This book follows the life of Ivan Aguéli, the artist, anarchist, and esotericist, notable as one of the earliest Western intellectuals to convert to Islam and to explore Sufism. This book explores different aspects of his life and activities, revealing each facet of Aguéli’s complex personality in its own right. It then shows how esotericism, art, and anarchism finally found their fulfillment in Sufi Islam. The authors analyze how Aguéli’s life and conversion show that Islam occupied a more central place in modern European intellectual history than is generally realized. His life reflects several major modern intellectual, political, and cultural trends. This book is an important contribution to understanding how he came to Islam, the values and influences that informed his life, and—ultimately—the role he played in the modern Western reception of Islam.

A knife adorned with a swastika and an eagle's head ... As a young boy, Joseph Pearson was terrified of the weapon hanging from a hook in his grandfather's basement, a trophy seized from the enemy in battle. When he later inherited the knife, he unlocked a story far more unsettling than he could ever have imagined. By then a writer and cultural historian living in Berlin, Joseph found himself drawn to other objects from the Nazi era: a pocket diary, a recipe book, a double bass and a cotton pouch. Although the past remains a painful subject in Germany, he embarked on a journey to illuminate their stories before they disappeared from living memory. A historical detective story and an enthralling account of one historian's search for answers, My Grandfather's Knife is at once a poignant meditation on memory and a unique addition to our understanding of Nazi Germany.

How did an ancient spiritual practice become the preserve of the privileged? Nadia Gilani has been practising yoga as a participant and teacher for over twenty-five years. Yoga has saved her life and seen her through many highs and lows; it has been a faith, a discipline, and a friend, and she believes wholeheartedly in its radical potential. However, over her years in the wellness industry, Nadia has noticed not only yoga's rising popularity, but also how its modern incarnation no longer serves people of colour, working class people, or many other groups who originally pioneered its creation. Combining her own memories of how the practice has helped her with an account of its history and transformation in the modern west, Nadia creates a love letter to yoga and a passionate critique of the billion-dollar industry whose cost and inaccessibility has shut out many of those it should be helping. By turns poignant, funny, and shocking, The Yoga Manifesto excavates where the industry has gone wrong, and what can be done to save the practice from its own success.

Can you name the creator of the Territorial Army and the British Expeditionary Force? The man who laid the foundation stones of MI5, MI6, the RAF, the LSE, Imperial College, the 'redbrick' universities and the Medical Research Council? This book reveals that great figure: Richard Burdon Haldane. As a philosopher-statesman, his groundbreaking proposals on defence, education and government structure were astonishingly ahead of his time-the very building blocks of modern Britain. His networks ranged from Wilde to Einstein, Churchill to Carnegie, King to Kaiser; he pioneered cross-party, cross-sector cooperation. Yet in 1915 Haldane was ejected from the Liberal government, unjustly vilified as a German sympathiser. John Campbell charts these ups and downs, reveals Haldane's intensely personal side through previously unpublished private correspondence, and shows his enormous relevance in our search for just societies today. Amidst political and national instability, it is time to reinstate Haldane as Britain's outstanding example of true statesmanship. A Sunday Times Politics and Current Affairs Book of the Year, 2020. A Telegraph Best Book of the Year, 2020.

"I'd been an activist for years. I'd marched, protested, blocked the road, been arrested. I'd exposed how banks and tax havens fuel corruption, poverty and environmental destruction. I'd launched a campaign that rewrote the laws on secret company ownership in dozens of countries. My research had contributed to the cluster munitions ban and a treaty to control the arms trade. But despite these efforts, my discomfort about activism was growing. Was I part of the problem too?" The Entangled Activist is the story of how activism is entangled in the problems it seeks to solve, told by a hard-hitting campaigner who through personal experience -- as well as extensively researched psycho-social enquiry -- comes to look at activism very differently. After years of thinking that her task was to 'get the bastards,' campaigner, writer and reporter Anthea Lawson came to see that activism often emerges from the same troubles it is trying to fix, and that its demons, including hypocrisy, saviourism, burnout and treating other people badly, can be a gateway to understanding the depth of what really needs to change. Drawing on her own experience, critical analysis and interviews with leading activists, Lawson looks under the surface of our attempts to change the world to offer a timely and eye-opening vision for transformative work. By considering how unexamined shadows and assumptions get in the way of well-intentioned activist goals, and how those at the forefront of sociopolitical change are often caught up in the very systems and ideologies they seek to change, Lawson dismantles hierarchies that have shaped the field for too long. The Entangled Activist is a profound call to acknowledge our entanglement with the world. To those who are worried about the state of things but are skeptical of 'activism', it offers possibilities for action that go beyond righteousness and reactivity. And to activists who so want to help, it mindfully unearths a different starting place, one where transforming ourselves is unwaveringly part of transforming the world.

After the twenty year hiatus of Thatcherism, the character and politics of the British Labour Party are again centre stage. In the UK itself, a new generation of students, intellectuals and political activists are turning both their scholarship and their politics back towards Labour. Abroad there is widespread interest in the substance and potential of New Labour's 'Third Way'. Yet that turn has so far very little to bite on. For one consequence of those twenty years has been a dearth of informed scholarship on Labour, 'old' or 'New'. Fortunately one such body of scholarship exists, and is reproduced here for the first time in an easily accessible form: the writings of a group of scholars inspired by Ralph Miliband. The 'Miliband' voice in Labour Party historiography has been a strong and permanent one since the publication of Parliamentary Socialism in 1961, so strong in fact that even its most strident critics continue to cite it in their publications, invariably distorting its arguments in the process. These writings constitute one of the richest sources of material and analysis of the continuing limits of Labour politics. These writers- John Saville, Colin Leys, Leo Panitch, Hilary Wainwright- have an immense role to fulfill debunking the wilder claims for novelty of New Labour. They constitute an insightful source on the true character of Old Labour; and exemplify the problems of reformism. In this edited collection, David Coates reproduces the best of difficult to obtain scholarship. His editorial comments act as a guide to the moments to which that scholarship was a response. His choice of extracts demonstrates the coherence of the approach that links them together; and his closing essay (written with Leo Panitch) makes clear their vital importance as a source of understanding of the contemporary Labour Party as well as of Labour Parties in the past.

The so-called ?'spatial turn?' in the social sciences has led to an increased interest in what can be called the spatialities of power, or the ways in which power as a medium for achieving goals is related to where it takes place. This unique and intriguing Handbook argues that the spatiality of power is never singular and easily modeled according to straightforward theoretical bullet-points, but instead is best approached as plural, contextually emergent and relational. The Handbook on the Geographies of Power consists of a series of cutting edge chapters written by a diverse range of leading geographers working both within and beyond political geography. It is organized thematically into the main areas in which contemporary work on the geographies of power is concentrated: bodies, economy, environment and energy, and war. The Handbook maintains a careful connection between theory and empirics, making it a valuable read for students, researchers and scholars in the fields of political and human geography. It will also appeal to social scientists more generally who are interested in contemporary conceptions of power. Contributors include: J. Agnew, J. Allen, I. Ashutosh, J. Barkan, N. Bauch, L. Bhungalia, G. Boyce, B. Braun, M. Brown, P. Carmody, N. Clark, M. Coleman, A. Dixon, V. Gidwani, N. Gordon, M. Hird, P. Hubbard, J. Hyndman, J. Loyd, A. Moore, L. Muscara, N. Perugini, C. Rasmussen, P. Steinberg, K. Strauss, S. Wakefield, K. Yusoff

Shortlisted for the 2021 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Australian History. Representing Australian Aboriginal Music and Dance 1930-1970 offers a rethinking of recent Australian music history. In this open access book, Amanda Harris presents accounts of Aboriginal music and dance by Aboriginal performers on public stages. Harris also historicizes the practices of non-Indigenous art music composers evoking Aboriginal music in their works, placing this in the context of emerging cultural institutions and policy frameworks. Centralizing auditory worlds and audio-visual evidence, Harris shows the direct relationship between the limits on Aboriginal people's mobility and non-Indigenous representations of Aboriginal culture. This book seeks to listen to Aboriginal accounts of disruption and continuation of Aboriginal cultural practices and features contributions from Aboriginal scholars Shannon Foster, Tiriki Onus and Nardi Simpson as personal interpretations of their family and community histories. Contextualizing recent music and dance practices in broader histories of policy, settler colonial structures, and postcolonizing efforts, the book offers a new lens on the development of Australian musical cultures. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Australian Research Council.

Economic democracy is essential for creating a truly democratic political sphere. This engaging book uses Marxist theory to hypothesise that capitalism is not a democratic system, and that a modern socialist system of producer cooperatives and democratically managed enterprises is urgently needed. A New Model of Socialism focuses on the current crisis of the political Left, a result of the collapse of the Soviet model of society and the decline of statism and kingship. Bruno Jossa expands on existing theories to explore Marx?s notions on economic democracy in a modern setting. He advocates a move away from the centralised planning form of economic socialism towards a self-management system for firms that does not prioritise the interests of one class over another, in order to achieve greater economic democracy. It is argued that the establishment of such a system of democratic firms is the precondition for reducing intervention in the economy, thus enabling the State to perform its ultimate function of serving the public interest. This timely book is ideal for advanced scholars of Marxist, radical and heterodox economic theory, as well as academics with an interest in the rise of socialism in our modern world. Indeed, it will also be of value to all those seeking a viable and practical alternative to existing capitalist and socialist thinking.

While Malatesta was hiding from the police he regularly went to a cafe in Ancona, Italy. He had shaved off his usual beard but he was still taking a risk. Especially as this wasn't an anarchist cafe, but had a variety of customers including the local policeman. The conversations he had in this cafi became the basis for the dialogues that make up this book.
For the first time in English, Malatesta, in his usual commonsense and matter-of-fact style, sets out and critically analyses the arguments for and against anarchism. Translated by Paul Nursey-Bray, this is a classic defence of anarchism that anticipates the rise of nationalism, fascism and communism.