We've been told for years that the capitalist free market is a self-correcting perpetual growth machine in which sellers always find buyers, precluding any major crisis in the system. Then the credit crunch of August 2007 turned into the great crash of...

We don’t understand the reactionary mind. As a result, argues Mark Lilla in this timely book, the ideas and passions that shape today’s political dramas are unintelligible to us. The reactionary is anything but a conservative. He is as radical and modern...

Indebtedness as the universal condition of modern lifeThe credit crisis has pushed the whole world so far into the red that the gigantic sums involved defy understanding. On a human level, what does such an enormous degree of debt and insolvency mean? In...

A lively new translation of Rousseau's best-known work, accompanied by additional political writings"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains" are the famous opening words of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract, a work of political philosophy...

The Key Terms in Philosophy series offers clear, concise and accessible introductions to the central topics in philosophy. Each book offers a comprehensive overview of the key terms, concepts, thinkers and major works in the history of a key area of...

A New York Times bestseller—a dazzling and inspirational survey of how art can be found and appreciated in everyday lifeMichael Kimmelman, the prominent New York Times writer and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, is known as a deep...

Blossoming from a correspondence between Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder, Through Vegetal Being is an intense personal, philosophical, and political meditation on the significance of the vegetal for our lives, our ways of thinking, and our relations...

WITH A TWO-PART INTERVIEW BETWEEN MARILYNNE ROBINSON AND PRESIDENT OBAMA THAT FIRST APPEARED IN THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKSThe incomparable Marilynne Robinson has delivered an impassioned critique of contemporary society—our addiction to technology, our...

A philosopher makes the case for thinking of works of art as tools for investigating ourselvesIn Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, the philosopher and cognitive scientist Alva Noë argues that our obsession with works of art has gotten in the way of...

Why did some of the "best and brightest" of Weimar intellectuals advocate totalitarian solutions to the problems of liberal democratic, capitalist society? How did their "radical conservatism" contribute to the rise of National Socialism? What roles did...

Death Shall Be Dethroned is the “shadow book” of Los, a Chapter, Hélène Cixous tells us. It came along after Los, but it was always there "hidden" in her notebooks, in the Beethoven notebook, say, the one Jacques Derrida gave her. But when it tapped at...

Is contemporary continental philosophy making a break with Kant? The structures of knowledge, taken for granted since Kant�s Critique of Pure Reason, are now being called into question: the finitude of the subject, the phenomenal given, a priori...

The concept of democratic freedom refers to more than the kind of freedom embodied by political institutions and procedures. Democratic freedom can only be properly understood if it is grasped as the expression of a culture of freedom that encompasses an...

“You are about to enter a new genre, that of scientific fables, by which I don’t mean science fiction, or false stories about science, but, on the contrary, true ways of understanding how difficult it is to figure out what animals are up to.” —Bruno...

In the field of philosophy, Plato's view of rhetoric as a potentially treacherous craft has long overshadowed Aristotle's view, which focuses on rhetoric as an independent discipline that relates in complex ways to dialectic and logic and to ethics and...

Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer was one of the seminal works of political philosophy in recent decades. It was also the beginning of a series of interconnected investigations of staggering ambition and scope, investigating the deepest foundations of Western...

Originally published during the early part of the twentieth century, the Cambridge Manuals of Science and Literature were designed to provide concise introductions to a broad range of topics. They were written by experts for the general reader and...

With this timely commitment, Jacques Bidet unites the theories of arguably the world's two greatest emancipatory political thinkers. In this far-reaching and decisive text, Bidet examines Marxian and Foucauldian criticisms of capitalist modernity.For...

In anthropology as much as in popular imagination, kings are figures of fascination and intrigue, heroes or tyrants in ways presidents and prime ministers can never be. This collection of essays by two of the world’s most distinguished...

Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BCE–65 CE) was a Roman Stoic philosopher, dramatist, statesman, and advisor to the emperor Nero, all during the Silver Age of Latin literature. The Complete Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca is a fresh and compelling series of new...