If The Beatles had read Heller

by Mark Davis

It’s an evocative theme, a ‘Top 40’. A little alarmingly for some listening no doubt, Thesis Eleven was first conceived the year I was born, 1978. Growing up here in the UK during the 1980s, encountering the ‘Top 40’ meant listening to the radio (later watching TV) to learn which songs had climbed or fallen a few places in the charts depending on the music-buying public’s affections. I used to wait, enduring the songs that didn’t excite me in order to sing the songs that did.

Jack Palmer on ‘The Making and Unmaking of Strangers’

by Jack Palmer

I first read ‘The Making and Unmaking of Strangers’ where it is republished in Postmodernity and its Discontents, a collection of wide-ranging and loosely connected essays. A form typical of this stage of his work. Some of them are transcripts from lectures delivered at invited and esteemed lectures (the Manchester Annual Peace Lecture, for instance), reflecting perhaps a new-found fame and notoriety. Thesis Eleven was clearly a testing ground, it seems, a collection of the like-minded, alongside Telos, Theory, Culture & Society and The Jewish Quarterly.

John Grumley on George Márkus’s ‘Four Forms of Critical Theory’

by John Grumley

George Márkus’s Four Forms of Critical Theory was first published in Thesis Eleven no. 1 in 1980. Reading it again meant revisiting a paper that I had first read forty years ago with fresh eyes. I always thought George was a special person and a great philosopher. He supervised my PhD and became my senior colleague after I was appointed to the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. We became close friends after his retirement.  

Stuart Macintyre 1947-2021

by Peter Beilharz and Sian Supski

Stuart Macintyre died in Melbourne on 22 November 2021. He was one of the leading Australian historians of our times, an inspiring scholar, a culture builder, and endless source of generosity and enthusiasm for the work of history as well as the social sciences. A young Althusserian, all those years ago, he was a lifelong socialist and labour movement enthusiast.

Podcast episode: The life of editing

This year marks the 40th anniversary of Thesis Eleven, a journal of critical theory and historical sociology. Its Founding Editor, Professor Peter Beilharz, sat down with Dr Alonso Casanueva Baptista and Dr Andrew Gilbert, both current editors, to discuss the journal’s history, the changes in the university and academic publishing since the journal’s beginnings in 1981, as well as various other topics. Please join us for this inaugural podcast.

Issue 166, October 2021: Nomads of critique

Contributors: Peter Hudis, Alison Ross, Esperança Bielsa, Jodie Lee Heap, Andrea Lanza, Gerard Delanty, Neal Harris, Ali Rıza Taşkale, Jeremy Smith, Kevin Blachford, Eduardo de la Fuente, Wayne Hudson, John Lechte, J. F. Dorahy, Gary Pearce, Henry Paternoster, Chamsy el-Ojeili, Andrew Simon Gilbert, Greg Melleuish