In a thorough history of violence and killing, the Guggenheim fellow argues that violence erupts most frequently and brutally between those who are closest and examines the reasons behind this tendanc
"The choice we have is not between reasonable proposals and an unreasonable utopianism. Utopian thinking does not undermine or discount real reforms. Indeed, it is almost the opposite: practical refor
Russell Jacoby defines social amnesia as society's repression of remembrance - society's own past. In this book, Jacoby excavates the critical and historical concepts that have fallen prey to the dyna
By examining the private correspondence of a circle of German psychoanalyst emigrés that included Otto Fenichel, Annie Reich, and Edith Jacobson, Russell Jacoby recaptures the radical zeal of cl
We are facing the end of politics altogether, Russell Jacoby argues in The End of Utopia. Political contestation is premised on people’s capacity for offering competing visions of the future, but in a
Observing that for both revolutionaries and capitalists, nothing succeeds like success, Russell Jacoby asks us to reexamine a loser of Marxism: the unorthodox Marxism of Western Europe. The author begins with a polemical attack on 'conformist' or orthodox Marxism, in which he includes structuralist schools. He argues that a cult of success and science drained this Marxism of its critical impulse and that the successes of the Russian and Chinese revolutions encouraged a mechanical and fruitless mimicry. He then turns to a Western alternative that neither succumbed to the spell of success nor obliterated the individual in the name of science. In the nineteenth century, this Western Marxism already diverged from Russian Marxism in its interpretation of Hegel and its evaluation of Engels' orthodox Marxism. The author follows the evolution of this minority tradition and its opposition to authoritarian forms of political theory and practice.
This provocative book chronicles the disappearance of the "public intellectual" in America. For over thirty years, the cultural landscape has been dominated by the generation of Irving Howe, Daniel Be
Russell Jacoby argues that violence erupts most often, and most savagely, between those of us most closely related. Weaving together the biblical story of Cain and Abel, Freud's "narcissism of minor d
In print for fifty years, White Collar by C. Wright Mills is considered a standard on the subject of the new middle class in twentieth-century America. This landmark volume demonstrates how the condit