Darrrow Schecter began his academic research career with a study of Antonio Gramsci's factory council writings: Gramsci and the Theory of Industrial Democracy (1991). The book was followed by a co-authored work on Gramsci (Gramsci and the Italian State, with Professor Richard Bellamy of UCL, in 1993, translated in Japanese in 2012), which in turn was followed by broader research on diverse currents that one might roughly group together under the rubric of libertarian socialism. In Radical Theories: Paths beyond Marxism and Social Democracy (1994), amongst other aims, he attempts to draw attention to the ongoing relevance of the ideas of G.D.H. Cole. Sovereign States or Political Communities? Civil Society and Contemporary Politics (2000) provides the broad outlines of the main political institutions that could best underpin an economy based on libertarian socialist self-government. The theme of legitimacy is analysed with more stringency and greater detail in Beyond Hegemony: Toward a New Philosophy of Political Legitimacy (2005). Among his most recent works: The History of the Left from Marx to the Present: Theoretical Perspectives (2007, currently being translated into Spanish and Turkish); The Critique of Instrumental Reason from Weber to Habermas (2010, translated into German in 2013); Critical Theory in the Twenty-First Century (2013, currently being translated into German). He's now working on Critical Theory and Sociological Theory: Re-Thinking the Bases of Political Integration in Late Modernity, as an attempt to elaborate the findings of the 2010 and 2013 books, and as part of his work as editor of the Bloomsbury Critical Theory and Contemporary Society series.
