The American anarchist, primitivist philosopher, and author John Zerzan critiques agriculture-based civilization as inherently oppressive and advocates drawing upon the life of hunter-gatherers as an inspiration for what free society should look like. Subjects of his criticism include domestication, language, symbolic thought, and the concept of time.This book includes sixteen essays ranging from the beginning of civilization to today’s general crisis. Zerzan provides a critical pe...

These are dark and darkening times, challenging us to look deeper to grasp the roots and dynamics of the looming civilizational crisis. Chronic illness of the planet calls for radically new thinking if there is to be any hope of renewal. When We Are Human offers thought at a necessary and primal level.All previous civilizations have failed, and now there's just one global civilization, which is starkly, grandly failing. To deny or avoid this fact is to remain in the sphere of the su...

The infamous eco-anarchist John Zerzan whose books have resulted in recent interviews by Vice and Believer magazines, checks in with further provocative articles about the chaotic results of civilization and technology.Says novelist Lang Gore in his introduction:"The present collection of essays continues the overarching thrust of John's scholarship, unveiling the post-apocalyptic nature of our times by noting the apocalypse was yesterday, several thousand...

"Zerzan's writing is sharp, uncompromising, and tenacious." — Derrick Jensen"John Zerzan's importance does not only consist in his brilliant intelligence, his absolute clearness of analysis and his unequalled dialectical synthesis that clarifies even the most complicated questions, but also in the humanity that fills his thoughts of resistance. Future Primitive Revisited is one more precious gift for us all."—Enrico Manicardi, author of Liberi dalla Civiltá (F...

Ecocriticism explores the ways in which we imagine and portray the relationship between humans and the environment in all areas of cultural production, from Wordsworth and Thoreau through to Google Earth, J.M. Coetzee and Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man.Greg Garrard’s animated and accessible volume traces the development of the movement and explores its key concepts, including:pollutionwildernessapocalypsedwellinga...

French philosopher Gilles Deleuze is known as a thinker of creation, joyous affirmation, and rhizomatic assemblages. In this short book, Andrew Culp polemically argues that this once-radical canon of joy has lost its resistance to the present. Concepts created to defeat capitalism have been recycled into business mantras that joyously affirm “Power is vertical; potential is horizontal!”Culp recovers the Deleuze’s forgotten negativity. He unsettles the prevailing interpretation thro...

A stirring and sobering diagnosis of the challenges that confront anyone laboring to renew America’s tradition of ordered liberty. Classicist Bruce Thornton’s Plagues of the Mind is a forceful vindication of the West’s tradition of rational, critical inquiry—a legacy now largely jettisoned in favor of a host of new deities, environmentalism, feminism, primitivism, New Age, and the cult of the therapeutic among them.

The book begins by debunking the popular idea that Man is just another type of ape by an explanation of human nature as deeply cooperative as well as competitive, and showing that consciousness and free will are not illusions but defining features of humanity. The materialist atheism favoured by evolutionary biologists and their Humanist admirers is an impossible basis for any system of ethics, and Humanist liberal principles are in fact rooted in Judaeo-Christian culture. Some of our mora...

Following the publication of the seminal Fear of Freedom, Erich Fromm applied his unique vision to a critique of contemporary capitalism in The Sane Society. Where the former dealt with man's historic inability to come to terms with his sense of isolation, and the dangers to which this can lead, The Sane Society took his theories one step further.

Studies in the culture and history of the book are a burgeoning academic specialty. Intriguing, rigorous, and vital, they are nevertheless rooted within three major academic disciplines - history, literary studies, and bibliography - that focus respectively upon the book as a cultural transaction, a literary text, and a material artefact. Old Books and New Histories serves as a guide to this rich but sometimes confusing territory, explaining how different scholarly approaches to w...

The Art Instinct combines two of the most fascinating and contentious disciplines, art and evolutionary science, in a provocative new work that will revolutionize the way art itself is perceived. Aesthetic taste, argues Denis Dutton, is an evolutionary trait, and is shaped by natural selection. It's not, as almost all contemporary art criticism and academic theory would have it, "socially constructed." The human appreciation for art is innate, and certain artistic values are unive...