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Political Theory
Simon Tormey’s book is intended to be the first introduction and assessment in English of Agnes Heller’s work. The goal in itself is ambitious for three main reasons. First, the pupil of Lukács is a very prolific writer and she has more than twenty books published in English; second, her Lukacsian and continental vocabulary is sometimes difficult to follow and translate in an Anglo-Saxon context; and third, the secondary bibliography on Heller is rather scarce. So, this is a much-needed pioneering work of synthesis and assessment, and the very effort of trying to cope with it deserves recognition. The main point of Tormey’s book is that Heller is a highly political thinker, and I agree fully with him. Heller’s work is, from its inception, a sustained effort to ameliorate our social world and this can be termed political. But, as Tormey’s book states, there are dramatic changes in what politics is for Agnes Heller. First, she was a defender of Marxian social or total revolution (in a sense, the end of politics) and now she has less utopian expectations and a much greater recognition of the political institutions of liberalism. The path from one extreme to another is indeed interesting and Tormey narrates it with clarity and precision.
In order to present her work through using this key political orientation, Tormey proceeds classically: a chronological and detailed presentation of Heller’s work. This is superbly done in the sense that each work is summarized minutely; the political context in which the works are produced is also presented accurately and briefly and, last but not least, there is a constant counterpoint of Heller’s arguments with the relevant and opposed positions of other important contemporary thinkers. Thus, some of Heller’s topics like the expectations of the New Left in Hungary; the delusion of the reformability of really existing socialism; the end of the grand narratives and the delineation of a philosophy with political orientation for the contingent world of postmodernity are wonderfully portrayed and well written. To sum up, a very good introductory book for both students and academics of philosophy and politics.
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