Joel Kovel
Biographic Data
| ID | 557886 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Joel Kovel |
| GIVEN NAMES | Joel |
| FAMILY NAME | Kovel |
| SIGNATURE | KOVEL J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Bard College |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 95 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 79 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 95 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1966 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Correcting Dickens
Ecosocialism as a Human Phenomenon
We live in an epoch of radical crisis. From the economic side, we see intractable stagnation and vicious class polarization. And from another side, which I shall call the ecological, we find that t
The Question of Israel
Presentation at Occupy Wall Street
I am honored to be here this evening. *Zuccotti Park, New York, October 28, 2011. This transcription is broken into the General Assembly lingo – short sentences so they could be repeated by the “p
A Philosophical Quest for Twenty-First-Century Socialism
Istvan Meszaros, Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness. Volume I: The Social Determination of Method; Volume II: The Dialectic of Structure and History (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010
The National Security State Has Its Way
Last winter, in an article nicely titled “Repulsive Progressive Hypocrisy,” Glenn Greenwald skewered the acceptance by self-professed liberals of Barack Obama's betrayal of his fine campaign promis
An Announcement
A Gathering Storm
This issue of Capitalism Nature Socialism is the first to be entirely devoted to a single theme—the COP-17 UN Climate Change conference in Durban, R.S.A.—and the first to be co-published in book fo
WikiLeaks Forever
On Marx and Ecology
I am honored1 to be here to explore with you the relation of Marxism to ecological civilization. Although the title of this conference may seem obscure to the average person, its importance becomes
U.S. Imperialism
A Conference That Will Live In Infamy
Wilhelm Reich: A Harbinger of Ecosocialism? An Introduction to Bennett
Reply to Bennett
There is much agreement between Phillip Bennett and myself about Wilhelm Reich, but this does not extend to our views on Reich's scientific work concerning orgone energy. Unhappily, to my view, Ben
Imperial Blues
Suffering a Sea-change
Dark Satanic Mills: William Blake and the Critique of War
Some time ago I learned that Woodstock, the town in upstate New York I called home for almost three decades, occupies a small but very definite and enduring place in the satanic structure known as
From the Archeology of the Future
Mearsheimer and Walt Revisited
The appearance of an article in the London Review of Books early in 2006 by two mainstream academics calling attention to an “Israel Lobby” in the United States was definitely news. I was in Durban
The World According to Carlos Slim
Sourly observing the decline of the once great magazine known as The New Yorker as it has become the weekly outlet of the Fashion Industry, I have often pondered cancelling my subscription. But I n
The Worst of Times
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born: in this interregnum, morbid phenomena of the most varied kind come to pass. — Antonio Gramsci Barack Obam
The Obama Phenomenon
The November 4 victory of Barack Obama triggered the most enthusiastic celebration in the United States since the end of the Second World War. People were dancing in the streets throughout the nigh
All Aboard for Copenhagen
A Speech That Didn't Get Delivered
The EIN
The ecofeminist ground of ecosocialism
A Twofold Mission. The ecological crisis is too serious to be left to greenwashers, technocrats and reformers; it demands, rather, the “ruthless criticism” Marx set forward in 1843, criticism that
Ecosocialism as a Human Phenomenon
We live in an epoch of radical crisis. From the economic side, we see intractable stagnation and vicious class polarization. And from another side, which I shall call the ecological, we find that t
Ecosocialism, Global Justice, and Climate Change
So far it is only a word, plucked from the bin of radical possibility to concentrate the mind in this grim age of world-destroying capitalism. We call it “ecosocialism” because the times, as Hamlet
Ecological Marxism and dialectic
1995). Ecological Marxism and dialectic. Capitalism Nature Socialism: Vol. 6, No. 4, pp. 31-50
The struggle for use value: Thoughts about the transition
The National Security State Has Its Way
Last winter, in an article nicely titled “Repulsive Progressive Hypocrisy,” Glenn Greenwald skewered the acceptance by self-professed liberals of Barack Obama's betrayal of his fine campaign promis
On Marx and Ecology
I am honored1 to be here to explore with you the relation of Marxism to ecological civilization. Although the title of this conference may seem obscure to the average person, its importance becomes
The Enemy of Nature
It is a great privilege to be here and share with you these reflections about the global crisis of ecological destruction. I believe Cuba to be the one place on earth where this, perhaps the greatest crisis in human history, can receive a full and deep analysis. Cuba has earned the distinction by becoming the first modern society to embrace an agricultural policy capable of sustainability. While we know that this transformation was the fruit of p…
Narcissism and the Family
To pursue the psychological and social relations of narcissism is to enter a swamp. However, that swamp happens to be a real part of the world. Consider some of its dimensions: —Narcissism is an aspect of personal life without which human existence would not be thinkable. One treads softly about the word “normal” but in this case we must assume that narcissism, as the location of desire in the self, is ubiquitous, and indeed transhistorical. More…
Ave atque Vale, Fidel
House organ
A Materialism Worthy of Nature
The justifiers: A critique of Julian Simon, Stephan Schmidheiny, and Paul Hawken on Capitalism and Nature
Rationalization and the Family
In Kafka's Trial, K. succeeds in proving to the Priest that the Doorkeeper who keeps the man from approaching the Law is no more than a simpleton. The Priest, however, objects. No one has the right to pass judgment on the Doorkeeper, for he serves the Law; to doubt his dignity is to doubt the Law itself. K. fights back: “I don't agree with that point of view...for if one accepts it, one must accept as true everything the Doorkeeper says. But you …
The Question of Israel
A Conference That Will Live In Infamy
From the Archeology of the Future
Liberties and Commons for All
Grace Paley and the Dark Lives of Women
An interview with Maria Mies, January 18, 2004, Mumbai, India
Joel Kovel: Maria, we meet at what some are calling an historic event, the World Social Forum, which is being held in India for the first time. I wonder what you think of these goings-on. Maria Mie
Has Ecosocialism Passed on the Tough Questions
The Dialectic of Radical Ecologies
Negating Bookchin
Red green politics in the United States
1994). Red green politics in the United States? Capitalism Nature Socialism: Vol. 5, No. 4, pp. 1-4
Therapy in Late Capitalism
A radical approaching the institution of psychotherapy often feels inclined to impale it with a barb updated from Marx's judgment on religion: where once was the opium of the people, here stands their heroin, a new, synthetic addiction, concocted out of the brew of late capitalist culture. The hostility is understandable, since therapy has in some respects been even more successful than religion in deflecting energy from the need for radical soci…
Huckleberry Finn: A Psychoanalytic Study
White Racism: A Psychohistory
Meetings of the Psychoanalytic Association of New York
(1976). Meetings of the Psychoanalytic Association of New York. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly: Vol. 45, No. 2, pp. 342-344.
Therapy in Late Capitalism
A radical approaching the institution of psychotherapy often feels inclined to impale it with a barb updated from Marx's judgment on religion: where once was the opium of the people, here stands their heroin, a new, synthetic addiction, concocted out of the brew of late capitalist culture. The hostility is understandable, since therapy has in some respects been even more successful than religion in deflecting energy from the need for radical soci…
Neurosis and Civilization: A Marxist-Freudian Synthesis
Michael Schneider. Neurosis and Civilization: A Marxist-Freudian Synthesis. Translated by Michael Roloff. New York: Seabury Press, 1975. 302 pages
Rationalization and the Family
In Kafka's Trial, K. succeeds in proving to the Priest that the Doorkeeper who keeps the man from approaching the Law is no more than a simpleton. The Priest, however, objects. No one has the right to pass judgment on the Doorkeeper, for he serves the Law; to doubt his dignity is to doubt the Law itself. K. fights back: “I don't agree with that point of view...for if one accepts it, one must accept as true everything the Doorkeeper says. But you …
Narcissism and the Family
To pursue the psychological and social relations of narcissism is to enter a swamp. However, that swamp happens to be a real part of the world. Consider some of its dimensions: —Narcissism is an aspect of personal life without which human existence would not be thinkable. One treads softly about the word “normal” but in this case we must assume that narcissism, as the location of desire in the self, is ubiquitous, and indeed transhistorical. More…
Mind and state in ancient Greece
Values, interests, and psychotherapy
Theses on Technocracy
The nuclear war towards which we appear to be uncontrollably lurching will be the failure of diplomacy but the triumph of technocracy, indeed, its Gotter-dammerung. Diplomacy seeks state power through rational means; technocracy, domination through the logos of science. Fora long time the two ran together in the same trace, facilitated by the identification of science with rationality. Nuclear weapons objectively broke this identity — there being…
Western Marxism
Review of Dialectic of Defeat: Contours of Western Marxism by Russell Jacoby.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website
Marx on the Jewish question
A Reading of Marxism
Review of Four Lectures on Marxism by Paul Sweezy.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website
White racism: A Psychohistory
Marxism and Christianity
Review of Marxism: An American Christian Perspective by Arthur F. McGovern.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website
From Reich to Marcuse
In 1960 I was a medical student and ardent follower of the recently deceased Wilhelm Reich. In common with other Reichians, I regarded society as at most an impediment to the full expression of the life force, or orgone. Such had been the master's final opinion, forged by the unmerciful repression to which he had been subjected by the U.S. government. In retrospect, Reich's martyrdom was an important element of his appeal. Anybody this far out ha…
The Vatican Strikes Back
The Vatican's recently released Instruction on Certain Aspects of the "Theology of Liberation" (Dublin: Veritas Publications, 1984; henceforth referred to as Instruction) is doleful but essential reading for those of us who have begun to rethink the traditional hostility between religion and the left. The work of one of Catholicism's leading ideologians, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Instruction is a key link in Pope John Paul II's counteroffensive …
Indefensible Weapons: The Political and Psychological Case against Nuclearism
Marx, Freud and the problem of materialism
The Pitfalls of Psychologism
I was pleased to see Robert Heilbroner's review of Eli Sagan's At the Dawn of Tyranny in the September issue of MR. Sagan's book is an important one, which raises many key issues about what may be broadly considered the subjective side of domination—issues which rarely get the attention they deserve from socialists. But these are difficult issues as well; and it is precisely because of that difficulty that I would have hoped for a more thorough t…
Class, Power and the State
"The old order is dying but the new one cannot be born." Gramsci's somber aphorism beautifully describes the modern predicament. Yet it may have been an understatement. Few on the revolutionary left could have predicted then that the old order, capitalism, would, without in the least solving either its internal crisis or its essential brutality, display such staying power. Nor was it widely expected that capital would derive such strength from th…
Constructing Reality
Review of The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection by Edward S. Herman and Frank Brodhead.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website
More on the Origins of Tyranny; Reply to Sagan
I write in response to Joel Kovel's serious and thoughtful rejoinder to Robert Heilbroner's review of my book At the Dawn if Tyranny (MR, October 1986). My first task, it appears, is to make clear what my views of social development are.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website
Power and Terror in Bomb Philosophy: A Review of Joel Kovel's Against the State of Nuclear Terror
The embracing vision of Joseph Needham
Political science (67 works) · Philosophy (45 works) · Sociology (44 works) · History (38 works) · Law (29 works) · Philosophy (27 works) · History (18 works) · Law (18 works) · Epistemology (17 works) · Political Economy and Marxism (16 works)