We have long since lost our faith in the idea that human beings could achieve human happiness in some future ideal state-a state that Thomas More, writing five centuries ago, tied to a topos, a fixed place, a land, an island, a sovereign state under a wise and benevolent ruler. But while we have lost our faith in utopias of all hues, the human aspiration that made this vision so compelling has not died. Instead it is re-emerging today as a vision focused not on the future but on the past, not on a future-to-be-created but on an abandoned and undead past that we could call retrotopia.
The emergence of retrotopia is interwoven with the deepening gulf between power and politics that is a defining feature of our contemporary liquid-modern world-the gulf between the ability to get things done and the capability of deciding what things need to be done, a capability once vested with the territorially sovereign state. This deepening gulf has rendered nation-states unable to deliver on their promises, giving rise to a widespread disenchantment with the idea that the future will improve the human condition and a mistrust in the ability of nation-states to make this happen. True to the utopian spirit, retrotopia derives its stimulus from the urge to rectify the failings of the present human condition-though now by resurrecting the failed and forgotten potentials of the past. Imagined aspects of the past, genuine or putative, serve as the main landmarks today in drawing the road-map to a better world. Having lost all faith in the idea of building an alternative society of the future, many turn instead to the grand ideas of the past, buried but not yet dead. Such is retrotopia, the contours of which are examined by Zygmunt Bauman in this sharp dissection of our contemporary romance with the past.
We are all fascinated by the mystery of metamorphosis - of the caterpillar that transforms itself into a butterfly. Their bodies have almost nothing in common. They don't share the same world: one crawls on the ground and the other flutters its wings in the air. And yet they are one and the same life. Emanuele Coccia argues that metamorphosis - the phenomenon that allows the same life to subsist in disparate bodies - is the relationship that binds all species together and unites the living with the non-living. Bacteria, viruses, fungi, plants, animals: they are all one and the same life. Each species, including the human species, is the metamorphosis of all those that preceded it - the same life, cobbling together a new body and a new form in order to exist differently. And there is no opposition between the living and the non-living: life is always the reincarnation of the non-living, a carnival of the telluric substance of a planet - the Earth - that continually draws new faces and new ways of being out of even the smallest particle of its disparate body. By highlighting what joins humans together with other forms of life, Coccia's brilliant reflection on metamorphosis encourages us to abandon our view of the human species as static and independent and to recognize instead that we are part of a much larger and interconnected form of life.
The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States sent shockwaves across the globe. How was such an outcome even possible? In two lectures given at American universities in the immediate aftermath of the election, the leading French philosopher Alain Badiou helps us to make sense of this extraordinary occurrence. He argues that Trump's victory was the symptom of a global crisis made up of four characteristics: the triumph of a brutal form of global capitalism, the decomposition of the established political elite, the growing frustration and disorientation that many people feel today, and the absence of a compelling alternative vision. It was in this context that Trump could emerge as a new kind of political figure that was both inside and outside the political order, a member of the Republican Party who, at the same time, represents something outside the system. The progressive political challenge now is to create something new that offers people a real choice, a radical alternative based on principles of universality and equality. This concise account of the meaning of Trump should be read by everyone who wants to understand what is happening in our world today.
The death of God in the West was the prelude to a metaphysical soap opera that continues to this day. Christianity's masterstroke was to combine a fierce belief in the individual with the promise of eternal participation in the Absolute. When that dream evaporated, various attempts were made to offer the individual a minimum of being. The latest of these attempts is advertising, which seeks to arouse desire and transform the subject into a docile phantom, doomed to follow advertising's every whim. But, like all previous attempts, this superficial participation in the world fails, and unhappiness and depression continue to spread. We can all produce a cold revolution in ourselves, however, by stepping outside the flow of information and advertising. We need to take some time out, unplug the television, turn off our smartphones, stop buying stuff and adopt an aesthetic attitude to the world. We just need to stay still for a few seconds. This is one of the key themes developed by Michel Houellebecq in this collection of his texts and interviews from the last three decades. Here he explains and elaborates his point of view, discusses his novels and addresses a wide range of topics from politics, religion and literature to suicide, euthanasia and paedophilia. An indispensable book for anyone interested in the work of one of the most widely read and controversial novelists of our time.
We are living in an open sea, caught up in a continuous wave, with no fixed point and no instrument to measure distance and the direction of travel. Nothing appears to be in its place any more, and a great deal appears to have no place at all. The principles that have given substance to the democratic ethos, the system of rules that has guided the relationships of authority and the ways in which they are legitimized, the shared values and their hierarchy, our behaviour and our life styles, must be radically revised because they no longer seem suited to our experience and understanding of a world in flux, a world that has become both increasingly interconnected and prone to severe and persistent crises.
We are living in the interregnum between what is no longer and what is not yet. None of the political movements that helped undermine the old world are ready to inherit it, and there is no new ideology, no consistent vision, promising to give shape to new institutions for the new world. It is like the Babylon referred to by Borges, the country of randomness and uncertainty in which `no decision is final; all branch into others'. Out of the world that had promised us modernity, what Jean Paul Sartre had summarized with sublime formula `le choix que je suis' (`the choice that I am'), we inhabit that flattened, mobile and dematerialized space, where as never before the principle of the heterogenesis of purposes is sovereign.
This is Babel.
From ancient philosophy to contemporary theories of fiction, it is a common practice to relegate illusory appearances to the realm of the non-existent, like shadows on the wall of Plato's cave. Contrary to this traditional mode of drawing a metaphysical distinction between reality and fiction, Markus Gabriel argues that the realm of the illusory, fictional, imaginary and conceptually indeterminate is as real as it gets. Being in touch with reality need not and cannot require that we overcome appearances in order to grasp a meaningless reality which exists `out there', outside and maybe even beyond our minds. Human mindedness (Geist) exists in the mode of fictions through which we achieve self-consciousness. This novel approach provides a fresh perspective on our existence as subjects who lead their lives in the light of self-conceptions. Fictions also develops a social ontology according to which the social unfolds as a constant renegotiation of dissent, of different points of view onto the same reality. Thus we cannot ever hope to ground human society in a fiction-free realm of objective transactions. However, this does not mean that truth and reality are somehow outdated concepts. On the contrary, we need to enlarge our conception of reality so that it fully encompasses ourselves as specifically minded social animals. This major new work of philosophy will be of interest to students and scholars throughout the humanities and to anyone interested in contemporary philosophy and social thought.
China's military has entered a new era. It has acquired modern weapons to rival the world's finest, undergone a massive restructuring under Xi Jinping, and been on the frontlines of territorial disputes with Japan, India, Vietnam, and the Philippines. It is readying forces to be able to seize Taiwan sometime in the next decade. It aims to be a "world-class" military on par with the United States. China's Quest for Military Supremacy provides a broad and accessible exploration of Chinese military power, including relations between the Chinese Communist Party and its army, the strategic worldview of Chinese leaders, military strategy and resourcing, conventional and nuclear modernization, military diplomacy and coercion, preparations for war, and the People's Liberation Army's emerging global role. It also identifies the challenges facing China's military and shows how its focus on supremacy in the region means that it is not yet prepared to fight with the same lethality beyond Asia. Different futures are possible, and the book concludes with a preview of what it might take for a truly "world-class" Chinese military to take the global stage.
Annemarie Schwarzenbach was one of the twentieth century's most remarkable women, possibly the greatest sexual and political radical of the 1930s. But until now she's been largely ignored.
Born to a wealthy family in Switzerland, as a teenager she rebelled against her domineering pro-Nazi mother. She immersed herself in the antifascist, queer and artistic circles of the German diaspora of the 1930s. Her edgy glamour and androgynous beauty turned heads in the lesbian nightclubs of Weimar Berlin, on the ski slopes of St. Moritz, and in New York's luxury hotels and jazz bars.
Constantly on the move, Annemarie chronicled the low and dishonest decade leading to war through her unique journalism, writing and photography. Her work was as adventurous and uncompromising as her personal life, and reveals a deep courage, intelligence, and ambition tragically curtailed by her untimely death.
In this compelling dialogue, two of the world's most influential thinkers reflect on the value of equality and debate what citizens and governments should do to narrow the gaps that separate us. Ranging across economics, philosophy, history, and current affairs, Thomas Piketty and Michael Sandel consider how far we have come in achieving greater equality. At the same time, they confront head-on the extreme divides that remain in wealth, income, power, and status nationally and globally.
What can be done at a time of deep political instability and environmental crisis? Piketty and Sandel agree on much: more inclusive investment in health and education, higher progressive taxation, curbing the political power of the rich and the overreach of markets. But how far and how fast can we push? Should we prioritize material or social change? What are the prospects for any change at all with nationalist forces resurgent? How should the left relate to values like patriotism and local solidarity where they collide with the challenges of mass migration and global climate change?
To see Piketty and Sandel grapple with these and other problems is to glimpse new possibilities for change and justice but also the stubborn truth that progress towards greater equality never comes quickly or without deep social conflict and political struggle.
'Even the biographical individual is a social category', wrote Adorno. `It can only be defined in a living context together with others.' In this major new biography, Stefan Müller-Doohm turns this maxim back on Adorno himself and provides a rich and comprehensive account of the life and work of one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century. This authoritative biography ranges across the whole of Adorno's life and career, from his childhood and student years to his years in emigration in the United States and his return to postwar Germany. At the same time, Muller-Doohm examines the full range of Adorno's writings on philosophy, sociology, literary theory, music theory and cultural criticism. Drawing on an array of sources from Adorno's personal correspondence with Horkheimer, Benjamin, Berg, Marcuse, Kracauer and Mann to interviews, notes and both published and unpublished writings, Muller-Doohm situates Adorno's contributions in the context of his times and provides a rich and balanced appraisal of his significance in the 20th Century as a whole. Müller-Doohm's clear prose succeeds in making accessible some of the most complex areas of Adorno's thought. This outstanding biography will be the standard work on Adorno for years to come.
June 1940: France surrenders to Germany. The Gestapo is searching for Heinrich Mann and Franz Werfel, Hannah Arendt, Lion Feuchtwanger and many other writers and artists who had sought asylum in France since 1933. The young American journalist Varian Fry arrives in Marseille with the aim of rescuing as many as possible. This is the harrowing story of their flight from the Nazis under the most dangerous and threatening circumstances.
It is the most dramatic year in German literary history. In Nice, Heinrich Mann listens to the news on Radio London as air-raid sirens wail in the background. Anna Seghers flees Paris on foot with her children. Lion Feuchtwanger is trapped in a French internment camp as the SS units close in. They all end up in Marseille, which they see as a last gateway to freedom. This is where Walter Benjamin writes his final essay to Hannah Arendt before setting off to escape across the Pyrenees. This is where the paths of countless German and Austrian writers, intellectuals and artists cross. And this too is where Varian Fry and his comrades risk life and limb to smuggle those in danger out of the country. This intensely compelling book lays bare the unthinkable courage and utter despair, as well as the hope and human companionship, which surged in the liminal space of Marseille during the darkest days of the twentieth century.
What would happen if we were to awaken one day and suddenly realize that the world we live in appeared eerily alien, as if we'd been teleported to some other distant world? That frightening prospect is now. Our planetary hydrosphere, which animates all of life on Earth, is rebelling in the wake of a global warming climate, spurring biblical spring floods, devastating summer droughts, heatwaves, and wildfires and powerful autumn hurricanes and typhoons, wreaking havoc on ecosystems and society.
For too long we have misjudged the very nature of our existence and to what we owe our lifeline. We have come to believe that we live on a land planet when the reality is that we live on a water planet, and now the Earth's hydrosphere is rewilding in the throes of a changing climate, taking our species and our fellow creatures into a mass extinction event as it searches for a new equilibrium.
Jeremy Rifkin calls on us to rethink our place in the universe and realize that we live on Planet Aqua. He takes us on a new journey into the future where we will need to reassess every aspect of the way we live - how we engage nature, govern society, conceptualize economic life, educate our children, and even orient ourselves in time and space. The next stage in the human journey is to rebrand our home Planet Aqua and learn how to readapt to the waters of life.
Underpinned by robust research, this major new work by one of the world's leading public intellectuals aims to redefine the very core of our existence on Planet Aqua.
Also available as an audiobook.
David Walker, a free (with a small f) black man, was one of the most significant African-American abolitionists of the nineteenth century. Born in a slave society before moving to Boston where, after the American Revolutionary War, slavery was abolished, Walker devoted his life to fighting slavery and antiblack racism. In this book, Sherrow O. Pinder brings to light Walker's lived experience, activism, and the synchronizing of his Christian principles and reformist radicalism to demonstrate why and how slavery must be eliminated. Walker's call for blacks to regain their natural rights culminated in his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, an enormously influential work that is now considered a founding text of black studies. Today, given the escalation of antiblack racism manifested in the upholding of institutionalized violence by the state and the continued marginality of African-Americans, we cannot afford to forget Walker's push for racial egalitarianism: it is more urgent than ever.
The world is entering a new nuclear age. Nuclear weapons are returning to the fore of international statecraft in ways unseen since the Cold War. With major powers like Russia issuing threats of nuclear strikes, China and North Korea continuing to grow their arsenals, and new prospects for proliferation from the Middle East to East Asia, the world has been thrust into a new era of heightened nuclear risk.
In this incisive book, international security expert Ankit Panda explores the enduring and emerging factors that are contributing to this new nuclear age. From strained great power ties to complex multipolar dynamics and the precipitous decline of arms control, he shows how our coexistence with the bomb is becoming more complicated and perilous. The prospect of nuclear escalation is again shaping how political decision-makers and military establishments around the world think and act. But unlike the peril of the Cold War, a greater number of nuclear players and a plethora of new technologies, including AI and exotic new weapons, make the search for stability far from straightforward. Managing the risks of a nuclear confrontation, he argues, will require new urgency and thinking to pull us back from the precipice of global catastrophe.
As a writer, poet, musician and dissident, Liao Yiwu is one of the most important chroniclers and analysts of contemporary China. In his books, he draws on his own experiences of imprisonment and mistreatment at the hands of the Chinese state to criticise abuses of power and give a voice to the downtrodden and disenfranchised.
In this powerful memoir, Liao Yiwu reflects on his own journey from imprisonment in Sichuan to his current life in Berlin, where he now works as a full-time writer. As China's presence and influence on the international stage grows, this small book is a poignant reminder of the human cost of authoritarianism and of the power of the written word to bear witness to evil.
A war is being waged against the Past. Whether it's toppling statues, decolonising the curriculum or erasing terms from our vocabulary, a cultural crusade is underway designed to render the past toxic. It is condemned as enemy territory and has become the target of venomous hate. What is at stake in provoking such a strong sense of societal shame towards Western history?
In this book, Frank Furedi mounts a fierce defence of the past and calls for a fight back against the delegitimization of its ideals and accomplishments. Casting the past as a story of shame has become a taken-for granted outlook permeating the educational and cultural life of western society from the top down. Its advocates may see it as a cultural imperative, but a society that loses touch with its past will face a permanent crisis of identity. Squandering the wisdom provided by our historical inheritance means betraying humanity's positive achievements. Challenging this great betrayal, Furedi argues, is one of the most important battles of our time.
A spectre is haunting us: fear. We are constantly confronted with apocalyptic scenarios: pandemics, world war, the climate catastrophe. Images of the end of the world and the end of human civilization are conjured up with ever greater urgency. Anxiously, we face a bleak future. Preoccupied with crisis management, life becomes a matter of survival.
But it is precisely at such moments of fear and despair that hope arises like a phoenix from the ashes. Only hope can give us back a life that is more than mere survival. Fear isolates people and closes them off from one another; hope, by contrast, unites people and forms communities. It opens up a meaningful horizon that re-invigorates and inspires life. It nurtures fantasy and enables us to think about what is yet to come. It makes action possible because it infuses our world with purpose and meaning. Hope is the spring that liberates us from our collective despair and gives us a future.
In this short essay on hope, Byung-Chul Han gives us the perfect antidote to the climate of fear that pervades our world.
What are we made up of? What holds material bodies together? Is there a difference between terrestrial matter and celestial matter - the matter that makes up the Earth and the matter that makes up the Sun and other stars? When Democritus stated, between the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, that we are made up of atoms, few people believed him. Not until Galileo and Newton in the seventeenth century did people take the idea seriously, and it was another four hundred years before we could reconstruct the elementary components of matter. Everything around us - the matter that forms rocks and planets, flowers and stars, even us - has very particular properties. These properties, which seem quite normal to us, are in fact very special, because the universe, whose evolution began almost fourteen billion years ago, is today a very cold environment. In this book, Guido Tonelli explains how elementary particles, which make up matter, combine into bizarre shapes to form correlated quantum states, primordial soups of quarks and gluons, or massive neutron stars. New questions that have emerged from the most recent research are answered: in what sense is the vacuum a material state? Why can space-time also vibrate and oscillate? Can elementary grains of space and time exist? What forms does matter assume inside large black holes? In clear and lively prose, Tonelli takes readers on an exhilarating journey into the latest discoveries of contemporary science, enabling them to see the universe, and themselves, in a new light.
Also available as an audiobook
Public life is dominated from time to time by media storms around integrity. The behaviour of elected political leaders has led many to decry the deterioration in standards and the lack of integrity in public life. But what is integrity, and where does our concern with integrity in public life come from? In this book, Martin Albrow argues that integrity has been an essential component of the rise of the West and a key feature that distinguishes the West from other civilizations. He traces the idea of integrity back to its roots in ancient Greece and Rome, where integrity acquired its special meaning: the unique feature of any object with integrity was that it combined its wholeness or completeness with the embodiment of standards that came from outside it. Integrity was unity through values. He then follows the story of integrity through early Christianity and the Renaissance to the present day. Today, we find ourselves in the paradoxical situation where the lack of integrity in public life is widely condemned while, at the same time, politicians can remain popular without even pretending to act with integrity: this is the new politics of the integrity vacuum. The idea of integrity may be a distinctively western one but, like many other aspects of western culture, it has now become a property of worldwide society. Albrow concludes by arguing that integrity could add more value today by being combined with non-western wisdom as we strive to create an order where honesty, trust and reliability in our relationships with others are paramount. This highly original account of an idea that lies at the heart of western culture will be of interest to anyone concerned about the state and future of our public life.
The bestselling feminist book, now adapted for a young adult audience
Before the 1960s, sex before marriage was frowned upon and pornography was difficult to get hold of. We are now much freer to do what we like - there has been a `sexual revolution'. This must be a good thing, right?
Wrong, argues Louise Perry. These changes have had many negative consequences, especially for girls and women. The main winners from a world of rough sex, hook-ups and freely available porn are a tiny minority of rich and powerful men. Women have been forced to adapt to these changes in ways that often harm them.
Louise Perry carefully guides readers through the difficulties of sex in the 21st century. Her advice will be invaluable to all young women and men who may be feeling lost in a world where `doing it' can sometimes seem dangerous or confusing.
In the shadow of the Cold War, whispers from the cosmos fueled an unlikely alliance between the US and USSR. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (or SETI) emerged as a foundational field of radio astronomy characterized by an unusual level of international collaboration-but SETI's use of signals intelligence technology also served military and governmental purposes.
In this captivating new history of the collaboration between American and Soviet radio astronomers as they sought to detect evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations, historian Rebecca Charbonneau reveals the triumphs and challenges they faced amidst a hostile political atmosphere. Shedding light on the untold stories from the Soviet side for the first time, she expertly unravels the complex web of military and political interests entangling radio astronomy and the search for alien intelligence, offering a thought-provoking perspective on the evolving relationship between science and power.
This is not just a story of radio waves and telescopes; it's a revelation of how scientists on both sides of the Iron Curtain navigated the complexities of the Cold War, blurring the lines between espionage and the quest for cosmic community. Filled with tension, contradiction, and the enduring human desire for connection, this is a history that transcends national boundaries and reaches out to the cosmic unknown, ultimately asking: how can we communicate with extraterrestrials when we struggle to communicate amongst ourselves?
With an entire discipline devoted to political science, what is distinctive about political sociology? This concise book explains what a sociological perspective brings to our understanding of the emergence, reproduction, and transformation of different forms of political order. Crucially, political sociology expands the field of view to the politics that happen in other social settings - in the family, at work, in civic associations - as well as the ways in which social attributes such as class, religion, age, race, and gender shape patterns of political participation and the distribution of political power.
Political sociology grapples with these issues across an enormous range of historical and geographic settings, from intimate to geo-political scales. It requires an analytic toolkit that includes concepts of power, identities and inequalities, social closure, civil society, and modes of political action. Using these central concepts, this updated edition of What is Political Sociology? discusses the major forms of political order, processes of regime formation and revolution, the social bases for political participation, policy formation as well as feedbacks, social movements and social change, and the possibilities for new forms of digital and transnational politics. In sum, the book offers an insightful introduction to this core perspective on social life.
What is happening to the Left? It seems to be dying a slow death. While many commentators have predicted its demise, the Left has always defied these bleak prognoses and risen from the ashes in the most unexpected ways. Nevertheless, we are witnessing today a global decline in organized movements on the Left, and while social struggles continue to challenge dominant political regimes, these efforts do not translate into support for traditional left parties or into the creation of dynamic movements on the Left. Bestselling historian Shlomo Sand argues that the global decline of the Left is linked to the waning of the idea of equality that has united citizens in the past and inspired them to engage in collective action. Sand retraces the evolution of this idea in a wide-ranging account that includes the Diggers and Levellers of seventeenth-century England; the French Revolution; the birth of anarchism and Marxism; the decolonial, feminist, and civil rights revolts; and the left-wing populism of our time. In piecing together the thinkers and movements that built the Left over centuries, Sand illuminates the global and transnational dynamics which pushed them forward. He outlines how they shaped the notion of equality, while also analysing how they were confronted by its material reality, and the lessons that they did - or did not - draw from this. This concise and magisterial history of the Left will appeal to anyone interested in the idea of equality and the fate of one of the most important movements that has shaped the modern world.
Also available as an audiobook.
Can Israelis and Palestinians end their long conflict? The shocking violence of current events undermines hope, as does the long history of peace deals sabotaged by extremists on both sides. In this compelling and timely book, the eminent moral philosopher Jonathan Glover argues that one vital step towards progress is to better understand the disturbing psychology of the cycle of violence. Glover explores the psychological flaws that entrap both sides: the urge to respond to wounds or humiliation with backlash; political or religious beliefs held with a rigidity that excludes compromise; and people's identity being shaped by the conflict in ways that make it harder to imagine or even desire alternatives. Drawing on the history of comparable conflicts that eased over time, Glover proposes some ways to gradually weaken the grip of this psychology. Completed as casualties mounted in the latest political and humanitarian crisis, Israelis and Palestinians is essential reading for anyone concerned by the ongoing violence in the Middle East.
