Problem of Human Needs and the Critique of Civilisation

Patricia Springborg (MA Hons, University of Canterbury, NZ, 1968; DPhil. Oxon, 1979), was a student of J.G.A. Pocock and taught political theory at the University of Canterbury, NZ, the University of Pennsylvania and UC Berkeley in the US, the University of Bolzano in Italy, and was for 30 years lecturer and then professor of Political Theory in the Government Department of the University of Sydney (1974–2005). She has been a stipendiary fellow at Institutes for Advanced Study in Washington DC, Berlin, Oxford and Uppsala, and was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Research & Writing Grant held at the The Brookings Institution, Washington, DC. She has 8 authored and co-authored books, including The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan (2007); and the first English translation and critical edition of Hobbes’s Historia Ecclesiastica (Paris, 2008); as well as some 80 articles in refereed journals and international collections. Most recently she was Guest Professor and Researcher at the Humboldt University, Berlin (2013–22).

• Acknowledgements. 1. The Problem of Human Needs 2. Needs in Hellenistic and Enlightenment Materialism 3. Rousseau on Natural and Artificial Needs 4. The Early Socialists on Needs and Society 5. Civil Society as a ‘System of Needs’ in Hegel 6. Marx on Human and Inhuman Needs 7. Jean-Paul Sartre on Needs and Desires 8. Reich and Fromm on Needs and Social Character 9. Marcuse on True and False Needs 10. Farther Reaches of Need Theory 11. Agnes Heller and Ivan Illich on the Structure of Needs 12. William Leiss on the Problem of Needs and Commodities. Conclusion. Appendix: ‘Needs’ as a Concept. Bibliography. Index.