Preface

The essays collected in this eighth volume from CRMEP Books derive from a conference on the thought of the British sociologist and philosopher Gillian Rose, held at Swedenborg Hall in Bloomsbury, London, 18–19 June 2025. Interest in Rose’s wide-ranging body of critical work in the sociology and philosophy of modernity has grown significantly since her early death in 1995. In the wake of the publication of a Penguin Modern Classics edition of Rose’s Love’s Work (2024), along with some of her undergraduate lectures on critical theory from the University of Sussex at the end of the 1970s (Marxist Modernism, Verso, 2024), this thirty-year anniversary event set out to explore the play of promise and perdition – from which Love’s Work itself departed – across the full span of her writings.

The conference solicited a range of generational responses to Rose’s work, from former postgraduate students from the 1980s and early 1990s (Caygill, Tubbs, Gane), via authors of monographs on her work (Brower Latz, Schick) to a new generation of doctoral and postdoctoral researchers (Pafe, Hartnoll, Scott); alongside those for whom it is a distinctive voice with respect to more particular concerns (Cooper, Stimilli). It is interesting to see how the reception of the Kierkegaardian turn of Rose’s The Broken Middle (1992) has not taken recent readers away from the Hegel of Hegel Contra Sociology (1981) but rather back into the enduring philosophical meaning of that interpretation itself.

The conference followed four Gillian Rose Memorial Lectures (2019–2023) hosted by CRMEP with the support of the Tom Vaswani Family Educational Trust. These are available to download as e-pamphlets from CRMEP at www.crmep.co.uk. We are grateful to Tom Vaswani, once again, for his generous support of the production of this volume.