BEYOND LEVIATHAN

Critique of the State

Istvan Meszaros

Edited by John Bellamy Foster

Paperback

9789350028124

Aakar Books, 2023

Language: English

482 pages

INR 895.00

In stock

SKU

LWB1450

István Mészáros was one of the greatest political theorists of the twentieth century. Left unfinished at the time of his death, Beyond Leviathan is written on the magisterial scale of his previous book, Beyond Capital, and meant to complement that work. It focuses on the transcendence of the state, along with the transcendence of capital and alienated labor, while traversing the history of political theory from Plato to the present. Aristotle, More, Machiavelli, and Vico are only a few of the thinkers discussed in depth.

The larger objective of this work is no less than to develop a full-fledged critique of the state, in the Marxian tradition, and set against the critique of capital. Not only does it provide, for the first time, an-all-embracing Marxian theory of the state, it gives new political meaning to the notion of “the withering away of the state.” In his definitive, final work, Mészáros seeks to illuminate the political preconditions for a society of substantive equality and substantive democracy.

In his scholarly and personal introduction, John Bellamy Foster traces the gestation of this masterwork and its place in the history of political theory.

Istvan Meszaros

István Mészáros (19 December 1930 - 1 October 2017), one of the foremost Marxist intellectuals of our time, left his native Hungary after the Soviet invasion of 1956. He was professor emeritus at the University of Sussex, where he held the chair of philosophy for fifteen years. Mészáros is the author of The Structural Crisis of Capital, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time, Beyond Capital: Toward a Theory of Transition, and Marx's Theory of Alienation, among other books.

See more books by Istvan Meszaros

John Bellamy Foster

John Bellamy Foster is Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon and editor of Monthly Review (New York). His most recent books are The Endless Crisis (with Robert W. McChesney, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012) and Marx and the Earth (with Paul Burkett, Chicago: Haymarket, 2017).