Routledge Gramsci and Foucault: A Reassessment

Mapping the resonances, dissonances, and linkages between the thought of Gramsci and Foucault to uncover new tools for socio-political and critical analysis for the twenty-first century, this book reassesses the widely-held view that their work is incompatible. With discussions of Latin American revolutionary politics, indigenous knowledges, technologies of government and the teaching of paediatrics in post-invasion Iraq, complexity theory, medical anthropology and biomedicine, and the role of Islam in the transition to modern society in the Arab world, this interdisciplinary volume presents the latest theoretical research on different facets of these two thinkers’ work, as well as analyses of the specific linkages that exist between them in concrete settings. A rigorous, comparative exploration of the work of two towering figures of the twenty-first century, Gramsci and Foucault: A Reassessment will appeal to scholars and students of social and political theory, political sociology, communication and media studies, and contemporary philosophy. Review ’This provocative, pluralistic, and wide-ranging volume explores critically and productively convergences, dissonances, and potential synergies between the work of Gramsci and Foucault. Ranging from philosophical reflections through the staging of virtual dialogues to exemplary case studies that demonstrate significant complementarities, this is an important, timely, and unique contribution to rounding out the literature on these two critical intellectuals and political activists.’ Bob Jessop, Lancaster University, UK ’Foucault and Gramsci is a much better alternative for our times, than the polemically overdetermined formulation Foucault or Gramsci. In reassessing Foucault and Gramsci and their respective legacies conjuncturally, this volume goes a long way in clarifying and elaborating the relationship between macropolitics and micropolitics, between a politics anchored in hegemony and post- and counter-hegemonic practices of resistance and speaking truth to power, between the world as irreducibly local and the world as necessarily global and relational.’ Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, University of California Irvine, USA; author of Edward Said: A Dictionary and History, The Human, and the World Between About the Author David Kreps is Lecturer in the J.E. Cairnes School of Business and Economics at NUI Galway, Ireland. He is the author of Cyborgs: Cyborgism, Performance and Society.