Publisher's Synopsis
These essays from the 1970s mark the inception of the distinctive project that Jacques Ranci�re has pursued across forty years, with four interwoven themes: the study of working-class identity, of its philosophical interpretation, of "heretical" knowledge and of the relationship between work and leisure. For the short-lived journal Les R�voltes Logiques, Ranci�re wrote on subjects ranging across a hundred years, from the California Gold Rush to trade-union collaboration with fascism, from early feminism to the "dictatorship of the proletariat," from the respectability of the Paris Exposition to the disrespectable carousing outside the Paris gates. Ranci�re characteristically combines telling historical detail with deep insight into the development of the popular mind. In a new preface, he explains why such "rude words" as "people," "factory," "proletarians" and "revolution" still need to be spoken.
