In this book, Bradley Macdonald offers a brilliant reappraisal of one of the most influential and revered British intellectuals of the Victorian age. William Morris was, by turns, an artist, writer, social critic, and political radical. Here, Macdonald focuses on the interplay between Morris' aesthetic vision and his socialist ideology. He argues compellingly that, because these two sides of Morris' personality have generally been examined by art or literary historians and social theorists respectively, their integral relationship has often been lost sight of.

While William Morris (1834-1896) is generally considered one of the most important cultural and political figures of late Victorian England, there is avid disagreement on the way in which we can understand the interconnections between his aesthetic commitments (as a celebrated poet and decorative artist influenced by Pre-Raphaelitism and Aestheticism) and his later revolutionary socialist advocacy. As opposed to dominant interpretations within Morris scholarship, Bradley J. Macdonald argues for the importance of understanding the role a “critical notion of beauty” had in moving Morris toward a theory of socialism that took seriously the way in which desire, pleasure, and “beauty” (as applied to all externals of human life, not just art works) could be regenerated only through radical transformations in socioeconomic life. Consequently , William Morris's development represents an interesting example of cultural politics. Given this genealogy, Macdonald clarifies, Morris’s mature political theory incorporated a very important commitment to not just economic justice, but also, among other distinctive applications ; ecological sustainability, making him one of the first eco-socialist theorists within the Western tradition, and also an early proponent of what is today known as “degrowth communism.”

This book examines nineteenth-century interests in beauty, and considers whether these aesthetic pursuits were necessary to British public life.

This book offers a new interpretation of William Morris’s utopianism as a strategic extension of his political writing. Morris’s utopian writing, alongside his journalism and public lectures, constituted part of a sustained counter-hegemonic project that intervened both into the life-world of the fin de siècle socialist movement, as well as the dominant literary cultures of his day. Owen Holland demonstrates this by placing Morris in conversation with writers of first-wave feminism, nineteenth-century pastoralists, as well as the romance revivalists and imperialists of the 1880s. In doing so, he revises E.P. Thompson’s and Miguel Abensour’s argument that Morris’s utopian writing should be conceived as anti-political and heuristic, concerned with the pedagogic education of desire, rather than with the more mundane work of propaganda. He shows how Morris’s utopianism emerged against the grain of the now-here, embroiled in instrumental, propagandistic polemic, complicating Thompson’s and Abensour’s view of its anti-political character.

Performing Marx looks at what it means to be a Marxist dealing with contemporary political and theoretical developments in the twenty-first century. Drawing upon Marx's work, Western Marxism, and poststructuralist theory, Bradley J. Macdonald explores how a living tradition of Marx's ideas can constructively engage a politics of desire and pleasure, ecological sustainability, a politics of everyday life that takes seriously popular culture, and the nature of globalization and of the radical forces being arrayed against the logics of global capitalism. By engaging such crucial issues, Macdonald also provides important clarifications of the work of William Morris, Guy Debord and the situationists, Michel Foucault, Antonio Negri, Ernesto Laclau, and Chantal Mouffe, as they relate to Marx.

The medieval in the modern world is here explored in a variety of media, from film and book to gaming.

An indispensable and exemplary reference work, this Encyclopedia adeptly navigates the multidisciplinary field of critical political science, providing a comprehensive overview of the methods, approaches, concepts, scholars and journals that have come to influence the disciplineÕs development over the last six decades.