I’m thrilled to announce that this book, which has been a long time in the making, will be out on August 1. In addition to Losurdo’s seminal work, it includes an introduction that I co-authored with Jennifer Ponce de León and the first publication of an important lecture by Losurdo on Western Marxism.
Counter-History of the Present: Untimely Interrogations into Globalization, Technology, Democracy has definitively been accepted for publication by Duke University Press and is currently scheduled to appear in the spring of 2017. The French edition of the same book will be published in the fall of 2016 by Éditions CNRS. A brief overview and the TOC are available below.
Overview
We regularly hear that we are living in a global era in which a technological and economic network is increasingly linking together the four corners of the globe, and democracy has imposed itself as the only legitimate form of government. Some have even come to proclaim the end of history, thereby endeavoring to surreptitiously recuperate, by perverting its fundamental meaning, a certain Marxian discourse. And yet, this image of a global age, as advanced as it is civilized, is far from going without saying or being innocuous, and numerous voices have already risen up to contest it. Rooted in a very specific political force field, it often serves as a more or less clandestine vehicle for pernicious social and economic projects.
This is why it is necessary to open an interrogation into this vision of the present moment and, more profoundly, into the historical imaginary on which it depends. The goal of such an endeavor is not to propose an alternative description of our epoch based on the same basic phenomena. For the counter-history undertaken in this book aims precisely at reconfiguring the possibilities of history by proposing a completely different approach to the problem of the contemporary. New perspectives on ourselves thereby emerge, as well as on the world that we are in the process of constructing, and especially on the possibility of elucidating the diverse dimensions of the present conjuncture and taking charge of the meanings and directions of history [des sens de l’histoire].
Table of Contents
Preface Toward a Counter-History of the Present
Chapter 1 A Specter Is Haunting Globalization
Chapter 2 Are We Really Living in a Technological Era?
Chapter 3 What Is the Use of Democracy? Urgency of an Inappropriate Question
Afterword Taking Charge of the Meanings and Directions of History
GABRIEL ROCKHILL 