A classic work of Marxist analysis, available unabridged for the first time Originally published in 1965, Reading Capital is a landmark of French thought and radical theory, reconstructing Western Marxism from its foundations. Louis Althusser, the French Marxist philosopher, maintained that Marx's project could only be revived if its scientific and revolutionary novelty was thoroughly divested of all traces of humanism, idealism, Hegelianism and historicism. In order to complete this critical rereading, Althusser and his students at the cole normale sup rieure ran a seminar on Capital, re-exa... View More...
The world-famous work on the origins and development of nationalism The full magnitude of Benedict Anderson's intellectual achievement is still being appreciated and debated. Imagined Communities remains the most influential book on the origins of nationalism, filling the vacuum that previously existed in the traditions of Western thought. Cited more often than any other single English-language work in the human sciences, it is read around the world in more than thirty translations. Written with exemplary clarity, this illuminating study traces the emergence of community as an idea to South Am... View More...
Anderson's essay shows how the European processes of inventing nationalism were transported to the Third World through colonialism and were adapted by subject races in Latin America and Asia. View More...
A classic collection of Walter Benjamin's essays, including some of his most celebrated writing Walter Benjamin is one of the most fascinating and enigmatic intellectual figures of this century. Not only was he a thinker who made an enormous impact with his critical and philosophical writings, he shattered disciplinary and stylistic conventions. This collection, introduced by Susan Sontag, contains the most representative and illuminating selection of his work over a twenty-year period, and thus does full justice to the richness and the multi-dimensional nature of his thought. Included in thes... View More...
Walter Benjamin was fascinated by the impact of new technology on culture, an interest that extended beyond his renowned critical essays. From 1927 to '33, he wrote and presented something in the region of eighty broadcasts using the new medium of radio. Radio Benjamin gathers the surviving transcripts, which appear here for the first time in English. This eclectic collection demonstrates the range of Benjamin's thinking and his enthusiasm for popular sensibilities. His celebrated "Enlightenment for Children" youth programs, his plays, readings, book reviews, and fiction reveal Benjamin in a c... View More...
Responding to the US's perpetual war, Butler explores how mourning could inspire solidarity. In this profound appraisal of post-September 11, 2001 America, Judith Butler considers the conditions of heightened vulnerability and aggression that followed from the attack on the US, and US retaliation. Judith Butler critiques the use of violence that has emerged as a response to loss, and argues that the dislocation of first-world privilege offers instead a chance to imagine a world in which that violence might be minimized and in which interdependency becomes acknowledged as the basis for a global... View More...
"Judith Butler is the most creative and courageous social theorist writing today. - Cornel West "Judith Butler is quite simply one of the most probing, challenging, and influential thinkers of our time." - J. M. Bernstein Judith Butler's new book shows how an ethic of nonviolence must be connected to a broader political struggle for social equality. Further, it argues that nonviolence is often misunderstood as a passive practice that emanates from a calm region of the soul, or as an individualist ethical relation to existing forms of power. But, in fact, nonviolence is an ethical position foun... View More...
The classic, brilliant, best-selling account of the rise of the world's slums, where, according to the United Nations, one billion people now live According to the United Nations, more than one billion people now live in the slums of the cities of the South. In this brilliant and ambitious book, Mike Davis explores the future of a radically unequal and explosively unstable urban world. From the sprawling barricadas of Lima to the garbage hills of Manila, urbanization has been disconnected from industrialization, and even from economic growth. Davis portrays a vast humanity warehoused in shanty... View More...
How two centuries of Indigenous resistance created the movement proclaiming "Water is life"In 2016, a small protest encampment at the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, initially established to block construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline, grew to be the largest Indigenous protest movement in the twenty-first century. Water Protectors knew this battle for native sovereignty had already been fought many times before, and that, even after the encampment was gone, their anticolonial struggle would continue. In Our History Is the Future, Nick Estes traces traditions of Indigenous r... View More...
When capitalism doesn't fight climate change but rather tries to make a buck out of it The Great Adaptation tells the story of how scientists, governments and corporations have tried to deal with the challenge that climate change poses to capitalism by promoting adaptation to the consequences of climate change, rather than combating its causes. From the 1970s neoliberal economists and ideologues have used climate change as an argument for creating more flexibility in society, that is for promoting more market-based solutions to environmental and social questions. The book unveils the political... View More...
A major new work of feminism on the history and persistence of patriarchal hierarchies from the MacArthur Award-winning economist In this groundbreaking new work, Nancy Folbre builds on a critique and reformulation of Marxian political economy, drawing on a larger body of scientific research, including neoclassical economics, sociology, psychology, and evolutionary biology, to answer the defining question of feminist political economy: why is gender inequality so pervasive? In part, because of the contradictory effects of capitalist development: on the one hand, rapid technological change has ... View More...
Exploring the philosophy of disobedience The world is out of joint, so much so that disobeying should be an urgent question for everyone. In this provocative essay, Fr d ric Gros explores the roots of political obedience. Social conformity, economic subjection, respect for authorities, constitutional consensus? Examining the various styles of obedience provides tools to study, invent and induce new forms of civic disobedience and lyrical protest. Nothing can be taken for granted: neither supposed certainties nor social conventions, economic injustice or moral conviction. Thinking philosophical... View More...
Fiscal crises have cascaded across much of the developing world with devastating results, from Mexico to Indonesia, Russia and Argentina. The extreme volatility in contemporary political economic fortunes seems to mock our best efforts to understand the forces that drive development in the world economy. David Harvey is the single most important geographer writing today and a leading social theorist of our age, offering a comprehensive critique of contemporary capitalism. In this fascinating book, he shows the way forward for just such an understanding, enlarging upon the key themes in his rec... View More...
A narrative history of the movement that turned "Orientals" into Asian Americans Until the political ferment of the Long Sixties, there were no Asian Americans. There were only isolated communities of mostly Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos lumped together as "Orientals." Serve the People tells the story of the social and cultural movement that knit these disparate communities into a political identity, the history of how--and why--the double consciousness of Asian America came to be. At the same time, Karen Ishizuka's vivid narrative reveals the personal epiphanies and intimate stories of i... View More...
A longtime movement insider's powerful account of the origins of today's protest movements and what they can achieve now As Americans take to the streets in record numbers to resist the presidency of Donald Trump, L.A. Kauffman's timely, trenchant history of protest offers unique insights into how past movements have won victories in times of crisis and backlash and how they can be most effective today. This deeply researched account, twenty-five years in the making, traces the evolution of disruptive protest since the Sixties to tell a larger story about the reshaping of the American left. ... View More...
In a series of debates with Oliver Cromwell in Civil War England of 1647, the Levellers argued for democracy for the first time in British history. Evolving from Oliver Cromwell's New Model army in Parliament's struggle against King Charles I, the Levellers pushed for the removal of corruption in parliament, universal voting rights and religious toleration. This came to a head with the famous debates between the Levellers and Cromwell at St Mary's church in Putney, London. Renowned human-rights lawyer and author Geoffrey Robertson argues for the relevance of the Levellers' stand today, showing... View More...
A well-argued case for rolling back racism by breaking police power Last summer tens of millions of people poured onto the streets, bringing with them a wholly new idea of public safety, common security, and the delivery of justice, communicating that vision in the fiery vernacular of riot, rebellion, and protest. A World Without Police transcribes these new ideas, written in slogans and chants, over occupied bridges and hastily assembled barricades, into a compelling, must-read manifesto for police abolition. Fact-based and lyrically charged, A World Without Police flips what we think we know... View More...
Feminism as the bulwark against fascism In this exciting, innovative work, Polish feminist philosopher Ewa Majewska proposes a specifically feminist politics of antifascism. Mixing theoretical discussion with engaging reflections on personal experiences, Majewska proposes what she calls "counterpublics of the common" and "weak resistance," offering an alternative to heroic forms of subjectivity produced by neoliberal capitalism and contemporary fascism. View More...
The violence and destruction hiding behind the obsession with immunity Our contemporary political condition is obsessed with immunity. The immunity of bodies and the body politic; personal immunity and herd immunity; how to immunize the social system against breakdown. The obsession intensifies with every new crisis and the mobilization of yet more powers of war and police, from quarantine to border closures and from vaccination certificates to immunological surveillance.Engaging four key concepts with enormous cultural weight - Cell, Self, System and Sovereignty - Politics of Immunity moves f... View More...
