Editor’s Preface vii

Editor’s Introduction: Mimesis and the Division of Labor ix

A Personal Itinerary xxv

I. Plato's Lie

1. The Order of the City 3

2. The Order of Discourse 30

II. Marx's Labor


3. The Shoemaker and the Knight 57

4. The Production of the Proletarian 70

5. The Revolution Conjured Away 90

6. The Risk of Art 105

III. The Philosopher and the Sociologist

7. The Marxist Horizon 127

8. The Philosopher’s Wall 137

9. The Sociologist King 165

For Those Who Want More 203

Afterword to the English-Language Edition (2002) 219

Notes 229

“The Philosopher and His Poor is an excellent introduction to Rancière’s thought. The clear and lively introduction by Andrew Parker is invaluable to anyone encountering Rancière for the first time.” — Aimée Israel-Pelletier, Dalhousie French Studies

“Rancière’s sweep through this selection of the history of philosophy is meticulous. He leads us through the details he selects—all about the role of the poor in the various ideal political theories and their role as analogy to rhetoric, farce, spectacle, ignorance, and base material opportunism—to weave together a tableau of philosophy’s ideological exploitation of the body of the poor.” — Ronald R. Sundstrom, Radical Philosophy Review

“The Philosopher and His Poor is an excellent introduction to Rancière’s thought. The clear and lively introduction by Andrew Parker is invaluable to anyone encountering Rancière for the first time.” —Aimée Israel-Pelletier, Dalhousie French Studies

“Rancière’s sweep through this selection of the history of philosophy is meticulous. He leads us through the details he selects—all about the role of the poor in the various ideal political theories and their role as analogy to rhetoric, farce, spectacle, ignorance, and base material opportunism—to weave together a tableau of philosophy’s ideological exploitation of the body of the poor.” —Ronald R. Sundstrom, Radical Philosophy Review

“Sure to provoke controversy, The Philosopher and His Poor is a virtuoso performance. I can’t think of anyone who has pursued the populist premise—the intuition that in this or that situation the grounding of truth or value is to be located in those most dispossessed—with anything approaching Rancière’s degree of articulateness or philosophical sophistication. I predict that this book will become a landmark.” — Bruce Robbins, author of, Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress

“The Philosopher and His Poor is a remarkable work. Jacques Rancière demonstrates the recurrence throughout the history of western thought of a particular self-constituting move: the freedom and the right to think are premised upon a situating and excluding of those whose task is other than to think, what Rancière calls ‘the poor.’” — Derek Attridge, author of, The Singularity of Literature

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