About this Event
Please join TheoryLab in celebrating the launch of George Boss’s new book, Marx and the Politics of Need (Routledge, 2026).
There will be a panel discussion featuring Dr Boss (Queen Mary University of London), Prof Lawrence Hamilton (Universities of Cambridge and the Witwatersrand), Dr Amelia Horgan (Common Wealth think tank), and Dr Onur Ulas Ince (SOAS University of London), chaired by Dr Ben Turner (Queen Mary University of London). The panel and Q&A will be followed by a drinks reception.
About the book:
Marx and the Politics of Need challenges one of the most pervasive habits in contemporary political theory and practice: treating needs as moral facts that sit outside of our politics, and which can be used to judge it. Against this depoliticising impulse, George Boss offers a provocative re-reading of Marx’s writings on need, interpreting them not as didactic statements of an abstract philosophy, but as subversive interventions and provocations inseparable from his radical political activism.
Re-read in this way, those writings take on new, hitherto unexplored dimensions. Building on them, Boss develops a distinctive Marxian framework that recasts needs as constitutively political, exposing the conflicts, stakes, and possibilities that shape how needs are defined, contested, and met. The result is a fresh, deeply political perspective on human need at a time when the politics of need is both increasingly urgent and increasingly unruly. Opening up what had become ossified and closed down in contemporary social thought, the book thus fashions new opportunities for radical political agency and portends new social possibilities.
Praise
‘This astonishing book resituates the politics of human needs because it resituates philosophical enquiry. It does so by recontextualising Marx as a theorising, change-making
activist. Boss's bold approach to a philosophical problem resituates it as a political problem. How are needs produced, and why is there no satisfaction?’
Terrell Carver, Professor of Political Theory at the University of Bristol, author of 'The Postmodern Marx' and 'Marx'.
‘There have been a few good books on needs. There are libraries of books of a wide range of quality on Karl Marx. This book is excellent on both counts, providing a novel take on both needs and Marx’s firmly contextual, practical political thinking. It is a creative and carefully crafted account of the irreducibly political character of needs, taking needs as performative achievements in context riddled with struggle, oppression and suffering rather than natural givens. The author even ends off with how this approach can be marshalled to confront the political challenges of the present. A must read!’
Lawrence Hamilton, SA UK Bilateral Research Professor in Political Theory at the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Cambridge, author of 'The Political Philosophy of Needs'.
‘Boss’s innovative reading highlights the deeply political character of Marx's perspective on need, recovering from his writings insights and interventions that could radically transform the theory and practice of politics today.’
Maeve Cooke, Professor of Philosophy at University College Dublin, author of 'Re-Presenting the Good Society'
Event venue & nearby stays
GC701, Graduate Centre Top Floor, Queen Mary Univerity, London, United Kingdom
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.