Philosopher, cultural critic, and agent provocateur Slavoj Žižek constructs a fascinating new framework to look at the forces of violence in our world.Using history, philosophy, books, movies, Lacanian psychiatry, and jokes, Slavoj Žižek examines the...

In Psychiatric Power, the fourth volume in the collection of his groundbreaking lectures at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault addresses and expands upon the ideas in his seminal Madness and Civilization, sketching the genealogy of psychiatry and of...

Preface by Richard Howard. Translated by Richard Miller. This is Barthes's scrupulous literary analysis of Balzac's short story "Sarrasine."

Psyche: Inventions of the Other is the first publication in English of the twenty-eight essay collection Jacques Derrida published in two volumes in 1998 and 2003. Advancing his reflection on many issues, such as sexual difference, architecture, negative...

Plato is perhaps the most significant philosopher who ever lived and The Republic, composed in Athens in about 375 BC, is widely regarded as his most famous dialogue. Its discussion of the perfect city--and the perfect mind--laid the foundations for...

Just as speech can be acquired, so can it be lost. Individuals can forget words, phrases, even entire languages, and over the course of time speaking communities, too, let go of the tongues that were once theirs, as languages grow obsolescent and give...

A thought-provoking and timely book by a major American political theorist George Kateb has been one of the most respected and influential political theorists of the last quarter century. His work stands apart from that of many of his contemporaries and...

Walter Benjamin’s famous “Work of Art” essay sets out his boldest thoughts—on media and on culture in general—in their most realized form, while retaining an edge that gets under the skin of everyone who reads it. In this essay the visual arts of the...

In The Promise of Politics, Hannah Arendt examines the conflict between philosophy and politics. In particular, she shows how the tradition of Western political thought, which extends from Plato and Aristotle to its culmination in Marx, failed to account...

" Tocqueville: A Biography is a book of considerable importance, primarily because of its comprehensive treatment of both Tocqueville's public life and his private life--including many details necessarily absent from the two previous biographical essays...

Required reading for fans of Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia-the landmark investigation into Russian history and thoughtFew, if any, English-language critics have written as perceptively as Isaiah Berlin about Russian thought and culture. Russian...

The masterpiece of the father of modern philosophy A seminal text of modern philosophy, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781) made history by bringing together two opposing schools of thought: rationalism, which grounds all our knowledge in...

Bernard Rollin historically and conceptually examines the ideology that denies the relevance of ethics to science. Providing an introduction to basic ethical concepts, he discusses a variety of ethical issues relevant to science and how they are ignored,...

There are many ways of presenting the history of the left. In this concise and cogent survey, Darrow Schecter avoids trivializing struggles of the last 150 years, focusing on Marx's theories and the diverse struggles for human emancipation that have...

John Stuart Mill was the leading British philosopher of the nineteenth century and his famous essay Utilitarianism is the most influential statement of this philosophical approach. Henry West's introduction to utilitarianism serves as both a commentary...

In this innovative study of French political culture, the author re-examines the origins of modern republicanism through the writings and political practices of five key nineteenth-century intellectuals: Jules Barni, Charles Dupont-White, Emile Littre,...

Although Hannah Arendt is not primarily known as a Jewish thinker, she probably wrote more about Jewish issues than any other topic. As a young adult in Germany, she wrote about German Jewish history. After moving to France in 1933, she helped Jewish...

Plato's The Republic is widely acknowledged as the cornerstone of Western philosophy. Presented in the form of a dialogue between Socrates and three different interlocutors, it is an inquiry into the notion of a perfect community and the ideal individual...

What kind of turn is the turn to ethics? A Right turn? A Left turn? A wrong turn? A U-turn? Ethics is back in literary studies, philosophy, and political theory. The philosophers, political theorists, literary critics and physician whose essays are...

Where does philosophy, the oldest academic subject, stand at the beginning of the new millennium? This remarkable volume brings together leading figures from most major branches of the discipline to offer answers. What remains of the "linguistic turn"...