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The Ends of Utopian Thinking in Critical Theory is the first book devoted to utopia as a subject matter of politics. Dedicated to a better future, the book delineates how utopian thinking became defeated and explains why it needs to be salvaged.
The book offers a critical account of how utopian thinking became defeated as a tool of philosophy whose explicit objective has been to not only analyse but emancipate the world. While such philosophy was originally inseparable from ideas of a radically better society it aimed to realise, many of its most influential practitioners today object to the use of utopian ideas. Countering this scepticism, the book argues in favour of utopian thinking. By elucidating a concept of utopia freed of its alleged pitfalls, the book contends that utopian thinking indeed presents an important resource for achieving emancipatory social goals.
Why does Namibia’s economy look the way it does today? Was the reliance on raw materials for exports and on the service sector for employment an inevitability? And for what reasons has the manufacturing sector – the vehicle for economic development for many now-high income countries throughout the 19th and 20th centuries – seen its growth held back? With these questions in mind, this book offers an extensive analysis of industrial development and economic change in Namibia since 1900, exploring their causes, trajectory, vicissitudes, context, and politics. Its focus is particularly on the motivations behind the economic decisions of the state, arguing that power relations – both internationally and domestically – have held firm a status quo that has resisted efforts towards profound economic change. This work is the first in-depth economic study covering both the colonial and independence eras of Namibia’s history and provides the first history of the country’s manufacturing sector.
An exploration of the ways that shifting relations between materiality and language bring about different forms of politics in Tehran In Revolution of Things, Kusha Sefat traces a dynamism between materiality and language that sheds light on how the merger of the two permeates politics. To show how shifting relations between things and terms form the grounds for different modes of action, Sefat reconstructs the political history of postrevolutionary Iran at the intersection of everyday objects and words. Just as Islamism fashioned its own objects in Tehran during the 1980s, he explains, tyrannical objects generated a distinct form of Islamism by means of their material properties; everyday t...
This book offers the first realist reconstruction of Marx’s critique of capitalism. Reading Marx through a realist lens enables us to make sense of the connections between (1) Marx’s positive concept of freedom, rooted in a theory of human development, (2) his understanding of alienation as diagnosing capitalist unfreedom, and (3) his conceptions of democracy and socialism, respectively, as the cures for this unfreedom. Along the way, it discusses and responds to some of Marx’s most insightful critics, such as Max Weber and Friedrich Hayek. This clarifies Marx’s ideas for a new generation of political thinkers; explains the challenge they pose to contemporary debates about freedom, democracy, and future economic institutions; and demonstrates that these ideas remain both defensible and compelling.
This important new book is about power in the age of Artificial Intelligence. It looks at what the new technical powers that have accrued over the last decades mean for the freedom of people and for our democracies. AI must not be considered in isolation, but rather in a very specific context; the concentration of economic and digital-technological power that we see today. Analysis of the effects of AI requires that we take a holistic view of the business models of digital technologies, and of the power they exercise. Technology, economic power, and political power are entering into ever closer symbiosis. Digital technologies and their corporate masters now know more than people know about t...
This volume offers a critical re-assessment of the thought of Ernst Bloch, best known for his groundbreaking study The Principle of Hope and one of the most significant European thinkers and public intellectuals of the twentieth century. It explores Bloch’s life, work and reception; his debt to Marx and Hegel; his central concepts of hope and utopia; his affinities with philosophers such as Gramsci and Žižek; and his radical reframing of our understanding of history, society and culture. Above all, this volume examines the relevance of Bloch’s ideas today, in a world still shot through with economic inequality and social injustice. Contributors are: Agata Bielik-Robson, Ivan Boldyrev, Henk de Berg, Sam Dolbear, Vincent Geoghegan, Holger Glinka, Loren Goldman, Douglas Kellner, Cat Moir, Jan Rehmann, Nina Rismal, Johan Siebers and Peter Thompson
- Lists over 600 theses on historical topics completed during 2014 in UK and Irish universities - Includes not only history departments, but other departments where historical subjects might be taught - Gives full details of title, supervisor and university - Provides a subject index to aid searching, together with indexes of universities and authors The online version of Theses Completed is published on the IHR's website, where searches can be conducted by type of history, geographical area or period.
The turn of the Millennium demonstrated a fully-fledged revival and fusion of various left-wing social movements with differing agendas. Movements for women's, black, indigenous, LGTB and animal liberation as well as ecological, anti-nuclear and anti-war groups unified against the global capital. Considering the diverse emphases of these movements, is there a philosophical framework that could help us understand their nature and their modes of operation in the 21st century? This book provides a set of conceptual tools offering a theoretical model of 'slow' social transformation, a modality of social change that explicitly differs from the irruptive model of a revolution or a paradigm-changin...