Principles of Distributed Systems

America’s leading essayist on the frantic retreat of democracy, in the fire and smoke of the war on terrorIn twenty-five years of imperial adventure, America has laid waste to its principles of democr

America’s leading essayist on the frantic retreat of democracy, in the fire and smoke of the war on terrorIn twenty-five years of imperial adventure, America has laid waste to its principles of democr

A major new work of feminism on the history and persistence of patriarchal hierarchies from the MacArthur Award-winning economistIn this groundbreaking new work, Nancy Folbre builds on a critique and

A major new work of feminism on the history and persistence of patriarchal hierarchies from the MacArthur Award-winning economistIn this groundbreaking new work, Nancy Folbre builds on a critique and

A material analysis of the sign which deepens Marx's critique of political economy for spectacular times.What if the problems of modern society don't come from production, but rather consumption and the system of cultural signs? In this classic work from the defining intellectual of the postmodern, Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign takes Marx's critique of political economy and its analysis of the commodity form as the starting point for an analysis of signs and their meaning in modern society. Influenced by Lefebvre's critique of everyday life, Barthes's semiology, and Situationism, Baudrillard analyses how objects are encoded within the system of signs and meanings that constitute contemporary media and consumer societies. Combining semiological studies and sociology of the consumer society, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign contains Baudrillard's most extensive engagement with Marxism and shows him at a critical juncture for the

One of the most comprehensive portraits of a strike wave ever written, an indispensable window into the changing shape of the working class and American politicsAfter nearly four decades of labor quie

A comprehensive philosophy of contemporary life and politics, by one of the sharpest critics of the presentWe live in an age of impotence. Stuck between global war and global finance, between identity

Long before Occupy, cities were the subject of much utopian thinking. They are the centers of capital accumulation as well as of revolutionary politics, where deeper currents of social and political c

On the tracks of the killers of Rosa LuxemburgThe cold-blooded murder of revolutionary icons Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in the pitched political battles of post-WWI Germany marks one of the gr

A global study of the financialisation of housingIn Urban Warfare, Rolnik charts how the financialisation of housing has become a global crisis, as models of home ownership, originating in the US and

The first intellectual biography of the life and work of John BergerJohn Berger was one of the most influential thinkers and writers of postwar Europe. As a novelist, he won the Booker Prize in 1972,

A sweeping interpretation of the political, cultural, and economic struggles of gays and lesbiansAmerican Homo offers a sweeping interpretation of the political, cultural and economic struggles of les

On the origins of European queer politicsCome Together tells the incredible story of the emerging radicalism of the Gay Liberation Front, providing a vivid history of the movement, as well as the new

An extraordinary memoir of exile and the impossibility of finding home, from the author of In Search of Fatima“The journey filled me with bitterness and grief. I remember looking down on a night

A different kind of politics for a new kind of society--beyond work, scarcity and capitalismThe first decade of the twenty-first century marked the demise of the current world order. Despite widesprea

Mobility justice is one of the crucial political and ethical issues of our day. We are in the midst of a global climate crisis and experiencing the extreme challenges of urbanization. In Mobility Just

A powerful document of theday-to-day realities of Black women in BritainHeart of the Race is a powerful corrective to a version of Britain’s history from which black women have long been exclude

In this distillation of reflections accumulated from a lifetime of travel, Ryszard Kapuscinski takes a fresh look at the Western idea of the Other. Looking at this concept through the lens of his own

One of the world's leading anthropologists assesses the work of the founder of structural anthropologyAnthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss was among the most influential thinkers of the 20th cent

The leading philosopher of our time tackles the demise of liberalism, from the tragedy of 9/11 to the farce of the financial meltdown.Billions of dollars were hastily poured into the global banking system in a frantic attempt at financial stabilization. So why has it not been possible to bring the same forces to bear in addressing world poverty and environmental crisis? In this take-no-prisoners analysis, Slavoj Zizek frames the moral failures of the modern world in terms of the epoch-making events of the first decade of this century. What he finds is the old one-two punch of history: the jab of tragedy, the right hook of farce. In the attacks of 9/11 and the global credit crunch, liberalism dies twice: as a political doctrine and as an economic theory. The election of Donald Trump only confirms the bankruptcy of a liberal order on its last legs. First as Tragedy, Then as Farce is a call for the Left to reinvent itself in the light of our desperate historical situation. The time for li

Pakistan 1968: the history of a revolutionThe story of what happened in 1968 in Pakistan is often forgotten, but is proof of a global revolutionary moment. In that year, following years of tumult, a r

Charting the decline of the French intellectual, from the Dreyfus Affair to IslamophobiaThe best-selling author of The Invention of the Jewish People, Shlomo Sand examines the troublesome figure of th

The first full presentation of a fundamental aspect of Marx, the concept of need.The basic discoveries underlying Marx's critique of political economy - labour power, surplus value, use value - are al

Vivid account and reflection on two struggles that are at the heart of the contestation of neoliberal technocracy and the stateAt a time of ever more accelerated and expanded development of natural an

New edition of this major work examining the development of neoliberalismIn this major work, sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello go to the heart of the changes in contemporary capitalism. Via an unprecedented analysis of the latest management texts that have formed the thinking of employers in their reorganization of business, the authors trace the contours of a new spirit of capitalism. They argue that from the middle of the 1970s onwards, capitalism abandoned the hierarchical Fordist work structure and developed a new network-based form of organization that was founded on employee initiative and autonomy in the workplace—a “freedom” that came at the cost of material and psychological security. The authors connect this new spirit with the children of the libertarian and romantic currents of the late 1960s (as epitomised by dressed-down, cool capitalists such as Bill Gates and “Ben and Jerry”) arguing that they practice a more successful and subtle-form of exploitation. Now a

Recovering the history of the revolutionary Jewish traditionJewish radicals manned the barricades on the avenues of Petrograd and the alleys of the Warsaw ghetto; they were in the vanguard of those re

The gripping story of the Levellers, the radical movement at the heart of the English RevolutionThe Levellers, formed out of the explosive tumult of the 1640s and the battlefields of the Civil War, ar

The principle of the “lesser evil”—the acceptability of pursuing one exceptional course of action in order to prevent a greater injustice—has long been a cornerstone of Western ethical phi

From the award-winning author of The Rise of Islamic State, the essential story of the Middle East’s disintegrationThe Age of Jihad charts the turmoil of today’s Middle East and the devastating role t

A pioneering book proposing a transhumanist vision of the future, from one of the most influential visionary scientists of the twentieth century.

A genealogy of fanaticism—unearthing its long history, before it became a tool in the Clash of CivilizationsThe idea of fanaticism as a deviant or extreme variant of an already irrational set of relig

Is global emancipation a lost cause? Are universal values outdated relics of an earlier age? In fear of the horrors of totalitarianism should we submit ourselves to a miserable third way of economic l

Chris Harman describes the shape and course of human history as a narrative of ordinary people forming and re-forming complex societies in pursuit of common human goals. Interacting with the forces of

Electrifying investigation of White House lies about the assassination of Osama bin LadenIn 2011, an elite group of US Navy SEALS stormed an enclosure in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad and killed Os

Furies of Indian Communalism is a powerful and rigorous analysis of the growing phenomenon of Hindu communalism, which currently threatens to tear India apart. Placing the politics of Hindu nationalis

Magisterial account of the ideas and the figures who have forged the American Empire.Since the birth of the nation, impulses of empire have been close to the heart of the United States. How these urge

What are the origins of human rights? This question, rarely asked before the end of the Cold War, has in recent years become a major focus of historical and ideological strife. In this sequence of ref

The history of the war from the past one hundred years is a history of bombingEver since its invention, aviation has embodied the dream of perpetual peace between nations, yet the other side of this i