Dick Howard’s Defining the Political is a work of political theory written at the point where the inherited categories of Marxism, liberalism and the New Left were beginning to feel insufficient to the political world they were supposed to explain. 

A recurring concern is the paradox that free subjects can participate in producing their own domination. Howard works through alienation, reification, bureaucracy, capitalism and the failures of revolutionary politics, drawing on Marxist and post-Marxist traditions. The chapter shown here in the photos, for example, puts the question sharply: how does “the product dominate the producer, the object the subject?” Elsewhere, Howard turns to the legacy of the New Left and the possibility of a political form grounded in democratic judgment, rights and civil society rather than revolutionary teleology. It is very much a book about what remains of emancipation once certainty has gone missing.

Edition / condition: Macmillan Press, Basingstoke and London, 1989. First edition. Paperback. Printed in Hong Kong. Light rubbing and shelf wear to wrappers, with minor edge and corner wear; pages clean and unmarked, binding firm. Very good condition.