The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben is having an increasingly significant impact on Anglo-American political theory. His most prominent intervention to date is the powerful reassessment of sovereignty and the politics of life and death laid out in his multivolume Homo Sacer project. Agamben argues that in both the modern world and the ancient, politics inevitably involves a sovereign decision that bans some individuals from the political and human communities. For Agamben, the...

Deciding what is and what is not political is a fraught, perhaps intractably opaque matter. Just who decides the question; on what grounds; to what ends—these seem like properly political questions themselves. Deciding what is political and what is not can serve to contain and restrain struggles, make existing power relations at once self-evident and opaque, and blur the possibility of reimagining them differently. Political Concepts seeks to revive our common political vocabulary—both eve...

When Germany was defeated in 1945, both the Russians and the Americans undertook mass internments in the territories they occupied. The Americans called their approach “automatic arrest.” Carl Schmitt, although not belonging in the circles subject to automatic arrest, was held in one of these camps in the years 1945–6 and then, in March 1947, in the prison of the international tribunal in Nuremberg, as witness and “possible defendant.” A formal charge was never brought against him. Schmitt...

An insightful look at alienation in the modern world from the New York Times –bestselling author of The Art of Loving and Escape from Freedom .Social psychologist Erich Fromm observed the spread of alienation in the 1960s, arguing that humans who were once dynamic, creative beings were reduced to fixating on TV screens, emotionally pa...

A Pulitzer Prize Winner and landmark book from one of the truly original scholars of our time: a magnificent revelation of turn-of-the-century Vienna where out of a crisis of political and social disintegration so much of modern art and thought was born."Not only is it a splendid exploration of several aspects of early modernism in their political context; it is an indicator of how the discipline of intellectual history is currently practiced by its most able and ambitious craftsme...

How does a person become Hitler’s number one enemy? Not through espionage or violence, it turns out, but by striking fearlessly at the intellectual and spiritual roots of National Socialism.Dietrich von Hildebrand was a German Catholic thinker and teacher who devoted the full force of his intellect to breaking the deadly spell of Nazism that ensnared so many of his beloved countrymen.His story might well have been lost to us were it not for this memoir he p...

"Each [essay is] a model of clarity, weight, gravity . . . each superbly centered on the moods, manners, works . . . of ten exemplary men and women" ( Kirkus Reviews, starred review)."Dark times" is Brecht's phrase, and Hannah Arendt uses it suggest that those she writes about are not "mouthpieces of the Zeitgeist", but, rather, that the routine repetitive horrors of the twentieth century form the substance of the dark against which their lives of illuminat...

Genius. With hints of madness and mystery, moral license and visionary force, the word suggests an almost otherworldly power: the power to create, to divine the secrets of the universe, even to destroy. Yet the notion of genius has been diluted in recent times. Today, rock stars, football coaches, and entrepreneurs are labeled 'geniuses,' and the word is applied so widely that it has obscured the sense of special election and superhuman authority that long accompanied it.A...

"Zipes ably demonstrates that moral, political, religious, and other ideologies have shaped these apparently innocent narratives." — Lore and LanguageThis revised, expanded, and updated edition of the 1979 landmark Breaking the Magic Spell examines the enduring power of fairy tales and the ways they invade our subjective world. In seven provocative essays, Zipes discusses the importance of investigating oral folk tales in their socio-political cont...

"We are sleepwalking into catastrophe; Riemen wants to wake us up and he does with passion, wisdom, and eloquence." —Simon SchamaAn international bestseller, To Fight Against This Age consists of two beautifully written, cogent, and urgent essays about the rise of fascism and the ways in which we can combat it.In “The Eternal Return of Fascism,” Rob Riemen explores the theoretical weakness of fascism, which depends on a politics of resentment, the ...

German writers, from Luther and Goethe to Heine, Brecht, and Günter Grass, have had a profound influence on the modern world. This Very Short Introduction presents an engrossing tour of the course of German literature from the late Middle Ages to the present, focussing especially on the last 250 years. Emphasizing the economic and religious context of many masterpieces of German literature, it highlights how they can be interpreted as responses to social and political changes with...

The Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929) was one of the great modernists in the German language, but his importance as a major intellectual of the early twentieth century has not received adequate attention in the English-speaking world. One distinguished literary scholar of his generation called Hofmannsthal a "spiritual-moral authority" of a kind German culture had only rarely produced. This volume provides translations of essays that deal with the Austrian idea and with the...