The complete text of Knowledge and Politics

"Knowledge and Politics," the full text of which you can find below, was my first book, published in 1975. It presents an analysis and a criticism of what I took to be a set of political , moral, and epistemological assumptions underlying much of modern thought. Although "Knowledge and Politics" is distant, in form as well as in content, from my present work, it explores intellectual and political concerns that have continued to hold me in their grip. I suggest beginning with the Postscript of 1983; it anticipates many of the themes of my subsequent writings.

To order this book go to the "my books" section of this website.

Lectures on Social Theory, Spring 1976

These notes were prepared for a course on "classical social theory" I gave in Harvard College in the Spring of 1976. The course addressed mainly Marx, Durkheim, and Weber. The notes suggest how much of the project of social thought documented in this section of the website was inspired by a struggle with the ideas of these thinkers. To seize the transformative opportunities of the present moment, it seemed necessary to push forward in the direction they had taken, even at the cost of repudiating many of the assumptions, methods, and claims with which their work had come to be associated.

The complete text of Social Theory: Its Situation and Its Task

As the first volume in the Politics series, this book was followed by "False Necessity" and "Plasticity into Power" both of which are also available in full in this website. It has been published in a new paperback edition by Verso in 2004 together with "False Necessity" and "Plasticity into Power."

Ample selections from all three of these books are included in the one-volume anthology of my social theory work, edited and introduced by Zhiyuan Cui, "Politics: the Central Texts" (Verso 1997). To order this anthology go to the "my books" section of this website.

"Social Theory: Its Situation and Its Task" lays the groundwork for the development of a way of thinking about society that can resist the identification of what happened with what must be. The argument of the book addresses this task in a manner that contests the authority of the contemporary social sciences and discounts the distinctions among them. A direct line leads from this book to the introduction to the new edition of "False Necessity," the major work of the Politics series.

There are four themes in "Social Theory: Its Situation and Its Task" to which I draw the reader's particular attention: the discussion of the transformative vocation (pp. 26-35), the criticism of both classic social theory and contemporary social science as inadequately radical in recognizing that "it's all politics" (pp. 80-164), the contrast between two ways of realizing the intellectual program I propose, one embracing and the other eschewing comprehensive theories (pp. 165-169), and the analysis of the assumptions about necessity and contingency on which ny argument rests (pp. 170-199). Rather than antagonizing scientific method, I enlist natural science in the defense of these assumptions.

To order this book go to the "my books" section of this website.

The complete text of False Necessity

Here is the full text of the new edition of "False Necessity" (Verso 2002). A paperback version was

published in 2004 together with "Social Theory: Its Situation and Its Task" and "Plasticity into Power." "False Necessity" is the central work of my Politics books. It was preceded by "Social Theory: Its Situation and Its Task" and followed by "Plasticity into Power," available in the part of this website called "the institutional conditions of practical progress." "False Necessity" presents both a way of explaining society and a program for changing it. The explanation develops a radical alternative to Marxism, showing how we can account for established social arrangements without denying their contingency or our freedom. The program offers a progressive alternative to the now dominant ideological conceptions of neoliberalism and social democracy: a set of institutional innovations that would democratize markets, deepen democracies, and empower individuals.

The reader can master the gist of the argument of this long book by reading the introduction to the new edition, which presents the ideas of "False Necessity" as a subset of a larger family of intellectual and political possibilities; Chapter 1 (pp. 1-40), which outlines and connects the explanatory and programmatic themes; the first half of Chapter 4 (pp. 172-245), which presents an alternative, contingency-recognizing genealogy of contemporary institutions; the sections of the second half of Chapter 4 (pp. 277-331) that discuss the idea of negative capability and its relation to path dependency; the core of Chapter 5 (pp. 441-539), which advances a particular institutional program; and the concluding discussion in Chapter 5 of the spirit of this program (pp. 570-595).

To order this book go to the "my books" section of this website.

Science and politics between domesticated and radicalized pragmatism

"Science and politics between domesticated and radicalized pragmatism" - the outcome of a discussion with philosophers of science - works out some of the assumptions about thinking on which my recent work in social theory relies. At the same time this little essay attacks the diminished and servile version of pragmatism that threatens to become the ruling philosophy of the age. The essay was originally published in Science in Context 10, 1 (1997), introducing a collection of papers in most of which I discerned the domesticated pragmatism I combat; hence the reference to these papers in the first paragraph.

Theses on religion and politics

These theses, published as an appendix to the new edition of False Necessity, suggest connections between the intellectual project of an antifatalistic social theory and the beliefs lying at the core of some of the world religions.

Illusions of necessity in the economic order

A polemical address to economists delivered almost thirty years ago. The policy problems of the late 1970s in the United States are long gone. What remains is the need to come to terms with economics as the most potent of the social sciences, and to distinguish its achievements from its equivocations.