#207 - David Harvey - A Brief History of Neoliberalism

Author or Editor: David Harvey
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2005
Pages: 247
Size: 3,26MB

Future historians may well look upon the years 1978–80 as a revolutionary turning-point in the world’s social and economic history. In 1978, Deng Xiaoping took the first momentous steps towards the liberalization of a communist-ruled economy in a country that accounted for a fifth of the world’s population. The path that Deng defined was to transform China in two decades from a closed backwater to an open centre of capitalist dynamism with sustained growth rates unparalleled in human history.

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#199 - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels - The Communist Manifesto

Author or Editor: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Publisher: Signet Books
Published: 1888
Pages: 27
Size: 0,19MB

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

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#159 - Kevin MacDonald - THE CULTURE OF CRITIQUE

Author or Editor: Kevin MacDonald
Publisher: Praeger Publishing
Published: 2002
Pages: 531
Size: 1.89MB

The Culture of Critique (hereafter, CofC) was originally published in 1998 by Praeger Publishers, an imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. The thesis of the book is a difficult one indeed—difficult not only because it is difficult to establish, but also because it challenges many fundamental assumptions about our contemporary intellectual and political existence.

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#140 - Joseph Rothschild and Nancy M. Wingfield - Return to diversity: A Political History of East Central Europe

Author or Editor: Joseph Rothschild and Nancy M. Wingfield
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2000
Pages: 338
Size: 1.57MB

At the close of World War I, the four defeated empires that had dominated and ruled East Central Europe—the German, Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian empires—were replaced by a dozen new or restored or enlarged would-be nation-states, all of which based their asserted legitimation on the then reigning politico-moral principle of national self-determination. Though the territorial arrangements of 1919 to 1921 still left a number of additional nations in East Central Europe stateless and created problems of aggrieved minorities allocated to states toward which they felt little or no affinity (conditions that induced revisionist apologists for the territorial losers of World War I to charge that the territorial arrangements were merely a cynical and unprincipled victors’ fiat), for all their admitted flaws, they still freed three times as many people from nationally alien rule as they subjected to such rule.

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#138 - Jeff Pratt - Class, Nation and Identity

Author or Editor: Jeff Pratt
Publisher: Pluto Press
Published: 2003
Pages: 220
Size: 2.32MB

The first stimulus for this book came out of the experience of research in Central Italy in the early 1970s. Thiswasan environment structured by the pervasive conflict between Catholic and communist political movements, and it was here that I discovered that as a fieldworker my own political identity wasmore important than my nationality in most social contexts. It was also here that I encountered the contrast between rural and urban social worlds, and began to hear the many ways that these are represented. This contrast has profound importance in European political history and constitutes a recurring theme in this study.

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#134 - Robin Hahnel - ABCs of Political Economy

Author or Editor: Robin Hahnel
Publisher: A Press
Published: 2000
Pages: 292
Size: 2.77MB

Unlike mainstream economists, political economists have always tried to situate the study of economics within the broader project of understanding how society functions. However, during the second half of the twentieth century dissatisfaction with the traditional political economy theory of social change known as historical materialism increased to the point where many modern political economists and social activists no longer espouse it, and most who still call themselves historical materialists have modified their theory considerably to accommodate insights about the importance of gender relations, race relations, and the “human factor” in understanding social stability and social change.

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#83 - Barack Obama - The Audacity of Hope

Author or Editor: Barack Obama
Publisher: Crown Publishers
Published: 2006
Pages: 418

The Senate chamber is not the most beautiful space in the Capitol, but it is imposing nonetheless. The dun-colored walls are set off by panels of blue damask and columns of finely veined marble. Overhead, the ceiling forms a creamy white oval, with an American eagle etched in its center. Above the visitors’ gallery, the busts of the nation’s first twenty vice presidents sit in solemn repose.

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#20 - Noam Chomsky - Hegemony or Survival

Author or Editor: Noam Chomsky
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
Published: 2003
Pages: 200

A few years ago, one of the great figures of contemporary biology, Ernst Mayr, published some reflections on the likelihood of success in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.1 He considered the prospects very low. His reasoning had to do with the adaptive value of what we call "higher intelligence," meaning the particular human form of intellectual organization. Mayr estimated the number of species since the origin of life at about fifty billion, only one of which "achieved the kind of intelligence needed to establish a civilization." It did so very recently, perhaps 100,000 years ago. It is generally assumed that only one small breeding group survived, of which we are all descendants.

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#19 - Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri - Empire

Author or Editor: Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2001
Pages: 478

Empire is materializing before our very eyes. Over the past several decades, as colonial regimes were overthrown and then precipitously after the Soviet barriers to the capitalist world market finally collapsed, we have witnessed an irresistible and irreversible globalization of economic and cultural exchanges. Along with the global market and global circuits of production has emerged a global order, a new logic and structure of rule —in short, a new form of sovereignty. Empire is the political subject that effectively regulates these global exchanges, the sovereign power that governs the world.

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#17 - Danny Schechter - Embedded Weapons of Mass Deception

Author or Editor: Danny Schechter
Publisher: News Design Associates Inc.
Published: 2003
Pages: 300

“In this compelling inquiry, Danny Schechter vividly captures two wars: the one observed by embedded journalists and some who chose not to follow that path, and the “carefully planned, tightly controlled and brilliantly executed media war that was fought alongside it,” a war that was scarcely covered or explained, he rightly reminds us. That crucial failure is addressed with great skill and insight in this careful and comprehensive study, which teaches lessons we ignore at our peril.” – Noam Chomsky.

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#13 - Greg Palast - The Best Democracy Money Can Buy

Author or Editor: Greg Palast
Publisher: Pluto Press
Published: 2002
Pages: 137

This fascinating book is really a world tour with Palast as guide. Those who join him will learn the previously unrevealed secrets of globalization, a term which really is a new “brand name” for very old forms of international investment and exploitation.

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#12 - James W. McAuley - An Introduction to Politics, State and Society

Author or Editor: James W. McAuley
Publisher: Sage Publications
Published: 2003
Pages: 232

All of us live in a social world dramatically altered and recreated in recent decades. It is a world still undergoing rapid economic, social and political change in lifestyle, in gender roles, in the running of the state, and in the very dernition of society in a globalized world. How, for example, are we to best understand such climactic transformations as those involving the collapse of the Soviet bloc and end of the Cold War, the startling speed of technological change, the effects of globalization and the turn towards religious fundamentalist, ethic, regionalist, environmentalist and consumerist politics?

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