In contrast to the American situation, spaces in which questions of Marxism could once again be discussed were opening in the vicinity of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. Buck-Morss convincingly sketches this learning process that ended in antagonism when Horkheimer and Adorno proved unwilling to participate in the political practice of the extra-parliamentary opposition. Leftist students turned away from Critical Theory, treating it like the proverbial dead dog after 1970, thereby allowing it to be taken up by young conservatives who concerned themselves only with the aesthetic character of Adorno’s and Benjamin’s writings.

    The methodology of the late Paulo Freire has helped to empower countless impoverished and illiterate people throughout the world. Freire's work has taken on especial urgency in the United States and Western Europe, where the creation of a permanent underclass among the underprivileged and minorities in cities and urban centers is increasingly accepted as the norm. With a substantive new introduction on Freire's life and the remarkable impact of this book by writer and Freire confidant and authority Donaldo Macedo, this anniversary edition of Pedagogy of the Oppressed will inspire a new generation of educators, students, and general readers for years to come.

    Aside from his more directly theoretical texts, however, case-studies of theatrical naturalism, the Bloomsbury group, advertising, science fiction, and the Welsh novel are also included as illustrations of the method at work. Finally, Williams’s identity as an active socialist, rather than simply an academic, is captured by two unambiguously political pieces on the past, present and future of Marxism.

    Sociologist Karen E. Fields and historian Barbara J. Fields argue otherwise: the practice of racism produces the illusion of race, through what they call “racecraft.” And this phenomenon is intimately entwined with other forms of inequality in American life. So pervasive are the devices of racecraft in American history, economic doctrine, politics, and everyday thinking that the presence of racecraft itself goes unnoticed.That the promised post-racial age has not dawned, the authors argue, reflects the failure of Americans to develop a legitimate language for thinking about and discussing inequality. That failure should worry everyone who cares about democratic institutions.

    She discusses the foreigner in Greek tragedy, in the Bible, and in the literature of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Enlightenment, and the twentieth century. She discusses the legal status of foreigners throughout history, gaining perspective on our own civilization. Her insights into the problems of nationality, particularly in France, are more timely and relevant in an increasingly integrated and fractious world.

    Provocative and eye-opening, Why Our Decisions Don’t Matter is one of three slim selections of philosophical texts and excerpts—along with Why We Need Love and Why We Fight—introduced and contextualized by acclaimed author Simon Van Booy (Love Begins in Winter, The Secret Lives of People in Love).

    Written expressly for "anyone who believes there are big questions out there, but does not know how to approach them," Think provides a sound framework for exploring the most basic themes of philosophy, and for understanding how major philosophers have tackled the questions that have pressed themselves most forcefully on human consciousness.

    and the better, more just society that could accompany itImagine: Living in a Socialist U.S.A. is an anthology of original essays that looks at what the United States could be if the capitalism collapsed and socialism was instated.The book paints a portrait of the many facets of life in a socialist society through a series of ruminations by prominent thinkers, activists, and artists, including Academy Award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore's proposal for how to effectively continue the Occupy Wall Street movement; incarcerated journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal's look at alternative systems to capitalist injustice; Hugo Award-winning author Terry Bisson's short story imagining Thanksgiving in 2077 where the dinner table conversation revolves around everything from the rising seas in Florida and the dismantling of the Alaskan pipeline to the children's ability to work off their student loans through civil service; New York Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez's argument that immigrant workers have already proven that socialism provides a better life; and attorney Michael Ratner, who is representing Julian Assange and WikiLeaks in the United States, explaining the steps he would take as attorney general, which include refusing to enforce criminal prosecution of undocumented immigrants and Internet activists like Assange, as well as ending all FBI surveillance measures.Other essays touch on the topics of gender equality in the workplace, an end to the war on drugs, how the arts and education would thrive in a socialist system, and, above all, make a case for how and why a socialist U.S.A could lead to a better world.

    Gulled by a ‘realism’ that reassures them that political struggle is for anachronistic losers, their allegiances began to slide inexorably toward the ‘revolutionary’ forces of the market’s invisible hand, and they join the celebrants of a new order governed by boredom, impotence and envy…. As might be expected of Châtelet—mathematician, philosopher, militant gay activist, political polemicist, praised by contemporaries such as Deleuze and Badiou for his singularly penetrating philosophical mind—this is no mere lament for a bygone age. To Live and Think Like Pigs is the story of how the perverted legacy of liberalism, allied with statistical control and media communication, sought to knead Marx’s ‘free peasant’ into a statistical ‘average man’—pliant raw material for the cybernetic sausage-machine of postmodernity.Combining the incandescent wrath of the betrayed comrade with the acute discrimination of the mathematician-physicist, Châtelet proceeds to scrutinize the pseudoscientific alibis employed to naturalize ‘market democracy’. As he acerbically recounts, ‘chaos’, ‘emergence’, and the discourses of cybernetics and networks merely impart a futuristic sheen to Hobbesian ‘political arithmetic’ and nineteenth-century ‘social physics’—a tradition that places the individual at the center of its apolitical fairy-tales while stringently ignoring the inherently political process of individuation.When first published in 1998, Châtelet’s book was a fierce revolt against the ‘winter years’ and a mordant theory-science-fiction of the future portended by the reign of Reagan-Thatcher-Mitterand. Today its diagnoses seem extraordinarily prescient: the ‘triple alliance’ between politics, economics and cybernetics; the contrast between the self-satisfied ‘nomadism’ of a global overclass and the cultivated herds of ‘neurolivestock’ whose brains labour dumbly in cybernetic pastures; the arrogance of the ‘knights of finance’; and the limitless complacency and petty envy of middle-class dupes haplessly in thrall to household gods and openly hostile to the pursuit of a freedom that might require patience or labour. Mercantile empiricists and acrobat-intellectuals, fluid nomads and viscous losers, Robinsons on wheels, Turbo-Bécassines and Cyber-Gideons…Châtelet deploys a cast of grotesque ‘philosophical personae’ across a series of expertly-staged set-pieces: from Hobbes’s Leviathan to Wiener’s cybernetics; from the ecstasies of Parisian nightlife to the equilibrial dystopia of Singapore’s ‘yoghurt-maker’; from the mercantile empiricist for whom the state is a glorified watermelon-seller to the coy urbanite with a broken hairdryer; from the ‘petronomadic’ stasis of the traffic jam to the financier chasing the horizon of absolute volatility; from the demonization of cannabis to the fatuous celebration of ‘difference’.To Live and Think Like Pigs is both an uproarious portrait of the evils of the new world order, and a technical manual for its innermost ideological workings. Châtelet’s diagnosis of the ‘neoliberal counter-reformation’ is a significant moment in French political philosophy worthy to stand alongside Deleuze’s ‘Control Society’ and Foucault’s ‘liberal governmentality’. His book is crucial reading for any future politics that wants to replace individualism with an understanding of individuation, libertarianism with liberation, liquidity with plasticity, and the statistical average with the singular exception. Its appearance in translation is an important new contribution to contemporary debate on neoliberalism, economics and capitalist subjectivation.

    Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern. We have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, as Harry Frankfurt writes, "we have no theory."Frankfurt, one of the world's most influential moral philosophers, attempts to build such a theory here. With his characteristic combination of philosophical acuity, psychological insight, and wry humor, Frankfurt proceeds by exploring how bullshit and the related concept of humbug are distinct from lying. He argues that bullshitters misrepresent themselves to their audience not as liars do, that is, by deliberately making false claims about what is true. In fact, bullshit need not be untrue at all.Rather, bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant. Frankfurt concludes that although bullshit can take many innocent forms, excessive indulgence in it can eventually undermine the practitioner's capacity to tell the truth in a way that lying does not. Liars at least acknowledge that it matters what is true. By virtue of this, Frankfurt writes, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

    Does it remain key to our autonomy, justice, and well-being, or is freedom’s long star turn coming to a close? Does a continued obsession with the term enliven and emancipate, or reflect a deepening nihilism (or both)? On Freedom examines such questions by tracing the concept’s complexities in four distinct realms: art, sex, drugs, and climate.Drawing on a vast range of material, from critical theory to pop culture to the intimacies and plain exchanges of daily life, Maggie Nelson explores how we might think, experience, or talk about freedom in ways responsive to the conditions of our day. Her abiding interest lies in ongoing “practices of freedom” by which we negotiate our interrelation with—indeed, our inseparability from—others, with all the care and constraint that entails, while accepting difference and conflict as integral to our communion.For Nelson, thinking publicly through the knots in our culture—from recent art-world debates to the turbulent legacies of sexual liberation, from the painful paradoxes of addiction to the lure of despair in the face of the climate crisis—is itself a practice of freedom, a means of forging fortitude, courage, and company. On Freedom is an invigorating, essential book for challenging times.

    Exploring the complicated relationship the two philosophical schools of thought have with one another, Sartre supposes that the two are in fact compatible and complimentary towards one another, with poignant analysis and reasoning.An important work of modern philosophy, Search for a Method has a major influence on the current perceptions of existentialism and Marxism."This is the most important philosophical work by Sartre to be translated since Being and Nothingness."--James Collings, America

    Cohen's masterful application of advanced philosophical techniques in an uncompromising defense of historical materialism commanded widespread admiration. In the ensuing twenty years, the book has served as a flagship of a powerful intellectual movement--analytical Marxism. In this expanded edition, Cohen offers his own account of the history, and the further promise, of analytical Marxism. He also expresses reservations about traditional historical materialism, in the light of which he reconstructs the theory, and he studies the implications for historical materialism of the demise of the Soviet Union.

    The stock market is certainly rational; one can understand it, study it, capitalists know how to use it, and yet it is completely delirious, it is mad. That's why we say: the rational always is the rationality of an irrational. Marx is fascinated by capitalist mechanisms precisely because the system is demented, yet works very well at the same time. Down below, there are investments of desire that cannot be confused with the investments of interest: all kinds of libidinous-unconscious flows that make up the delirium of this society. The true history is the history of desire."This collection of essays and interviews edited by Sylvere Lotringer and published in 1995, focuses on the French anti-psychiatrist and theorist's work as director of the experimental La Borde clinic ("A Clinic Unlike Any Other") and longtime collaborator with the philosopher Gilles Deleuze."Chaosophy" is a groundbreaking introduction to Guattari's theories on "schizo-analysis" a process meant to replace Freudian interpretation with a more pragmatic, experimental, and collective approach rooted in reality. Unlike Freud, Guattari believes that schizophrenia is an extreme mental state induced by the capitalist system itself, which keeps enforcing neurosis as a way of maintaining normality. Guattari's post-Marxist vision of capitalism provides a new definition not only of mental illness, but also of the micropolitical means of its subversion.This collection contains key essays, such as, "Balance-Sheet Program for Desiring-Machines" and "Capitalism and Schizophrenia," co-signed by Deleuze (with whom he co-authored "Anti-Oedipus" and "A Thousand Plateaus"), and the perennially provocative "Everybody Wants To Be a Fascist.

    The Dialectical Imagination is a major history of this monumental cultural and intellectual enterprise during its early years in Germany and in the United States. Martin Jay has provided a substantial new preface for this edition, in which he reflects on the continuing relevance of the work of the Frankfurt School.