The basic discoveries underlying Marx's critique of political economy - labour power, surplus value, use value - are all in some way built upon the concept of need. From Marx's varying and passing interpretations of a theory of need, Agnes Heller unravels the main tendencies and demonstrates the importance which Marx attached to the "restructuring" of a system of needs going beyond the purely material.She also brings out those aspects, especially the idea of "radical needs" which p...

Grandeur and Twilight of Radical Universalism provides a theoretical construction to the extraordinary events of the past several years in Europe and the Soviet Union, and China. These masterful essays attribute much of the problem of totalitarianism to its blind acceptance of a Marxist philosophy of practice. With the failure of communist practice, the collapse of the Marxian paradigm was quick to follow.At its roots this volume is a critique of the idea that we can have "scientific knowl...

Immortal Comedy is the first book to 'think' philosophically about the comic phenomenon in general. Although author Agnes Heller had written a book that is both deeply scholarly and meditative on the subject of the comic form in film, literature, and life her writing is eminently approachable. In both its subject and style, Immortal Comedy is a seminal book. In it, Heller takes us on a journey through theories of comedy beginning with classical thought. She then detours through foundationa...

First published in 1985, this book provides a stimulating series of inter-connected essays which address the theme of shame, which, unlike the problem of conscience, has been seldom discussed by moral philosophers. The essays focus on the ethical regulation of human action and judgement, examining both its constant and varying elements and concentrating on contemporary types of moral regulation. Professor Heller uses Aristotelian categories, such as the good life, in her discourse to prese...

Doomsday or Deterrence? argues against the majority of premises and conclusions of the antinuclear argument as existed in 1986 when this study was first published. Fehér and Heller’s study claims that social changes are important to curb technology trends that lean toward the construction of nuclear weapons, as well as using the ‘West’ as its own value that needs to be defended and emphasising the importance of understanding the true feelings behind the antinuclear argument. This title wil...

The Time Is Out of Joint handles the Shakespearean oeuvre from a philosophical perspective, finding that Shakespeare's historical dramas reflect on issues and reveal puzzles which were taken up by philosophy proper only in the centuries following them. Shakespeare's extraordinary handling of time and temporality, the difference between truth and fact, that of theory, and that of interpretation and revelatory truth are evaluated in terms of Shakespeare's own conjectural endeavors, ...

A Theory of Feelings examines the problem of human feelings, widely understood, from phenomenological, analytic, and historical perspectives. It begins with an analysis of drives and affects, and pursues the nature of "feeling" itself, in all of its variability, through a close study of the distinctive categories of emotions, emotional dispositions, orientive feelings, and the passions. As such, the starting point of the anlysis entails an examination of the characteristics of hum...

This book, first published in 1984, examines the politics and philosophy of ordinary men and women, and their ordinary transactions. It analyses the interaction between the individual and the social, both for the roots of everyday behaviour and for the means to change the social fabric. Using an approach that combines Marx, Husserl, Heidegger and Aristotle, Agnes Heller defines categories such as ‘group’, ‘crowd’, ‘community’, and deals with characteristics of everyday life such as repetit...

Considering such witnesses of the time as Shakespeare, Dante, Petrarch, Michelangelo, Machiavelli, Montaigne, More and Bacon, Agnes Heller looks at both the concept and the image of a Renaissance man. The concept was generalised and accepted by all; its characteristic features were man as a dynamic being, creating and re-creating himself throughout his life. The images of man, however, were very different, having been formed through the ideas and imagination of artists, politicians, philos...

This radical analysis of the role and importance of historiography interprets the philosophy and theory of history on the basis of historicity as a human condition. The book examins the norms and methods of historiography from a philosophical point of view, but rejects generalisations tht the philosophy of history can provide all the answers to contemporary problems. Instead it outlines a feasible theory of history which is still radical enough to apply to all social structures.

The main purpose of this book is to explicate the problematic relationship between the heterogeneity of what is experienced as beautiful and the homogeneity of the conceptualization of that experience, or attempt at such a conceptualization in the era of modern philosophy. While the heterogeneity of what is experienced as beautiful was permitted, and indeed celebrated, in the dominant ancient conception-for example, in the Symposium and Phaedrus of Plato-the need for homogenization in the ...

This book, first published in 1983, is a radical reinterpretation of the Hungarian revolution in the context of world politics and Eastern Europe as a whole. It examines the events and protagonists with a fresh eye, and relies on witnesses and participants for the rigorous documentary backing.