Book picks similar to
The Panopticon Writings by Jeremy Bentham
philosophy
non-fiction
politics
sociology
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
R. Buckminster Fuller - 1969
Fuller expresses what may well be his penultimate view of the human condition. Here, in a mood at once philosophical and involved, Mr. Fuller traces man's intellectual evolution and weighs his capability for survival on this magnificent craft, this Spaceship Earth, this superbly designed sphere of almost negligible dimension in the great vastness of space.Mr. Fuller is optimistic that man will survive and, through research and development and increased industrialization, generate wealth so rapidly that he can do very great things. But, he notes, there must be an enormous educational task successfully accomplished right now to convert man's tendency toward oblivion into a realization of his potential, to a universe-exploring advantage from this Spaceship Earth.It has been noted that Mr. Fuller spins ideas in clusters, and clusters of his ideas generate still other clusters. The concept spaceship earth is Mr. Fuller's, and though used by Barbara Ward as the title of a work of her own the idea was acknowledged by her there as deriving from Mr. Fuller. The brilliant syntheses of some fundamental Fuller principles given here makes of this book a microcosm of the Fuller system.
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
Michel Foucault - 1975
This groundbreaking book by the most influential philosopher since Sartre compels us to reevaluate our assumptions about all the ensuing reforms in the penal institutions of the West. For as he examines innovations that range from the abolition of torture to the institution of forced labor and the appearance of the modern penitentiary, Michel Foucault suggests that punishment has shifted its focus from the prisoner's body to the soul — and that our very concern with rehabilitation encourages and refines criminal activity.Lucidly reasoned and deftly marshaling a vast body of research, Discipline and Punish is a genuinely revolutionary book, whose implications extend beyond the prison to the minute power relations of our society.
On Revolution
Hannah Arendt - 1956
She looks at the principles which underlie all revolutions, starting with the first great examples in America and France, and showing how both the theory and practice of revolution have since developed. Finally, she foresees the changing relationship between war and revolution and the crucial changes in international relations, with revolution becoming the key tactic.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History
Thomas Carlyle - 1841
Utopia
Thomas More
The book is a frame narrative primarily depicting a fictional island society as described by the character Raphael Hythloday who lived there some years, who describes and its religious, social and political customs.
Rights of Man
Thomas Paine - 1791
One of Paine's greatest and most widely read works, considered a classic statement of faith in democracy and egalitarianism, defends the early events of the French Revolution, supports social security for workers, public employment for those in need of work, abolition of laws limiting wages, and other social reforms.
Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty
Carl Schmitt - 1922
Focusing on the relationships among political leadership, the norms of the legal order, and the state of political emergency, Schmitt argues in Political Theology that legal order ultimately rests upon the decisions of the sovereign. According to Schmitt, only the sovereign can meet the needs of an "exceptional" time and transcend legal order so that order can then be reestablished. Convinced that the state is governed by the ever-present possibility of conflict, Schmitt theorizes that the state exists only to maintain its integrity in order to ensure order and stability. Suggesting that all concepts of modern political thought are secularized theological concepts, Schmitt concludes Political Theology with a critique of liberalism and its attempt to depoliticize political thought by avoiding fundamental political decisions.
The Essays
Francis Bacon
A scholar, wit, lawyer and statesman, he wrote widely on politics, philosophy and science - declaring early in his career that 'I have taken all knowledge as my province'. In this, his most famous work, he considers a diverse range of subjects, such as death and marriage, ambition and atheism, in prose that is vibrant and rich in Renaissance learning. Bacon believed that rhetoric - the force of eloquence and persuasion - could lead the mind to the pure light of reason, and his own rhetorical genius is nowhere better expressed than in these vivid essays.
Crowds and Power
Elias Canetti - 1960
Breathtaking in its range and erudition, it explores Shiite festivals and the English Civil war, the finger exercises of monkeys and the effects of inflation in Weimar Germany. In this study of the interplay of crowds, Canetti offers one of the most profound and startling portraits of the human condition.
History of Political Philosophy
Leo Strauss - 1963
Written by specialists on the various philosophers, this third edition has been expanded significantly to include both new and revised essays.
Culture and Anarchy
Matthew Arnold - 1869
Arnold seeks to find out what culture really is, what good it can do, and if it is really necessary. He contrasts culture, which he calls the study of perfection, with anarchy, the mood of unrest and uncertainty that pervaded mid-Victorian England. This edition reproduces the original book version, revealing the immediate historical context and controversy of the piece. The introduction and notes broaden out the interpretative approach to Arnold's text, elaborating on the complexities of the religious context. The book also reinforces the continued importance of Arnold's ideas its influences in the face of the challenges of multi-culturalism and post-modernism.
The Force of Nonviolence: The Ethical in the Political
Judith Butler - 2020
M. BernsteinJudith 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 found in the midst of the political field. An aggressive form of nonviolence accepts that hostility is part of our psychic constitution, but values ambivalence as a way of checking the conversion of aggression into violence. One contemporary challenge to a politics of nonviolence points out that there is a difference of opinion on what counts as violence and nonviolence. The distinction between them can be mobilized in the service of ratifying the state’s monopoly on violence. Considering nonviolence as an ethical problem within a political philosophy requires a critique of individualism as well as an understanding of the psychosocial dimensions of violence. Butler draws upon Foucault, Fanon, Freud, and Benjamin to consider how the interdiction against violence fails to include lives regarded as ungrievable. By considering how “racial phantasms” inform justifications of state and administrative violence, Butler tracks how violence is often attributed to those who are most severely exposed to its lethal effects. The struggle for nonviolence is found in movements for social transformation that reframe the grievability of lives in light of social equality and whose ethical claims follow from an insight into the interdependency of life as the basis of social and political equality.
Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate
Jean-Paul Sartre - 1944
Nothing of the anti-Semite either in his subtle form as a snob, or in his crude form as a gangster, escapes Sartre's sharp eye, and the whole problem of the Jew's relationship to the Gentile is examined in a concrete and living way, rather than in terms of sociological abstractions.
The Road to Wigan Pier
George Orwell - 1937
His graphically unforgettable descriptions of social injustice, slum housing, mining conditions, squalor, hunger and growing unemployment are written with unblinking honesty, fury and great humanity.