What can you remember of your childhood? This was the question put to a number of ‘seniors’ asked to start from as far back as they could get, and go as far as the onset of adolescence. Their answers are in this unusual book.Topics naturally include their physical self; their parents, siblings, grandparents, friends, playmates, teachers, classmates, pets; their manners, training, rewards and punishments; food; play, toys; likes, dislikes; schools, kindergarten, elementary; outings, ...

For well over a century cinema has exerted enormous influence, yet many questions regarding its fascination remain unanswered. Films work so well because the viewers tend to unconsciously identify with the actors/actresses. The desire to become another, substituting identity by identification, can be traced to the illusion that the filmic heroes/heroines are immortal – identifying with them raises the possibility of gaining «deathlessness.» Viewers can, without real life risks, experiment ...

We forget all kinds of things, trivial and important ones; and not just things but also topics and techniques, and we forget in different ways. Inconvenient as it is to forget your to-do list, forgetting grave political factors can lead to repeating the same mistakes. Foolish as it is to let proven solutions fall by the wayside, repression, both on a personal as on a political level, will lead to catastrophe. This book enumerates many things already forgotten (or in the process of being fo...

This book gives explanations for the growing gap in wealth and income and the rise of anti-democratic movements. The power of the elites today is supposedly founded on merit (education, intelligence etc.), but a closer look shows that a well-marked-out pool is just self-re-producing. The power these in-groups wield often leads to moral insensibility, made worse by a condescending attitude towards people further down the food chain. The pre-dominance of the model of the nation-state, with i...

Accessible, entertaining, anecdotal. A good introduction to issues in contemporary civics as well as a measured and thoughtful response to major themes and figures in cultural studies.Civility in politics is a subject throughout, and analyses of both Obama's rhetoric and the use of lowest-common-denominator insults in public debate will be well-timed going into the 2012 election campaignNot just formal essays: some are dialogues, some personal meditations, some direct addre...

As insightful and wise today as it was when originally published in 1954, Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society has become a classic in its field, laying the groundwork for all other studies of technology and society that have followed.Ellul offers a penetrating analysis of our technological civilization, showing how technology—which began innocuously enough as a servant of humankind—threatens to overthrow humanity itself in its ongoing creation of an environment that ...

Originally published just months before the May 1968 upheavals in France, Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life offered a lyrical and aphoristic critique of the “society of the spectacle” from the point of view of individual experience. Whereas Debord’s masterful analysis of the new historical conditions that triggered the uprisings of the 1960s armed the revolutionaries of the time with theory, Vaneigem’s book described their feelings of desperation directly, and armed...

A New York Times bestseller about overcoming the profound ills of modern society by a legendary social psychologist, the author of Escape from Freedom ."A distinguished contribution to a growing body of social-psychological reflections on modern times." — The Washington PostOne of Fromm's main interests was to analyze social sy...

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...

A spirited defense of the anarchist approach to lifeJames Scott taught us what's wrong with seeing like a state. Now, in his most accessible and personal book to date, the acclaimed social scientist makes the case for seeing like an anarchist. Inspired by the core anarchist faith in the possibilities of voluntary cooperation without hierarchy, Two Cheers for Anarchism is an engaging, high-spirited, and often very funny defense of an anarchist way of seeing...

Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy is perhaps the most important and influential book on the subject ever written This volume is the result of an effort to weld into a readable form the bulk of almost forty years' thought, observation and research on the subject of socialism. The problem of democracy forced its way into the place it now occupies in this volume because it proved impossible to state my views on the relation between the socialist order of society and the democr...

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...