"A golden treasury of theory" Eric Banks, Bookforum "Verso's beautifully designed Radical Thinkers series, which brings together seminal works by leading left-wing intellectuals, is a sophisticated blend of theory and thought. The 12 authors whose writings are included in the series have worked tirelessly to expose the mechanisms by which culture and knowledge are manufactured, managed and controlled." Ziauddin Sardar, New Statesman"
Theodor Adorno was director of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt from 1956 until his death in 1969. His works include
In Search of Wagner;
Aesthetic Theory;
Negative Dialectics; and (with Max Horkheimer)
Dialectic of Enlightenment and
Towards a New Manifesto.
Louis Althusser was born in Algeria in 1918 and died in France in 1990. He taught philosophy for many years at the Ecole Normale Superieur in Paris, and was a leading intellectual in the French Communist Party. His books include
For Marx;
Reading Capital (with Etienne Balibar);
Essays in Ideology;
Politics and History: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx;
Machiavelli and Us; and
The Spectre of Hegel.
Étienne Balibar is a French Marxist philosopher and the most celebrated student of Louis Althusser. He is also one of the leading exponents of French Marxist philosophy and the author of
Spinoza and Politics,
The Philosophy of Marx and co-author of
Race, Nation and Class and
Reading Capital.Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) began teaching sociology at the Université de Paris-X in 1966. He retired from academia in 1987 to write books and travel until his death in 2007. His many works include
Simulations and Simulacra,
America,
The Perfect Crime,
The System of Objects,
Passwords,
The Transparency of Evil,
The Spirit of Terrorism, and
Fragments, among others.
Walter Benjamin was a German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and is the author of
Illuminations,
The Arcades Project, and
The Origin of German Tragic Drama.Simon Critchley is Hans Jonas Professor at the New School for Social Research, and a part-time professor of philosophy at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. His many books include
Infinitely Demanding,
Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity and, most recently,
The Book of Dead Philosophers.
Guy Debord was born in Paris in 1931 and committed suicide in 1994. A Marxist theorist, French writer, poet, filmmaker, hypergraphist and founding member of the groups Letterist International and Situationist International, Debord is best known as the leading theoretician of the situationist movement. His works translated into English include
The Society of the Spectacle,
Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, and
Panegyric.
Terry Eagleton is Professor of Cultural Theory and John Rylands Fellow, University of Manchester. His other books include
Ideology;
The Function of Criticism;
Heathcliff and the Great Hunger;
Against the Grain;
Walter Benjamin; and
Criticism and Ideology, all from Verso.
Fredric Jameson is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University. The author of numerous books, he has over the last three decades developed a richly nuanced vision of Western culture's relation to political economy. He was a recipient of the 2008 Holberg International Memorial Prize. He is the author of many books, including
Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,
The Cultural Turn, A Singular Modernity,
The Modernist Papers,
Archaeologies of the Future,
Brecht and Method, Ideologies of Theory, Valences of the Dialectic,
The Hegel Variations and
Representing Capital.Georg Lukács was a Marxist philosopher and literary critic and is widely considered to be the founder of the tradition of Western Marxism. He is the author of
History and Class Consciousness,
Lenin, and
Theory of the Novel.
Chantal Mouffe is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster. Her books include
The Return of the Political;
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (with Ernesto Laclau);
The Dimensions of Radical Democracy;
Gramsci and Marxist Theory;
Deconstruction and Pragmatism;
The Democratic Paradox; and
The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, all from Verso.
Gillian Rose was a British philosopher and sociologist. She is the author of
Paradiso,
Mourning Becomes the Law, and Hegel Contra Sociology.Paul Virilio trained as an artist in stained glass, working with Braque and Matisse, as well as studying philosophy at the Sorbonne. In 1975 he was made director of the Ecole spéciale d'architecture in Paris. He retired from teaching in 1998 and now works with private organizations on projects to house the homeless in Paris. He has written many books, including
War and Cinema, Open Sky, and
Ground Zero.
