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Introduction BOURGEOIS SOCIETY CAME INTO FULL RECOGNITION WITH ROUSSEAU, who in the *Discourse on the Origin of Inequality* and On the Social Contract, opened its radical critique. Hegel wrote: “The principle of freedom dawned on the world in Rousseau.” Marx quoted Rousseau favorably that “Whoever dares undertake to establish a people’s institutions must feel himself capable of changing, as it were, human nature… to take from man his own powers, and give him in exchange alien powers which he cannot employ without the help of other men. [Read More]

Eros and Civilization: the title expressed an optimistic, euphemistic, even positive thought, namely, that the achievements of advanced industrial society would enable man to reverse the direction of progress, to break the fatal union of productivity and destruction, liberty and repression – in other words to learn [Nietzsche’s] gay science. — Herbert Marcuse In [ancient] philosophy the duties of human life were treated as subservient to the happiness and perfection of human life. [Read More]

Cornwallis's 1781 surrender at Yorktown, where American soldiers sang the British Revolutionary song 'The World Turned Upside Down' as the British laid down their arms. All references to Smith’s *Wealth of Nations* in what follows are to the two volume edition edited by R.H. Campbell and Andrew Skinner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). References will be provided in the text in brackets. “By exposing the historical necessity that had brought capitalism into being, political economy became the critique of history as a whole” —Theodor W. [Read More]