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An impassioned manifesto from the author of Booker-winner God of Small Things, one of the most vocal campaigners in the world

Coates is the essential chronicler of black America, and his first memoir is a small and beautiful epic of growing up in 1980s Baltimore

For Marc Auge, best-selling author of Non-Places, the prevailing idea of ';the Future' rests on our present fears of the contemporary world. It is to the future that we look for redemption and progress; but it is also where we project our personal and apocalyptic anxieties. By questioning notions of certainty, truth, and totality, Auge finds ways to separate the future from our eternal, terrified present and liberates the mind to allow it to conceptualize our possible futures afresh.

"The Communist Manifesto", drafted on the eve of the 1848 revolutions, is a political text of literary interest and historical insight. It is presented here by Eric Hobsbawm who describes the century-and-a-half of history which has been both shaped and illuminated by the "Manifesto".

Three renowned contemporary theorists discuss their different perspectives for politics and thought.

Capitalism is going to endPeter Frase argues that increasing automation and a growing scarcity of resources, thanks to climate change, will bring it all tumbling down. In Four Futures, Frase imagines how this post-capitalist world might look, deploying the tools of both social science and speculative fiction to explore what communism, rentism, socialism and exterminism might actually entail.Could the current rise of real-life robocops usher in a world that resembles Ender's Game? And sure, communism will bring an end to material scarcities and inequalities of wealthbut there's no guarantee that social hierarchies, governed by an economy of ';likes,' wouldn't rise to take their place. A whirlwind tour through science fiction, social theory and the new technologies already shaping our lives, Four Futures is a balance sheet of the socialisms we may reach if a resurgent Left is successful, and the barbarisms we may be consigned to if those movements fail.

Offering a kaleidoscopic journey into the experiences of modernization, the dizzying social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world, this title dexterously interweaves an exploration of modernism in art, literature, and architecture.

Contemporary philosophy of science has paid close attention to the understanding of scientific practice, in contrast to the previous focus on scientific method. This work shows the deficiencies of many widespread ideas about the nature of knowledge. It argues that the only feasible explanation of any scientific success is a historical account.

In this debate political philosophers Fraser and Honneth set out to advance the discussion in political philosophy regarding the increasingly polarized political positions of redistribution or recognition, or more simply, class politics versus identity politics.

Jameson's study of the cultural, political and social implications of postmodernism.

This work examines what it means to be a philosopher and attacks the sterility of modern philosophy. Part One explores the nature and scope of philosophy and its relation to social and economic development. Part Two considers other forms of thought: science, art, literature and music.

The provocative political thinker asks if it will be with a bang or a whimperAfter years of ill health, capitalism is now in a critical condition. Growth has given way to stagnation; inequality is leading to instability; and confidence in the money economy has all but evaporated.In How Will Capitalism End?, the acclaimed analyst of contemporary politics and economics Wolfgang Streeck argues that the world is about to change. The marriage between democracy and capitalism, ill-suited partners brought together in the shadow of World War Two, is coming to an end. The regulatory institutions that once restrained the financial sector's excesses have collapsed and, after the final victory of capitalism at the end of the Cold War, there is no political agency capable of rolling back the liberalization of the markets.Ours has become a world defined by declining growth, oligarchic rule, a shrinking public sphere, institutional corruption and international anarchy, and no cure to these ills is at hand.

The all-encompassing embrace of world capitalism at the beginning of the twenty-first century was generally attributed to the superiority of competitive markets. Globalization had appeared to be the natural outcome of this unstoppable process. But today, with global markets roiling and increasingly reliant on state intervention to stay afloat, it has become clear that markets and states aren't straightforwardly opposing forces.In this groundbreaking work, Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin demonstrate the intimate relationship between modern capitalism and the American state, including its role as an ';informal empire' promoting free trade and capital movements. Through a powerful historical survey, they show how the US has superintended the restructuring of other states in favor of competitive markets and coordinated the management of increasingly frequent financial crises.The Making of Global Capitalism, through its highly original analysis of the first great economic crisis of the twenty-first century, identifies the centrality of the social conflicts that occur within states rather than between them. These emerging fault lines hold out the possibility of new political movements transforming nation states and transcending global markets.

';Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night,' wrote the poet Rupert Brooke. Before the age of electricity, the nighttime city was a very different place to the one we know todayhome to the lost, the vagrant and the noctambulant. Matthew Beaumont recounts an alternative history of London by focusing on those of its denizens who surface on the streets when the sun's down. If nightwalking is a matter of ';going astray' in the streets of the metropolis after dark, then nightwalkers represent some of the most suggestive and revealing guides to the neglected and forgotten aspects of the city.In this brilliant work of literary investigation, Beaumont shines a light on the shadowy perambulations of poets, novelists and thinkers: Chaucer and Shakespeare; William Blake and his ecstatic peregrinations and the feverish ramblings of opium addict Thomas De Quincey; and, among the lamp-lit literary throng, the supreme nightwalker Charles Dickens. We discover how the nocturnal city has inspired some and served as a balm or narcotic to others. In each case, the city is revealed as a place divided between work and pleasure, the affluent and the indigent, where the entitled and the desperate jostle in the streets.With a foreword and afterword by Will Self, Nightwalking is a captivating literary portrait of the writers who explore the city at night and the people they meet.