvey, Adolfo Gilly, Jo o Pedro St dile, Asada Akira, Wang Hui and Giovanni Arrighi.
New Left Review was founded in 1960 in London, which has remained its base ever since. In fifty years of publication, it has won an international reputation as an independent journal of socialist politics and ideas, attracting readers and contributors from every part of the world. A Spanish-language edition is published bi-monthly from Madrid.
392 pages, Paperback
Published November 7, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 1, 2013
there should be a million of these books.
only one of the interviews is really bad, the one with Joao Pedro Stedile, which reads like your local alt rag asking questions to the band coming to town next week. the rest are either fluffy (in mandel's interview it's just him telling stories about the war) or very extensive, like arrighi's or akira's. but they're all fun to read, not only for the biographical details, but for the frequent back-and-forth sparring, where people are forced to defend their intellectual or political mistakes/stands.
only one of the interviews is really bad, the one with Joao Pedro Stedile, which reads like your local alt rag asking questions to the band coming to town next week. the rest are either fluffy (in mandel's interview it's just him telling stories about the war) or very extensive, like arrighi's or akira's. but they're all fun to read, not only for the biographical details, but for the frequent back-and-forth sparring, where people are forced to defend their intellectual or political mistakes/stands.
November 14, 2024
an absolute treasure.
January 31, 2022
between this and politics and letters, probing article or book-length interviews are easily the best outputs the new left review are responsible for. i'd pretty well recommend they specialise in this more or less exclusively
August 20, 2024
Ernest Mandel was utterly insane—escaped Nazi prison only to get sent back and distribute communist leaflets to the guards
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews