First published before the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, this is an infuriating, inspiring, and altogether pioneering work of cultural criticism that investigates money, marketing, and the anti-corporate movement.As global corporations compete for the hearts and wallets of consumers who not only buy their products but willingly advertise them from head to toe—witness today's schoolbooks, superstores, sporting arenas, and brand-name synergy—a new generation has begun to battle consumerism with its own best weapons. In this provocative, well-written study, a front-line report on that battle, we learn how the Nike swoosh has changed from an athletic status-symbol to a metaphor for sweatshop labor, how teenaged McDonald's workers are risking their jobs to join the Teamsters, and how "culture jammers" utilize spray paint, computer-hacking acumen, and anti-propagandist wordplay to undercut the slogans and meanings of billboard ads (as in "Joe Chemo" for "Joe Camel").No Logo will challenge and enlighten students of sociology, economics, popular culture, international affairs, and marketing."This book is not another account of the power of the select group of corporate Goliaths that have gathered to form our de facto global government. Rather, it is an attempt to analyze and document the forces opposing corporate rule, and to lay out the particular set of cultural and economic conditions that made the emergence of that opposition inevitable." —Naomi Klein, from her Introduction

    Challenging the reductionist division of people by race, religion, and class, Sen presents an inspiring vision of a world that can be made to move toward peace as firmly as it has spiraled in recent years toward brutality and war.

    Alexis de Tocqueville, a young French aristocrat, came to the young nation to investigate the functioning of American democracy & the social, political & economic life of its citizens, publishing his observations in 1835 & 1840. Brilliantly written, vividly illustrated with vignettes & portraits, Democracy in America is far more than a trenchant analysis of one society at a particular point in time. What will most intrigue modern readers is how many of the observations still hold true: on the mixed advantages of a free press, the strained relations among the races & the threats posed to democracies by consumerism & corruption. So uncanny is Tocqueville’s insight & so accurate are his predictions, that it seems as tho he were not merely describing the American identity but actually helping to create it.

    The case study at the center of Direct Action is the organizing and events that led to the one of the most dramatic and militant mass protests in recent years—against the Summit of the Americas in Québec City. Written in a clear, accessible style (with a minimum of academic jargon), this study brings readers behind the scenes of a movement that has changed the terms of debate about world power relations. From informal conversations in coffee shops to large “spokescouncil” planning meetings and tear gas-drenched street actions, Graeber paints a vivid and fascinating picture.Along the way, he addresses matters of deep interest to anthropologists: meeting structure and process, language, symbolism and representation, the specific rituals of activist culture, and much more. Starting from the assumption that, when dealing with possibilities of global transformation and emerging political forms, a disinterested, “objective” perspective is impossible, Graeber writes as both scholar and activist. At the same time, his experiment in the application of ethnographic methods to important ongoing political events is a serious and unique contribution to the field of anthropology, as well as an inquiry into anthropology’s political implications.David Graeber is an anthropologist and activist who teaches at the University of London. Active in numerous direct-action political organizations, he has written for Harper’s Magazine and is the author of Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value, and Possibilities.In Oakland, California on March 24, 2015 a fire destroyed the AK Press warehouse along with several other businesses. Please consider visiting the AK Press website to learn more about the fundraiser to help them and their neighbors.

    Published posthumously in Germany in the early 1920's, it has become a constitutive part of the modern sociological imagination. Economy and Society was the first strictly empirical comparison of social structures and normative orders in world-historical depth, containing the famous chapters on social action, religion, law, bureaucracy, charisma, the city, and the political community with its dimensions of class, status and power.Economy and Status is Weber's only major treatise for an educated general public. It was meant to be a broad introduction, but in its own way it is the most demanding textbook yet written by a sociologist. The precision of its definitions, the complexity of its typologies and the wealth of its historical content make the work a continuos challenge at several levels of comprehension: for the advanced undergraduate who gropes for his sense of society, for the graduate student who must develop his own analytical skills, and for the scholar who must match wits with Weber.When the long-awaited first complete English edition of Economy and Society was published in 1968, Arthur Stinchcombe wrote in the American Journal of Sociology: "My answer to the question of whether people should still start their sociological intellectual biographies with Economy and Society is yes." Reinhard Bendix noted in the American Sociological Review that the "publication of a compete English edition of Weber's most systematic work [represents] the culmination of a cultural transmission to the American setting...It will be a study-guide and compendium for years to come for all those interested in historical sociology and comparative study."In a lengthy introduction, Guenther Roth traces the intellectual prehistory of Economy and Society, the gradual emergence of its dominant themes and the nature of its internal logic.Mr. Roth is a Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. Mr. Wittich heads an economic research group at the United Nations.

    This reissue of a classic will reintroduce readers to Lévi-Strauss’s understanding of man and society in terms of individuals—kinship, social organization, religion, mythology, and art.

    Laslett's standard edition of Two Treatises. First published in 1960, and based on an analysis of the whole body of Locke's publications, writings, and papers. The Introduction and text have been revised to incorporate references to recent scholarship since the second edition and the bibliography has been updated.

    This book shows how the collective purposes and meanings that had framed social debate became unhinged and uncertain. It offers a reinterpretation of the ways in which the decades surrounding the 1980s changed America.

    Mill's passionate advocacy of spontaneity, individuality, and diversity, along with his contempt for compulsory uniformity and the despotism of popular opinion, has attracted both admiration and condemnation.

    Whether we are trying to run a business, practice a vocation, raise our families, cooperate with our neighbors, or follow our religious beliefs, we run afoul of the government—not because we are doing anything wrong but because the government has decided it knows better. When we object, that government can and does tell us, “Try to fight this, and we’ll ruin you.”In this provocative book, acclaimed social scientist and bestselling author Charles Murray shows us why we can no longer hope to roll back the power of the federal government through the normal political process. The Constitution is broken in ways that cannot be fixed even by a sympathetic Supreme Court. Our legal system is increasingly lawless, unmoored from traditional ideas of “the rule of law.” The legislative process has become systemically corrupt no matter which party is in control.But there’s good news beyond the Beltway. Technology is siphoning power from sclerotic government agencies and putting it in the hands of individuals and communities. The rediversification of American culture is making local freedom attractive to liberals as well as conservatives. People across the political spectrum are increasingly alienated from a regulatory state that nakedly serves its own interests rather than those of ordinary Americans.The even better news is that federal government has a fatal weakness: It can get away with its thousands of laws and regulations only if the overwhelming majority of Americans voluntarily comply with them. Murray describes how civil disobedience backstopped by legal defense funds can make large portions of the 180,000-page Federal Code of Regulations unenforceable, through a targeted program that identifies regulations that arbitrarily and capriciously tell us what to do. Americans have it within their power to make the federal government an insurable hazard like hurricanes and floods, leaving us once again free to live our lives as we see fit.By the People’s hopeful message is that rebuilding our traditional freedoms does not require electing a right-thinking Congress or president, nor does it require five right-thinking justices on the Supreme Court. It can be done by we the people, using America’s unique civil society to put government back in its proper box.

    Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Caxton PressClassic treatise on the importance of maintaining the rights of the individual in the face of expanding state control manipulated by organized pressure groups.

    In this elegant, witty, and ultimately profound meditation on what is beautiful, Crispin Sartwell begins with six words from six different cultures - ancient Greek's "to kalon," the Japanese idea of "wabi-sabi," Hebrew's "yapha," the Navajo concept "hozho," Sanskrit "sundara," and our own English-language "beauty." Each word becomes a door onto another way of thinking about, and looking at, what is beautiful in the world, and in our lives. The earthy and the exalted, the imperfect and the ideal: things, spaces, high art, sounds, aromas, nothingness. Sartwell writes about handfuls of beautiful things - among them, a Japanese teapot and Diana Rigg as Mrs. Emma Peel, the pleasure in a well-used hammer and in pop music and in Vermeer's "Girl in a Red Hat."In Sartwell's hands these six names of beauty -and there could be thousands more-are revealed as simple and profound ideas about our world and our selves.

    This substantially revised 3rd edition of this text on political ideologies takes full account of the impact of the post Cold War world order, the challenge of postmodernism, the advance of globalization and the advent of global terrorism, and includes additional coverage of the prospects for ideologies in the 21st century.

    As arguments raged in mid-Victorian Britain about giving the working man the vote, and democracies overseas were pitched into despotism and civil war, Bagehot took a long, cool look at the "dignified" and "efficient" elements which made the English system the envy of the world. His analysis of the monarchy, the role of the prime minister and cabinet, and comparisons with the American presidential system are astute and timeless, pertinent to current discussions surrounding devolution and electoral reform. Combining the wit and panache of a journalist with the wisdom of a man of letters steeped in evolutionary ideas and historical knowledge, Bagehot produced a book which is always thoughtful, often funny, and surprisingly entertaining.This edition reproduces Bagehot's original 1867 work in full, and introduces the reader to the dramatic political events that surrounded its publication.

    Two years later, his predictions were borne out by the rise to power of a series of political outsiders whose economic nationalism and authoritarian tendencies threatened to destabilize the entire international order. These populist nationalists seek direct charismatic connection to "the people," who are usually defined in narrow identity terms that offer an irresistible call to an in-group and exclude large parts of the population as a whole.Demand for recognition of one's identity is a master concept that unifies much of what is going on in world politics today. The universal recognition on which liberal democracy is based has been increasingly challenged by narrower forms of recognition based on nation, religion, sect, race, ethnicity, or gender, which have resulted in anti-immigrant populism, the upsurge of politicized Islam, the fractious "identity liberalism" of college campuses, and the emergence of white nationalism. Populist nationalism, said to be rooted in economic motivation, actually springs from the demand for recognition and therefore cannot simply be satisfied by economic means. The demand for identity cannot be transcended; we must begin to shape identity in a way that supports rather than undermines democracy.Identity is an urgent and necessary book--a sharp warning that unless we forge a universal understanding of human dignity, we will doom ourselves to continuing conflict.