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"Sure to provoke controversy, The Philosopher and His Poor is a virtuoso performance. I can't think of anyone who has pursued the populist premise - the intuition that in this or that situation the grounding of truth or value is to be located in those most dispossessed - with anything approaching Ranciere's degree of articulateness or philosophical sophistication. I predict that this book will become a landmark." Bruce Robbins, author of Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress "The Philosopher and His Poor is a remarkable work. Jacques Ranciere demonstrates the recurrence throughout the history of western thought of a particular self-constituting move: the freedom and the right to think are premised upon a situating and excluding of those whose task is other than to think, what Ranciere calls 'the poor.'" Derek Attridge, author of The Singularity of Literature
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What has philosophy to do with the poor? If, as has often been supposed, the poor have no time for philosophy, then why have philosophers always made time for them? Why is the history of philosophy - from Plato to Karl Marx to Jean Paul Sartre to Pierre Bourdieu - the history of so many figures of the poor: plebes, men of iron, the demos, artisans, common people, proletarians, the masses? Why have philosophers made the shoemaker, in particular, a remarkably ubiquitous presence in this history? Does philosophy itself depend on this thinking about the poor? If so, can it ever refrain from thinking for them? Jacques Ranciere's "The Philosopher and His Poor" meditates on these questions in close readings of major texts of Western thought in which the poor have played a leading role - sometimes as the objects of philosophical analysis, sometimes as illustrations of philosophical argument.Published in France in 1983 and made available here for the first time in English, this consummate study assesses the consequences for Marx, Sartre, and Bourdieu of Plato's admonition that workers should do 'nothing else' than their own work. It offers innovative readings of these thinkers' struggles to elaborate a philosophy of the poor. Presenting a left critique of Bourdieu, the terms of which are largely unknown to an English-language readership, "The Philosopher and His Poor" remains remarkably timely twenty years after its initial publication.
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22 of 23 people found the following review helpful
Among Rancière's most interesting works
6 Aug 2004
Format:Paperback
The belated arrival of this early book of Jacques Rancière in English is very welcome. Andrew Parker's Introduction, which tells the convoluted story of the book's prior aborted translation, is worth reading by itself. And Parker goes beyond this story to provide not only the most thorough bibliography on Rancière that an English reader will ever have seen, but a compelling explanation of the philosopher's place in relation to his, and our, contemporaries (Althusser, Balibar, Bourdieu), and of his importance. And the book itself is fascinating stuff: a journey through the philosophical tradition tracking the contempt-laden figure of the working man. Rancière finds his favorite example, the shoemaker, in so many texts from so many centuries that one almost needs to check the references, lest we start to think the whole piece is some kind of Borgesian joke; but this is, completely in earnest, a fascinating synthetic argument about the condescension philosophy, even leftist philosophy, shows toward "simple" workers. The tone of the book isn't as hard to pin down as some of Rancière's other work (e.g. the terrific "Ignorant Schoolmaster"), and it is a little more of a scholarly, historical effort, a little more humorous, and a little more accessible than you might expect, but it's still a difficult, intelligent, and rewarding text for the philosophical reader.
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