POLITY

(P/B) THE CONSTITUTION OF SOCIETY
Anthony Giddens has been in the forefront of developments in social theory for the past decade. In The Constitution of Society he outlines the distinctive position he has evolved during that period and offers a full statement of a major new perspective in social thought, a synthesis and elaboration of ideas touched on in previous works but described here for the first time in an integrated and comprehensive form, A particular feature is Giddens's concern to connect abstract problems of theory to an interpretation of the nature of empirical...
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(H/B) EUROPE'S COMING OF AGE
European integration has had many successes and failures, Brexit being one of the biggest failures. Despite the setbacks, the EU has been acquiring more functions and members and has now reached a stage where it needs to become a political adult. In this book, one of the world's leading authorities on Europe provides a lucid and wide-ranging appraisal of contemporary European affairs - of how the EU became what it is today and the key challenges Europeans must now confront. These challenges include the search for a common foreign and secu...
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(P/B) WILL THE GIG ECONOMY PREVAIL?
Increasingly, employees are being falsely treated as 'self-employed'. This phenomenon - the 'gig economy' - is seen as the inevitable shape of things to come. In this book, Colin Crouch takes a step back and questions this logic. He shows how the idea of an employee - a stable status that involves a bundle of rights - has maintained a curious persistence. Examining the ways companies are attacking these rights, from proffering temporary work to involuntary part-time work to 'gigging', he reveals the paradoxes of the situation and argues th...
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(P/B) THE STRUCTURAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE
This major work retraces the emergence and development of the Bourgeois public sphere -- that is, a sphere which was distinct from the state and in which citizens could discuss issues of general interest. In analysing the historical transformations of this sphere, Habermas recovers a concept which is of crucial significance for current debates in social and political theory. Habermas focuses on the liberal notion of the bourgeois public sphere as it emerged in Europe in the early modern period. He examines both the writings of political th...
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(P/B) IDENTITY
As we grapple with the insecurity and uncertainty of liquid modernity, Bauman argues that our socio-political, cultural, professional, religious and sexual identities are undergoing a process of continual transformation. Identities the world over have become more precarious than ever: we live in an era of constant change and disposability - whether it's last season's outfit, or car, or even partner -- and our identities as a result have become transient and deeply elusive. In a world of rapid global change where national borders are increa...
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(P/B) FORMATIONS OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
When I decided to explore the question of Witz, or wit, with you this year, I undertook a small enquiry. It will come as no surprise at all that I began by questioning a poet. This is a poet who introduces the dimension of an especially playful wit that runs through his work, as much in his prose as in more poetic forms, and which he brings into play even when he happens to be talking about mathematics, for he is also a mathematician. I am referring to Raymond Queneau. While we were exchanging our first remarks on the matter he told me a j...
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(P/B) THE SUFFERING OF THE IMMIGRANT
This book is a major contribution to our understanding of the condition of the immigrant and it will transform the reader s understanding of the issues surrounding immigration. Sayad's book will be widely used in courses on race, ethnicity, immigration and identity in sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, politics and geography. an outstanding and original work on the experience of immigration and the kind of suffering involved in living in a society and culture which is not one s own; describes how immigrants are compelled, out of re...
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(H/B) AN IMAGINARY RACISM
'Islamophobia' is a term that has existed since the nineteenth century. But in recent decades, argues Pascal Bruckner in his controversial new book, it has become a weapon used to silence criticism of Islam. The term allows those who brandish it in the name of Islam to 'freeze' the latter, making reform difficult. Whereas Christianity and Judaism have been rejuvenated over the centuries by external criticism, Islam has been shielded from critical examination and has remained impervious to change. This tendency is exacerbated by the hypocri...
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(P/B) POSTHUMAN FEMINISM
In a context marked by the virulent return of patriarchal and white supremacist attitudes, a new generation of activists, from the Xenofeminists to Pussy Riot, are continuing the struggle, fighting alongside star feminists like Emma Watson and Scarlett Johansson: these are very feminist times. But how do these and other struggles relate to our contemporary posthuman condition? In this important new book, Rosi Braidotti examines the implications of the posthuman turn for feminist theory and practice. She defines the posthuman turn as a conv...
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(P/B) POST-DEMOCRACY AFTER THE CRISES
In Post-Democracy (Polity, 2004) Colin Crouch argued that behind the fa?ade of strong institutions, democracy in many advanced societies was being hollowed out, its big events becoming empty rituals as power passed increasingly to circles of wealthy business elites and an ever-more isolated political class. Crouch's provocative argument has in many ways been vindicated by recent events, but these have also highlighted some weaknesses of the original thesis and shown that the situation today is even worse. The global financial deregulation ...
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(P/B) WRITINGS ON WAR
Writings on War collects three of Carl Schmitt's most important and controversial texts, here appearing in English for the first time: The Turn to the Discriminating Concept of War, The Grossraum Order of International Law, and The International Crime of the War of Aggression and the Principle "Nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege". Written between 1937 and 1945, these works articulate Schmitt's concerns throughout this period of war and crisis, addressing the major failings of the League of Nations, and presenting Schmitt's own conceptual...
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(P/B) THE NEW LAWS OF LOVE
Online dating has become a widespread feature of modern social life. In less than two decades, seeking partners through commercial intermediaries went from being a marginal and stigmatized practice to being a common activity. How can we explain this rapid change and what does it tell us about the changing nature of love and sexuality? In contrast to those who praise online dating as a democratization of love and those who condemn it as a commodification of intimacy, this book tells a different story about how and why online dating became b...
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(P/B) DEMOCRACY AND COMMUNITY
The concept of community is tainted by the events of the twentieth century, frequently appropriated by totalitarian regimes for the purposes of exclusion and oppression. In this dialogue with Peter Engelmann, philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy attempts to reframe community as central to a reconceptualization of politics and democracy. Observing that all our interactions are in some way shared experiences, Nancy demonstrates that a common sense of life precedes our existence as individuals: we can only truly make sense of life in a plurality. Democ...
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(H/B) THE OBJECT RELATION
'The unfulfilled and unsatisfied mother around whom the child ascends the upward slope of his narcissism is someone real. She is right there, and like all other unfulfilled creatures, she is in search of what she can devour, quaerens quem devoret. What the child once found as a means of quashing the symbolic unfulfilment is what he may possibly find across from him again as a wide-open maw [...] To be devoured is a grave danger that our fantasies reveal to us. We find it at the origin, and we find it again at this turn in the path where it...
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(P/B) ANXIETY
Jacques Lacan is widely recognized as a key figure in the history of psychoanalysis and one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th Century. In Anxiety, now available for the first time in English, he explores the nature of anxiety, suggesting that it is not nostalgia for the object that causes anxiety but rather its imminence. In what was to be the last of his year-long seminars at Saint-Anne hospital, Lacan's 1962-63 lessons form the keystone to this classic phase of his teaching. Here we meet for the first time the notorious a in ...
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(P/B) INTERTEXTUALITY
This book is a comprehensive introduction to the idea of intertextuality and the debates surrounding it. Mary Orr focuses on the four key thinkers whose work has been central to these debates - Kristeva, Barthes, Bloom and Genette - and, with an innovative perspective, guides the reader through the original texts of each of them. Of special importance is the author's reading of Kristeva's Semeiotike. Orr's investigation takes a fresh approach to the rival French critics who also worked on intertexuality (Angenot, Derrida, Girard and Ricoeu...
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(P/B) THE SOCIAL STRUCTURES OF THE ECONOMY
Much orthodox economic theory is based on assumptions which are treated as self-evident: supply and demand are regarded as independent entities, the individual is assumed to be a rational agent who knows his interests and how to make decisions corresponding to them, and so on. But one has only to examine an economic transaction closely, as Pierre Bourdieu does here for the buying and selling of houses, to see that these abstract assumptions cannot explain what happens in reality. As Bourdieu shows, the market is constructed by the state, ...
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(P/B) THE EXPULSION OF THE OTHER
The days of the Other are over in this age of excessive communication, information and consumption. What used to be the Other, be it as friend, as Eros or as hell, is now indistinguishable from the self in our narcissistic desire to assimilate everything and everyone until there are no boundaries left. The result is a 'terror of the Same', lives in which we no longer pursue knowledge, insight and experience but are instead reduced to the echo chambers and illusory encounters offered by social media. In extreme cases, this feeling of disori...
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(P/B) POST-DEMOCRACY
Post-Democracy is a polemical work that goes beyond current complaints about the failings of our democracy and explores the deeper social and economic forces that account for the current malaise. Colin Crouch argues that the decline of those social classes which had made possible an active and critical mass politics has combined with the rise of global capitalism to produce a self-referential political class more concerned with forging links with wealthy business interests than with pursuing political programmes which meet the concerns of...
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(P/B) HOW EVERYTHING CAN COLLAPSE
What if our civilization were to collapse? Not many centuries into the future, but in our own lifetimes? Most people recognize that we face huge challenges today, from climate change and its potentially catastrophic consequences to a plethora of socio-political problems, but we find it hard to face up to the very real possibility that these crises could produce a collapse of our entire civilization. Yet we now have a great deal of evidence to suggest that we are up against growing systemic instabilities that pose a serious threat to the c...
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