In this fascinating new book Robert Fine recasts three great studies of modern political life: Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Marx's Capital and Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism. The originality of this book lies in its radical reinterpretation of these individual texts which frees them from their intellectual isolation and reads them together as a living unity. In Fine's account all three emerge as formative works of critical theory which succeed in sustaining the great promises of modern politics – freedom, equality, solidarity, the new – alongside the grubbier reality of domination and violence. They are all revealed as empirical works which analyse the actual forms of political modernity, as scientific works which link external appearances to internal processes, as dynamic works concerned with the movement, trajectory and potentiality of politics and as equivocal texts which not only unmask the illusions of political life but also the illusions of unmasking itself. Political Investigations offers a clear and engaging read for students, academics and all who work and take pleasure in social and political thought. It also significantly reviews present-day understandings of the relation between normative political philosophy and empirically-based social theory.

Robert Fine is Convenor of the MA in Social and Political Thought and Director of the Centre for Social Theory at the University of Warwick. He is author of Democracy and the Rule of Law: Liberal Ideals and Marxist Critiques (Pluto) and Beyond Apartheid: Labour and Liberation in South Africa (Pluto). He is co-editor of Social Theory after the Holocaust