Dick Howard is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Among his books are The Marxian Legacy (2nd edition), The Birth of American Political Thought, From Marx to Kant (2nd edition), and Political Judgments. He has also published several books in French, most recently La democratie a l'epreuve.

• Introduction: Why Should We, and How Should We, Reclaim Marx? Part 1. Marxism and the Intellectuals 1. Marxism in the Postcommunist World 2. Can French Intellectuals Escape Marxism? 3. The Frankfurt School and the Transformation of Critical Theory into Cultural Theory 4. Habermas's Reorientation of Critical Theory Toward Democratic Theory 5. The Anticommunist Marxism of "Socialisme ou Barbarie" 6. Claude Lefort's Passage from Revolutionary Theory to Political Theory 7. From Marx to Castoriadis, and from Castoriadis to Us 8. From the Critique of Totalitarianism to the Politics of Democracy Part 2. Republican Democracy or Democratic Republics 9. The Burden of French History 10. Intersecting Trajectories of Republicanism in France and the United States 11. Reading U.S. History as Political 12. Fundamentalism and the American Exception Part 3. Back to Marx? 13. Philosophy by Other Means? Notes Index

If Marxist theory is to survive the debacle of Marxist practice, it will have to transform itself in more than superficial ways into a credible defender of radical democracy. Drawing on more than three decades of experience as one of America's foremost interpreters of French and German critical theory, Dick Howard goes a long way towards meeting this challenge. The Specter of Democracy is a primer for twenty-first-century political critique and a welcome reminder that radicalism and responsibility need not be antithetical terms. -- Martin Jay, author of the The Dialectical Imagination