Lives on the Left: A Group Portrait/Francis Mulhern

Description 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, Ji 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. About the Author Francis Mulhern is Associate Editor of New Left Review . His books include The Moment of "Scrutiny" , Culture/Metaculture and the edited collection Lives on the Left: Interviews with New Left Review . Giovanni Arrighi (1937-2009) was Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. His books include The Long Twentieth Century , Adam Smith in Beijing , and, with Beverly Silver, Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System . His work has appeared in many publications, including New Left Review --who published an interview on his life-long intellectual trajectory in March-April 2009, and an obituary in Nov-Dec 2009--and there are more accounts on his memorial website. Asada Akira is a critic and curator and the current head of the Graduate School at the Kyoto University of Art and Design. His first book, published in 1983, was Structure and Power: Beyond Semiotics . Since then he has published, among other things, Beyond "the End of History" and The End of Cinema's Century . He was co-editor of Hihyokukan ("Critical Space"). Luciana Castellina has been a leading figure of the Italian Left since the 1960s. She co-founded the Partito di Unitŕ Proletaria per il communismo (PdUP) and the Movimento dei Comunisti Unitari (CU). She was a member of the European parliament from 1979 to 1999 and has been at different times the editor of Nuovo Generazione , il manifesto and Liberazione . Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of American Power and the New Mandarins , Manufacturing Consent (with Ed Herman), Deterring Democracy , Year 501 , World Orders Old and New , Powers and Prospects , Profit over People , The New Military Humanism and Rogue States . Lucio Colletti (1924-2001) served on the editorial board of Societŕ , the cultural journal of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). After his split with PCI, he became a staunch left critic of its political and cultural orthodoxy. In his final years, he shifted to the right, joining the camp of Silvio Berlusconi and serving as parliamentary deputy as part of Forza Italia. K. Damodaran (1904-1976) was a prolific writer came to Marxism after early experience of militancy and imprisonment in the cause of Indian independence. He was one of the founders of the Kerala unit of the Communist Party of India (CPI) and went on to serve on the party's National Council and Central Executive, and in the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian legislature. Adolfo Gilly is a professor of history and politics at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and the author of the classic study La revolución interrumpida (in English, The Mexican Revolution ), which was conceived and written while he was imprisoned. David Harvey teaches at the Graduate Center of the City University of N