{
    "id": 311006,
    "slug": "the-spell-of-capital-johan-f-hartle",
    "nstc": null,
    "title": "The spell of capital",
    "subtitle": null,
    "collection_title": null,
    "collection_part_number": null,
    "annotation": null,
    "description": "The Timeliness of Western Marxism reconstructs the tradition, impact, and contemporary relevance of two key concepts of critical cultural analysis. It thus emphasizes the continuity of a specific tradition of Western Marxism, in which the concepts of 'reification' and 'spectacle' were originally coined: the Luk\u00e1cs-Debord axis.<br />The contemporary relevance of these two thinkers is at once highly dubious and more than obvious: in analytical or descriptive terms the concepts of 'reification' and 'spectacle' are often invoked - more often than not without any direct reference to their original theoretical context. <br />The Luk\u00e1cs-Debord axis represents a whole tradition of Marxist cultural critique. In light of the analyses of this book, the theoretical insights and conceptual contributions of Luk\u00e1cs and Debord are not only inseparable from the key ambitions of so-called 'Western Marxism' but even define its very core. <br />The aim of this book is to provide a fundamental understanding of the history of Western Marxism to revisit discussions of the importance of its methodology for a materialist phenomenology of contemporary society. <br />AUP S17 Catalogue text<br />This book explores the tradition, impact, and contemporary relevance of two key ideas from Western Marxism: Georg Luk\u00e1cs's concept of reification, in which social aspects of humanity are viewed in objectified terms, and Guy Debord's concept of the spectacle, where the world is packaged and presented to consumers in uniquely mediated ways. Bringing the original, yet now often forgotten, theoretical contexts for these terms back to the fore, Johan Hartle and Samir Gandesha offer a new look at the importance of Western Marxism from its early days to the present moment-and reveal why Marxist cultural critique must continue to play a vital role in any serious sociological analysis of contemporary society.",
    "additional_content": null,
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    "imprint": null,
    "language_code": "eng",
    "original_language_code": null,
    "page_count": null,
    "duration_seconds": null,
    "publication_date_first": "2017-03-09",
    "publication_date_latest": "2017-03-09",
    "cover_url": null,
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    "created_at": "2025-09-19T13:16:03+00:00",
    "updated_at": "2025-11-04T00:24:34+00:00",
    "publisher": {
        "id": 106,
        "slug": "amsterdam-university-press-bv",
        "name": "Amsterdam University Press B.V.",
        "created_at": "2025-09-19T12:25:37+00:00",
        "updated_at": "2025-09-19T15:13:02+00:00"
    },
    "contributors": [
        {
            "id": 185293,
            "slug": "johan-f-hartle-2",
            "key_names": "Hartle",
            "names_before_key": "Johan F.",
            "prefix_to_key": null,
            "contributor_role": "A01",
            "readable_contributor_role": "Author"
        }
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