Book Details
Orange Code:93079
Paperback:261 pages
Publications:
Categories:
Sections:
1. Introduction: Communism, Society, and History2. History and History’s Problem3. Issues in the Historiography of Communism, Part One—Identifying the Problem4. Issues in the Historiography of Communism, Part Two: Some Principles of Critical Analysis5. Ideology and the Metaphysics of Content6. “Society Against the State”: The Fullness of the Primitive7. Left Futures (with Randy Martin)8. Rethinking the Crisis of Socialism (with Randy Martin)
Description:
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In this fresh appraisal of communism and anti-communism, with an emphasis on the American case, respected scholar Michael E. Brown examines the methods, controversies and difficulties involved in writing the history of communism. Arguing that one important way of understanding communism—other than as a concrete political or ideological force—is as an expression of an essentially reflexive aspect of society that typically manifests itself in social movements. In this regard, Brown understands the history of communism as part of the history of society. Examining works by E. P. Thompson, Karl Marx, and Pierre Clastres, Brown develops the idea of history as an immanent feature of human activities. Taken together, the essays in this book—written over a period of 20 years–offer a distinctive approach to the connections between social theory, criticism, and historiography and to what is “social” about “social movements.”
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