The Making of a Marxist Philosopher is a revealing and beautifully written memoir and family history from renowned Marxist philosopher Sean Sayers.
His father was the son of a Jewish-Irish businessman who was a friend of Michael Collins and other leaders in the Irish struggle for independence. He became a writer who was given his first job by T. S. Eliot, shared a flat with George Orwell, went to America and was blacklisted under McCarthyism. His mother was the American-born daughter of a world famous Italian American anarchist. She became a communist and lived and worked in China. Sean was born in New York and grew up in London. He studied philosophy in Cambridge and Oxford Universities in the 1960s and has become an internationally known Marxist philosopher. As one of the founders of the journal Radical Philosophy and the creator of the Marx and Philosophy Review of Books, Sayers has been at the centre of the development of philosophy on the left in the English-speaking world during the past fifty years.
Reflecting on the fate of Marxism in an engaging, thoughtful way, The Making of a Marxist Philosopher is filled with revealing family photographs which Sayers uses to craft an original must-read on left-wing thought and politics.
Preface
Part 1: Family and Childhood
1. Family
2. Childhood
3. Family Life
Part 2: Growing Up
4.School
5. Being an American
6. Cambridge
7. Oxford
Part 3: Work and Adult Life
8. The University of Kent
9. Radical Philosophy
10. Working at Kent
11. Living and Working Abroad
12. Writing and Thought
Part 4: Later Life
13. Retirement
14. China Again
15. Family History
Appendix: Analytical and Continental Philosophy
Biography
Sean Sayers is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kent and Visiting Professor at Peking University. He was educated at Cambridge and Oxford Universities, and has taught in Colorado, Sydney, Istanbul, Massachusetts, Beijing, Wuhan and Shanghai. He has been a central figure in the development of Marxist philosophy in the English-speaking world. He has an international reputation for his work on Hegelian and Marxist philosophy which has been translated into Chinese, French, German, Greek, Japanese, Korean, and Turkish. His books include Marx and Alienation (2009), Plato's Republic: An Introduction (1999), Marxism and Human Nature (1998), Reality and Reason (1985), and Hegel, Marx and Dialectic: A Debate (1980). He was one of the founders of Radical Philosophy (1972), and he created the online Marx and Philosophy Review of Books (2009).
A fascinating read. Sayers has had such a many-sided career and his finely written (and photographed) account contains many striking philosophical and political insights. The result is a splendid amalgam of the personal and the academic.
David McLellan, Goldsmiths College, University of London
