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In The Theory of the Leisure Class, his first and best-known work, Thorstein Veblen challenges some of society's most cherished standards of behavior and, with devastating wit and satire, exposes the hollowness of many of our canons of taste, education, dress, and culture.Veblen uses the leisure class as his example because it is this class that sets the standards followed by every level of society. The sign of membership in the leisure class is exemption from industrial toil and the mark of suc...

Nineteen authors from nine countries analyze reports of travels to the Ottoman Empire between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries. The volume discusses questions of perceptions of "otherness", the circulation of knowledge, intermedial relations, gender roles, and explores possibilities and limits of digital analysis.

What does it mean for Black women to organize in a political context that has generally ignored them or been unresponsive although Black women have shown themselves an important voting bloc? How for example, does #sayhername translate into a political agenda that manifests itself in specific policies? Shadow Bodies focuses on the positionality of the Black woman's body, which serves as a springboard for helping us think through political and cultural representations. It does so by asking: How do...

A brilliant book which studies the psychological conditions which made possible the development of capitalist civilization. The book analyzes the connection between the spread of Calvinism and a new attitude toward the pursuit of wealth in post-Reformation Europe and England, and attitude which permitted, encouraged-even sanctified-the human quest for prosperity.

In his new book, Goran Therborn - author of the now standard comparative work on classical sociology and historical materialism, Science, Class and Society - looks at successive state structures in an arrestingly fresh perspective. Therborn uses the formal categories of modern system analysis - input mechanisms, processes of transformation, output flows - to advance a substantive Marxist analysis of state power and state apparatuses. His account of these is comparative in the most far-reaching h...

Juergen Habermas opens Volume 2 with a brilliant reinterpretation of Mead and Durkheim and then develops his own approach to society, combining two hitherto competing paradigms, "system" and "lifeworld." The strength of this combination is then demonstrated in a detailed critique of Parsons's theory of social systems. Concluding with a critical reconstruction of the Weberan and Marxian treatment of modernity and its discontents, Habermas sets a new agenda for the critical theory of contemporary...

Traditional concepts of social, political, and legal theory are increasingly at odds with current practices of warfare, while more recent poststructuralist theories tend to mimic their form. A conceptual framework for capturing the real-world phenomena is missing. In robotics and artificial intelligence, particularly in weapon systems that are constituted as man-machine ensembles, there are no longer 'agents' to whom 'responsibility' could be ascribed, making fundamental legal concepts inapplic...

Social movements and popular struggle are a central part of today's world, but often neglected or misunderstood by media commentary as well as experts in other fields. In an age when struggles over climate change, women's rights, austerity politics, racism, warfare and surveillance are central to the future of our societies, we urgently need to understand social movements. Accessible, comprehensive and grounded in deep scholarship, Why Social Movements Matter explains social movements for a gene...

This book examines the use of cryptography in both real and fictional crimes-a topic that is rarely broached. It discusses famous crimes, such as that of the Zodiac Killer, that revolve around cryptic messages and current uses of encryption that make solving cases harder and harder. It then draws parallels with the use of cryptography and secret writing in crime fiction, starting with Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, claiming that there is an implicit principle in all such writing-namely,...

Recent years have seen massive feminist mobilizations in virtually every continent, overturning social mores and repressive legislation. In this brilliant and original look at the emerging feminist international, Verónica Gago explores how the women's strike, as both a concept and collective experience, may be transforming the boundaries of politics as we know it. At once a gripping political analysis and a theoretically charged manifesto, Feminist International draws on the author's rich expe...

A profound rumination on the concept of freedom from the bestselling author of The Perfect Storm 'Sebastian Junger bears witness to a hard-won and an uncertain new world, framed in vital and brilliant prose: a true and honest accounting of everything that underlies the frantic performance of life’ Philip Hoare, author of Albert and the Whale Throughout history, humans have been driven by the quest for two cherished ideals: commu...

The ancient moral philosophy of Epicureanism offers many valuable lessons for the modern world. How to Live Well updates and modifies Epicurean philosophy to offer an exciting new framework for contemporary social reform. How To Live Well provides a synopsis of the key facets of Epicureanism and offers a history of Epicureanism across the past twenty centuries. Fitzpatrick identifies the core criticisms of Epicureanism and compares it with Aristotelian thought. In light of these criticisms, he...

Winner of the 1964 Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction Anti-Intellectualism in American Life is a book which throws light on many features of the American character. Its concern is not merely to portray the scorners of intellect in American life, but to say something about what the intellectual is, and can be, as a force in a democratic society. "As Mr. Hofstadter unfolds the fascinating story, it is no crude battle of eggheads and fatheads. It is a rich, complex, shifting picture of the life of the...

This book makes a case for infrapolitics as an enactment of intellectual responsibility in the face of a tumultuous world of war and of technological value extraction on a planetary scale. Infrapolitical Passages proposes to clear a way through some of the dominant political determinations and violent symptoms of contemporary globalization. In doing so, Gareth Williams makes a case for infrapolitics as an enactment of intellectual responsibility in the face of a tumultuous world of war and of...

Each of us develops and enacts strategies for living our everyday lives. These may confirm the general tendency towards new forms of connected solitude, in which we work, travel and live alone, yet feel sociable mainly by means of technology. Alternatively, they may help to create flexible communities that are open and inclusive, and therefore resilient and socially sustainable. In Politics of the Everyday, Ezio Manzini discusses examples of social innovation that show how, even in these diff...