文档介绍：Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy CORNELIUS CASTORIADIS Edited by David Ames Curtis New York Oxford OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1991 Foreword Only of late has the Anglophone reading public e aware of Cornelius Castoriadis and his five decades of work. Despite the pioneering efforts of the British journal Solidarityto translate Castoriadis' writings, efforts continued at one time by Telosand now by Thesis Eleven, it was only in 1984, with the publication of Crossroadsin the Labyrinth, that Castoriadis' distinctive thought became accessible to a broad Englishspeaking audience. That first book-length translation, which contained articles from the previous decade, was followed by the publication of The Imaginary Institution of Societyin 1987 and two volumes of his Political and Social Writings in 1988; the writings found in these latter translations, however, date from the mid-1940s through the mid-1970s. The publication of the present volume will be the first time that Castoriadis' essays are published in English in book form in a timely fashion. What makes this situation so striking is that there are so few living, active writers of Cornelius Castoriadis' experience and breadth of vision. To recap briefly the path he has traveled, 1Castoriadis, born in 1922 in Constantinople, began his political life at age fifteen years as a member of the munist Youth, formed an opposition group within the munist Party ( 1941) after the German occupation, joined the Trotskyists ( 1942) when he became convinced that munists were unreformable, and spent much of the rest of the war dodging both Stalinist agents and the Gestapo. Leaving Greece for France, he joined the Trotskyist Fourth International in Paris, where his e attack on the Fourth's "unconditional defense of the Soviet Union" led him and others to form an opposition group, Socialisme ou Barbarie. Basing their criticism on people's actual aspirations toward autonomy in the form of workers' self-management,