America's foremost novelist reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics: race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, the desire for belonging. What is race and why does it matter? What motivates the human tendency to construct Others? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid? Drawing on her Norton Lectures, Toni Morrison takes up these and other vital questions bearing on identity in The Origin Of Others.

In her search for answers, the novelist considers her own memories as well as history, politics, and especially literature. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Camara Laye are among the authors she examines. Readers of Morrison's fiction will welcome her discussions of some of her most celebrated books: Beloved, Paradise, and A Mercy. Morrison also writes about nineteenth-century literary efforts to romance slavery, contrasting them with the scientific racism of Samuel Cartwright and the banal diaries of the plantation overseer and slaveholder Thomas Thistlewood. She looks at configurations of blackness, notions of racial purity, and the ways in which literature employs skin colour to reveal character or drive narrative.

Expanding the scope of her concern, she also addresses globalization and the mass movement of peoples in this century. National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates provides a foreword to Morrison's most personal work of nonfiction to date.

In Critique Of Black Reason, eminent critic Achille Mbembe offers a capacious genealogy of the category of Blackness - from the Atlantic slave trade to the present - to critically reevaluate history, racism, and the future of humanity. Mbembe teases out the intellectual consequences of the reality that Europe is no longer the world's center of gravity while mapping the relations between colonialism, slavery, and contemporary financial and extractive capital.

Tracing the conjunction of Blackness with the biological fiction of race, he theorizes Black reason as the collection of discourses and practices that equated Blackness with the nonhuman in order to uphold forms of oppression. Mbembe powerfully argues that this equation of Blackness with the nonhuman will serve as the template for all new forms of exclusion.

With Critique Of Black Reason, Mbembe offers nothing less than a map of the world as it has been constituted through colonialism and racial thinking while providing the first glimpses of a more just future.

In this powerful collection of interviews, Noam Chomsky exposes the problems of our world today, as we stand in this period of monumental change, preparing for a more hopeful tomorrow.

"For the left, elections are a brief interlude in a life of real politics, a moment to ask whether it's worth taking time off to vote . . . Then back to work. The work will be to move forward to construct the better world that is within reach."

He sheds light into the phenomenon of right-wing populism, and exposes the catastrophic nature and impact of authoritarian policies on people, the environment and the planet as a whole. He captures the dynamics of the brutal class warfare launched by the masters of capital to maintain and even enhance the features of a dog-eat-dog society. And he celebrates the recent unprecedented mobilizations of millions of people internationally against neoliberal capitalism, racism and police violence.

We stand at a precipice and we must fight to pull the world back from it.

Male entitlement takes many forms. To sex, yes, but more insidiously to admiration, bodily autonomy, knowledge, power, even care. In this urgent intervention, philosopher Kate Manne offers a radical new framework for understanding misogyny.

In clear-sighted, powerful prose, she ranges widely across the culture to show how the idea that a privileged man is tacitly deemed to be owed something is a pervasive problem. Male entitlement can explain a wide array of phenomena, from mansplaining and the undertreatment of women's pain to mass shootings by incels and the seemingly intractable notion that women are 'unelectable'. The consequences for girls and women are often devastating. As Manne shows, toxic masculinity is not just the product of a few bad actors; we are all implicated, conditioned as we are by the currents of our time.

With wit and intellectual fierceness, she sheds new light on gender and power and offers a vision of a world in which women are just as entitled as men to be cared for, believed and valued.

The #1 Sunday Times bestseller from 'the most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now' (New York Times) - now in paperback.

How should we live properly in a world of chaos and uncertainty?

Jordan Peterson has helped millions of people, young and old, men and women, aim at a life of responsibility and meaning. Now he can help you.

Drawing on his own work as a clinical psychologist and on lessons from humanity's oldest myths and stories, Peterson offers twelve profound and realistic principles to live by. After all, as he reminds us, we each have a vital role to play in the unfolding destiny of the world.

Deep, rewarding and enlightening, 12 Rules for Life is a lifeboat built solidly for stormy seas: ancient wisdom applied to our contemporary problems.

In 12 Rules for Life, acclaimed public thinker and clinical psychologist Jordan B. Peterson offered an antidote to the chaos in our lives: eternal truths applied to modern anxieties. His insights have helped millions of readers and resonated powerfully around the world.

Now in this long-awaited sequel, Peterson goes further, showing that part of life's meaning comes from reaching out into the domain beyond what we know, and adapting to an ever-transforming world. While an excess of chaos threatens us with uncertainty, an excess of order leads to a lack of curiosity and creative vitality. Beyond Order therefore calls on us to balance the two fundamental principles of reality - order and chaos ­- and reveals the profound meaning that can be found on the path that divides them.

In times of instability and suffering, Peterson reminds us that there are sources of strength on which we can all draw: insights borrowed from psychology, philosophy, and humanity's greatest myths and stories. Drawing on the hard-won truths of ancient wisdom, as well as deeply personal lessons from his own life and clinical practice, Peterson offers twelve new principles to guide readers towards a more courageous, truthful and meaningful life.

The brilliant and provocative new book from one of the world’s foremost political writers.

In The War on the West, international bestselling author Douglas Murray asks: if the history of humankind is one of slavery, conquest, prejudice, genocide and exploitation, why are only Western nations taking the blame for it?

It’s become perfectly acceptable to celebrate the contributions of non-Western cultures, but discussing their flaws and crimes is called hate speech. What’s more it has become acceptable to discuss the flaws and crimes of Western culture, but celebrating their contributions is also called hate speech. Some of this is a much-needed reckoning; however, some is part of a larger international attack on reason, democracy, science, progress and the citizens of the West by dishonest scholars, hatemongers, hostile nations and human-rights abusers hoping to distract from their ongoing villainy.

In The War on the West, Douglas Murray shows the ways in which many well-meaning people have been lured into polarisation by lies, and shows how far the world’s most crucial political debates have been hijacked across Europe and America. Propelled by an incisive deconstruction of inconsistent arguments and hypocritical activism, The War on the West is an essential and urgent polemic that cements Murray’s status as one of the world’s foremost political writers.

Politicians, financiers and bureaucrats claim to believe in free competitive markets, yet they have built the most unfree market system ever created. In this Gilded Age, income is funnelled to the owners of property - financial, physical and intellectual - at the expense of society. Wages stagnate as labour markets are transformed by outsourcing, automation and the on-demand economy, generating more rental income while broadening the precariat. Now fully updated with an introduction examining the systemic issues exposed by Brexit and Covid-19, The Corruption of Capitalism argues that rentier capitalism is fostering revolt and presents a new income distribution system that would achieve the extinction of the rentier while encouraging sustainable growth.

The first single-volume anthology of Brecht's writings on both art and politics This volume contains new translations to extend our image of one of the twentieth century's most entertaining and thought provoking writers on culture, aesthetics and politics. Here are a cross-section of Brecht's wide-ranging thoughts which offer us an extraordinary window onto the concerns of a modern world in four decades of economic and political disorder. The book is designed to give wider access to the experience of a dynamic intellect, radically engaged with social, political and cultural processes. Each section begins with a short essay by the editors introducing and summarising Brecht's thought in the relevant year.

Philip Pettit has drawn together here a series of interconnected essays on three subjects to which he has made notable contributions. The first part of the book discusses the rule-following character of thought. The second considers how choice can be responsive to different sorts of factors, while still being under the control of thought and the reasons that thought marshals. The third examines the implications of this view of choice and rationality for the normative regulation of social behaviour.

When is it right to go to war? The most persuasive answer to this question has always been 'in self-defense'. In a penetrating new analysis, bringing together moral philosophy, political science, and law, David Rodin shows what's wrong with this answer. He proposes a comprehensive new theory of the right of self-defense which resolves many of the perplexing questions that have dogged both jurists and philosophers.

Thomas Hill presents a set of essays exploring the implications of basic Kantian ideas for practical issues. The first part of the book provides background in central themes in Kant's ethics; the second part discusses questions regarding human welfare; the third focuses on moral worth - the nature and grounds of moral assessment of persons as deserving esteem or blame. Hill shows moral, political and social philosophers just how valuable moral theory can be in addressing practical matters.

Some philosophers hold that trust grows fragile when people become too rational. They advocate a retreat from reason and a return to local, traditional values. Others hold that truly rational people are both trusting and trustworthy. Everything hinges on what we mean by 'reason' and 'rational'. If these are understood in an egocentric, instrumental fashion, then they are indeed incompatible with trust. With the help of game theory, Martin Hollis argues against that narrow definition and in favour of a richer, deeper notion of reason founded on reciprocity and the pursuit of the common good. Within that framework he reconstructs the Enlightenment idea of citizens of the world, rationally encountering, and at the same time finding their identity in, their multiple commitments to communities both local and universal.

Political theory is traditionally concerned with the justification and limits of state power. It asks: Can states legitimately direct and coerce non-consenting subjects? If they can, what limits, if any, constrain sovereign power? Public law is concerned with the justification and limits of judicial power. It asks: On what grounds can judges 'read down' or 'read in' statutory language against the apparent intention of the legislature? What limits, if any, are appropriate to these exercises of judicial power? This book develops an original constitutional theory of political authority that yields novel answers to both sets of questions. Fox-Decent argues that the state is a fiduciary of its people, and that this fiduciary relationship grounds the state's authority to announce and enforce law. The fiduciary state is conceived of as a public agent of necessity charged with guaranteeing a regime of secure and equal freedom. Whereas the social contract tradition struggles to ground authority on consent, the fiduciary theory explains authority with reference to the state's fiduciary obligation to respect legal principles constitutive of the rule of law. This obligation arises from the state's possession of irresistible public powers. The author begins with a discussion of Hobbes's conception of legality and the problem of discretionary power in administrative law. Drawing on Kant, he sketches a theory of fiduciary relations, and develops the argument through three parts. Part I shows that it is possible for the state to stand in a public fiduciary relationship to its people through a discussion of Crown-Native fiduciary relations recognized by Canadian courts. Part II sets out the theoretical underpinnings of the fiduciary theory of the state. Part III explores the implications of the fiduciary theory for administrative law and common law constitutionalism. The final chapter situates the theory within a broader philosophical discussion of the rule of law.

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. Plato's Republic has influenced Western philosophers for centuries, with its main focus on what makes a well-balanced society and individual.

Parallelwelten (parallel worlds) are worlds invisible to anyone not part of them. More and more, our reality is defined through digital products, which afford us infinitely more freedom than in the analogue past. But increased choice has also heightened our susceptibility to manipulation. Filter bubbles, fake news and alternative facts are just data that can be easily and cheaply manipulated. We now live in multiple realities that are increasingly losing touch with each other. Reality has been turned into bits. Or is it the other way around? The digital world increasingly defines, controls and governs the analogue world. Tech companies buy and sell the raw data of human experience. Our human behaviour is turned into data, which is processed into information and then manipulated and fed back into our information diet to control our behaviour. Data is the raw material, and information - not content - is king. Information even defines reality. This book investigates these parallel worlds from different angles: technological, corporate, scientific, cultural, economic and political. It doesn't view tech as an end in itself and something the rest of the world simply must adapt to. Instead, it asks how tech can solve real problems and make the world not a worse place, but a better one.

This thought-provoking book develops and elaborates on the artifact theory of law, covering a wide range of related theoretical and practical topics. Offering a range of perspectives that flesh out the artifact theory of law, it also introduces criticisms of previous formulations of the theory and inquires into its potential payoffs. Featuring international contributions from both noted and up-and-coming scholars in law and philosophy, the book is divided into two parts. The first part further explores and evaluates the concept of law as an artifact and analyses the background and theoretical basis of the theory. The second part comprises three sections on legal ontology, semantics and legal normativity, specifically in relation to law's artifactual nature. Providing cutting-edge insights at the intersection of law and philosophy, this book will appeal to scholars and students in philosophy of law, empirical legal studies, social ontology and the philosophy of society.

We live in a world that's constantly redesigned. Today's redesign is tomorrow's vintage look. But times of crisis rapidly change the picture. Suddenly, the whole world is in dire need of a proper redesign. From capitalism to communication, from work to supply chains, from cities to office space - it's hard to find an area of our lives that's not due for an overhaul. This is a challenge, but also a huge opportunity: to design a better world.

This book examines how ancient myths have developed and still survive in the collective public imagination in order to answer fundamental questions concerning the individual, society and historical heritage: On what basis do we form our opinion and develop attitudes about key issues? What is, and how should, the relationship between ourselves and nature be oriented? And what is the relationship between ourselves and others? Advancing a critical analysis of myths, Andrea Cerroni reveals the inconsistencies and consequences of our contemporary imagination, addressing neoliberalism in particular. The book elaborates a sociological theology from historical reconstruction, drawing together analytical concepts such as political theology and sociological imagination. It brings into focus a cultural matrix comprising ancient myths about nature, society and knowledge, in opposition to modern myths built around reductionism, individualism and relativism. Providing suggestions for deconstructing these myths, Contemporary Sociological Theology explores concepts of reflexive complexity, Gramscian democratic politics and a general relativisation of knowledge. Highly interdisciplinary, this book will be an insightful read for sociology and social policy scholars, for students with a particular interest in sociological theory, cultural sociology and innovation policy and for all those who seek awareness of the imagination that rules our world.

This is fundamentally a text about race and antiblack racism and their subsequent production of the problem of alienation (separation) of human beings from one another, from their bodies, and from themselves, globally, but with distinct and conscious focus on the historical context of apartheid and “post”-apartheid South Africa through the psychological lens of one of the country’s first and distinguished clinical psychologists, Noel Chabani Manganyi.

The book is a philosophically critical engagement with his work, and it constitutes, as it were, part of the author’s overarching project of attempting to reclaim and retrieve hitherto overlooked, ignored and invisibilised Black thinkers of the past and present. Although Manganyi has written over 10 books, the most important and popular being Being-Black-in-the-World (1973) and Alienation and the Body in Racist Society (1977), his ideas and work have, for one reason or another, been disregarded by mainstream South African psychology, let alone philosophy. The author foregrounds philosophy as also a culprit because Manganyi himself describes his work as that of “a psychologist who thinks and conceptualises psychological reality in a phenomenological way”.

Manganyi has the distinction of being the first Black clinical psychologist trained in South Africa as the title of his latest book, Apartheid and the Making of a Black Psychologist (2016) indicates. His body of published work reveals that from the beginning he has been involved in an attempt to contextualise his discipline, psychology, to the lived realities of his country, that is, apartheid racism and the alienation it produced on Black people. In other words, his main concern has been to utilise psychological discourse to address issues relevant to what can broadly be called “the Black lived-experience” in an antiblack racist society and their experience of the condition of alienation. As such he stood as a solitary figure whose voice was pushed to the margins of the psychological establishment, which was either silent about or complicit in the oppression of Blacks by the apartheid regime.

By exploring Manganyi’s serious concerns about apartheid racism and its attendant devastating production of alienation among Black people, the author argues that the problem of alienation produced by continuing rampant antiblack racism (even from the hands of a Black government) constitutes itself as a lingering problem of “post”-apartheid South Africa.

The author demonstrates that apartheid and alienation are not only conceptually synonymous but experientially related because what connects antiblack racism (apartheid) and alienation is the fact of our embodied existence in the world and that Black alienation manifests itself through the body. After all, antiblack racism is predicated on bodily appearance and body differences among human beings. Manganyi himself places a high premium on the body precisely because, in his view, the Black subjects have inherited a negative sociological schema of their black bodies as a result of which most of them experience themselves as somethings or objects outside of themselves, that is.

The value of revisiting Manganyi’s contribution can be underlined by reference to imperatives posed in recent incidents of antiblack racism and contemporary approaches to race and embodiment in disciplines such as philosophy (Black existentialism), psychology, sociology, cultural studies and identity politics.

This book's focus spans a wide variety of disciplines, including psychology, philosophy, political philosophy, critical race studies and post-colonialism, and therefore will be of interest to a broad cross-section of undergraduate and graduate students, scholars and activists.