But years before his death, he turned his attention to the consequences and aftermath of another critical revolution—the Communist revolution. The result, Le passé d'une illusion, is a penetrating history of the ideological passions that have fueled and characterized the modern era.

    With style and lucidity, Delsol likens contemporary Western man to the mythical figure Icarus, fallen back to earth after trying to reach the sun, alive but badly shaken and confused. During the twentieth, century, Delsol argues, man flew too closely to the sun of utopian ideology. Having been burned, he is now groping for a way to orient himself. But the ideas he once held so dear--inevitable progress, the possibility of limitless social and self-transformation--are no longer believable, and he has, for the most part, long since rejected the religious tradition that might have provided an anchor. Delsol's portrait is engrossing. She explains how we have come simultaneously to embrace the good but reject the true; how we have sacralized rights and democracy; and how we have lost our sense of the tragic and embraced the idea of zero risk. Already a well-known political thinker in her native France, this is Delsol's first book to appear in English. Icarus Fallen should establish her as one of the most insightful social and cultural writers working on either side of the Atlantic.

    If Nietzsche proclaimed the "Death of God," Onfray starts from the premise that not only is God still very much alive, but increasingly controlled by fundamentalists who pose a danger to the human race. Documenting the ravages from religious intolerance over the centuries, the author makes a strong case against the three religions for demanding faith, belief, obedience and submission, and for extolling the "next life" at the expense of the here and now. Not since Nietzsche has a work so groundbreaking and explosive appeared to question the role of the world's dominant religions.

    Written by one of the world’s most influential sociologists, this classic argues that suicide primarily results from a lack of integration of the individual into society. Suicide provides readers with an understanding of the impetus for suicide and its psychological impact on the victim, family, and society.

    

    As Michael Curtis indicates in his introduction to this edition. Public Opinion qualifies as a classic by virtue of its systematic brilliance and literary grace. The work is divided into eight parts, covering such varied issues as stereotypes, image making, and organized intelligence. The study begins with an analysis of "the world outside and the pictures in our heads, " a leitmotif that starts with issues of censorship and privacy, speed, words, and clarity, and ends with a careful survey of the modern newspaper. The work is a showcase for Lippmann's vast erudition. He easily integrated the historical, psychological, and philosophical literature of his day, and in every instance showed how relevant intellectual formations were to the ordinary operations of everyday life. Public Opinion is of enduring significance for communications scholars, historians, sociologists, and political scientists.

    In his view, the only way of escape from the many forms of slavery--spiritual, economic, political--which shackle & improverish the spirit lies in the fuller realization of personality, as he defines it. Berdyaev turned to religious views & played a large part in the renaissance of religious & philosophical thought in Russian intellectual life early in the 20th century. In 1922 he & a number of other intellectuals were expelled from the USSR. His writings most often deal with the problem of freedom & human relations to the world in light of this problem.In Place of an IntroductionPart 1PersonalityMaster, slave & free manPart 2Being & freedom. The slavery of man to beingGod & freedom. The slavery of man to GodNature & freedom. The cosmic lure & the slavery of man to natureSociety & freedom. The social lure & the slavery of man to societyCivilization & freedom. The slavery of man to civilization & the lure of cultural valuesThe slavery of man to himself & the lure of individualismPart 3The lure of slavery & sovereignty. The 3fold image of the stateThe lure of war. The slavery of man to warThe lure & slavery of nationalism. Nation & peopleThe lure & slavery of aristocracy. The 2fold image of aristocracyThe lure of the bourgeois spirit. Slavery to property & moneyThe lure & slavery of revolution. The 2fold image of revolutionThe lure & slavery of collectivism. Enticement of utopia. The 3fold image of socialismThe erotic lure & slavery. Sex, personality & freedomThe aesthetic lure & slavery. Beauty, art & naturePart 4The spiritual liberation of man. Victory over fear & deathThe lure & slavery of history. The three kinds of time. The 2fold interpretation of the end of history. Active-creative eschatology

    No conversation about the dangers of technology and its unavoidable effects on society can begin without a careful reading of this book."A magnificent book . . . He goes through one human activity after another and shows how it has been technicized, rendered efficient, and diminished in the process."-Harper's"One of the most important books of the second half of the twentieth-century. In it, Jacques Ellul convincingly demonstrates that technology, which we continue to conceptualize as the servant of man, will overthrow everything that prevents the internal logic of its development, including humanity itself-unless we take necessary steps to move human society out of the environment that 'technique' is creating to meet its own needs."-The Nation"A description of the way in which technology has become completely autonomous and is in the process of taking over the traditional values of every society without exception, subverting and suppressing these values to produce at last a monolithic world culture in which all non-technological difference and variety are mere appearance."-Los Angeles Free Press

    But with demonstrations like those against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund being blamed on anarchists, it is clear that an explanation of what they do stand for is long overdue. Colin Ward provides answers to these questions by considering anarchism from a variety of perspectives: theoretical, historical, and international, and by exploring key anarchist thinkers, from Kropotkin to Chomsky. He looks critically at anarchism by evaluating key ideas within it, such as its blanket opposition to incarceration, and policy of "no compromise" with the apparatus of political decision-making. Can anarchy ever function effectively as a political force? Is it more "organized" and "reasonable" than is currently perceived? Whatever the politics of the reader, Ward's argument ensures that anarchism will be much better understood after experiencing this book.

    Written at a time when most of Europe supported the French Revolution, Edmund Burke’s prescient and, at the time, controversial denunciation of its mob rule predicted the Terror, began the modern conservative tradition and still serves as a warning to those who seek to reshape societies through violence.

    This landmark study of Western thought takes a fresh look at the writings of the great thinkers of classic philosophy and questions many pieces of conventional wisdom. The book invites comparison with Bertrand Russell's monumental History of Western Philosophy, "but Gottlieb's book is less idiosyncratic and based on more recent scholarship" (Colin McGinn, Los Angeles Times). A New York Times Notable Book, a Los Angeles Times Best Book, and a Times Literary Supplement Best Book of 2001.

    Habermas takes up the challenge posed by the radical critique of reason in contemporary French poststructuralism. Tracing the odyssey of the philosophical discourse of modernity, Habermas's strategy is to return to those historical crossroads at which Hegel and the Young Hegelians, Nietzsche and Heidegger made the fateful decisions that led to this outcome. His aim is to identify and clearly mark out a road indicated but not taken: the determinate negation of subject-centered reason through the concept of communicative rationality. As The Theory of Communicative Action served to place this concept within the history of social theory, these lectures locate it within the history of philosophy. Habermas examines the odyssey of the philosophical discourse of modernity from Hegel through the present and tests his own ideas about the appropriate form of a postmodern discourse through dialogs with a broad range of past and present critics and theorists. The lectures on Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Cornelius Castoriadis are of particular note since they are the first fruits of the recent cross-fertilization between French and German thought. Habermas's dialogue with Foucault--begun in person as the first of these lectures were delivered in Paris in 1983 culminates here in two appreciative yet intensely argumentative lectures. His discussion of the literary-theoretical reception of Derrida in America--launched at Cornell in 1984--issues here in a long excursus on the genre distinction between philosophy and literature. The lectures were reworked for the final time in seminars at Boston College and first published in Germany in the fall of 1985.

    There is no more proper instrument of analysis of our contemporary myths than this book—one of the most significant works in French theory, and one that has transformed the way readers and philosophers view the world around them.Our age is a triumph of codification. We own devices that bring the world to the command of our fingertips. We have access to boundless information and prodigious quantities of stuff. We decide to like or not, to believe or not, to buy or not. We pick and choose. We think we are free. Yet all around us, in pop culture, politics, mainstream media, and advertising, there are codes and symbols that govern our choices. They are the fabrications of consumer society. They express myths of success, well-being, and happiness. As Barthes sees it, these myths must be carefully deciphered, and debunked.What Barthes discerned in mass media, the fashion of plastic, and the politics of postcolonial France applies with equal force to today's social networks, the iPhone, and the images of 9/11. This new edition of Mythologies, complete and beautifully rendered by the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, critic, and translator Richard Howard, is a consecration of Barthes's classic—a lesson in clairvoyance that is more relevant now than ever.

    From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960s up to the present, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism and everyday life in the late twentieth century. Now finally available in a superb English translation approved by the author, Debord's text remains as crucial as ever for understanding the contemporary effects of power, which are increasingly inseparable from the new virtual worlds of our rapidly changing image/information culture.

    Within each of these stories we can find a simmering spirit of anarcho-nihilism, a tendency that challenges us to translate our feelings of hopelessness into wild and joyous forms of attack.Because even if we don't stand a chance, we refuse to be led to the slaughter like sheep."