Excavating Marx’s early writings to rethink the rights of the poor and the idea of the commons in an era of unprecedented privatizationThe politics of dispossession are everywhere. Troubling developments in intellectual property, genomics, and biotechnology are undermining established concepts of property, while land appropriation and ecological crises reconfigure basic institutions of ownership. In The Dispossessed, Daniel Bensaïd examines Karl Marx’s ear...

Recorded Fragments - Twelve reflections on the 20th century with Daniel BensaïdThese interviews with Daniel Bensaïd were a project broadcast on the radio station 'Fréquence Paris Plurielle' (106.3 FM).During recording sessions in 2007 and 2008, Daniel Bensaïd proposed further interviews on twelve events associated with key dates of the workers' movement. In these, he gives his insight into events such as the October Revolut...

A philosopher and activist, eager to live according to ideals forged in study and discussion, Daniel Bensaïd was a man deeply entrenched in both the French and the international left. Raised in a staunchly red neighbourhood of Toulouse, where his family owned a bistro, he grew to be France’s leading Marxist public intellectual, much in demand on talk shows and in the press. A lyrical essayist and powerful public speaker, at his best expounding large ideas to crowds of students and workers,...

"Is it meaningful to call oneself a democrat? And if so, how do you interpret the word?"In responding to this question, eight iconoclastic thinkers prove the rich potential of democracy, along with its critical weaknesses, and reconceive the practice to accommodate new political and cultural realities. Giorgio Agamben traces the tense history of constitutions and their coexistence with various governments. Alain Badiou contrasts current democratic practice with democratic communism...

THE AGE OF EMPIRE is a book about the strange death of the nineteenth century, the world made by and for liberal middle classes in the name of universal progress and civilisation. It is about hopes realised which turned into fears: an era of unparalleled peace engendering an era of unparalleled war; revolt and revolution emerging on the outskirts of society; a time of profound identity crisis for bourgeois classes, among new and sudden mass labour movements which rejected capitalism and ne...

In this series of essays, Ayn Rand presents her stand on the persecution of big business, the causes of war, the default of conservatism, and the evils of altruism.The foundations of capitalism are being battered by a flood of altruism, which is the cause of the modern world's collapse. This is the view of Ayn Rand, a view so radically opposed to prevailing attitudes that it constitutes a major philosophic revolution. Here is a challenging new look at modern societ...

**This world-famous work on the origins and development of nationalism examines what drives people to live, die, and kill in the name of nations.“One of the greatest.” —London Review of Books“Anderson transformed the study of nationalism.” —The New York Times“Boldly original.” —Guardian**The full magnitude of Benedict Anderson’s intellectual achievement is still being appreciated and debated. Imagined Communities remains the...

This collection of essays was the last work planned by Ayn Rand before her death in 1982. In it, she summarizes her view of philosophy and deals with a broad spectrum of topics.According to Ayn Rand, the choice we make is not whether to have a philosophy, but which one to have: rational, conscious, and therefore practical; or contradictory, unidentified, and ultimately lethal.Written with all the clarity and eloquence that have placed Ayn Rand’s Objectivist...

The political theorist and author of The Origins of Totalitarianism offers an "incisive, deeply probing" essay on violence and political power ( The Nation).Addressing the escalation of global warfare witnessed throughout the 1960s, Hannah Arendt points out that the glorification of violence is not restricted to a small minority of militants and extremists. The public revulsion for violence that followed World War II has dissipated, as have the no...

**“Exhilarating . . . brave and forthright.” —The New York Times Book Review“Perhaps the greatest single collection of thinking on the political, diplomatic, social, and cultural history of the past century.” —Forbes**We have entered an age of forgetting. Our world, we insist, is unprecedented, wholly new. The past has nothing to teach us. Drawing provocative connections between a dazzling range of subjects, from Jewish intellectuals and the challenge of e...

Four thought-provoking political essays by the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism.Taking an in-depth look at the tumult of the 1960s and '70s, one of the great political philosophers of our era examines how these crises challenged the American form of government. "Lying in Politics" is a penetrating analysis of the Pentagon Papers that deals with the role of image-making and public relations. "Civil Disobedience" examines various opposition movements...

Worldly Philosopher chronicles the times and writings of Albert O. Hirschman, one of the twentieth century's most original and provocative thinkers. In this gripping biography, Jeremy Adelman tells the story of a man shaped by modern horrors and hopes, a worldly intellectual who fought for and wrote in defense of the values of tolerance and change.Born in Berlin in 1915, Hirschman grew up amid the promise and turmoil of the Weimar era, but fled Germany when the Nazis seize...