Author: Marina Vishmidt File Type: pdf In Speculation as a Mode of Production Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital, Marina Vishmidt offers a new perspective on one of the main categories of capitalist life in the historical present. Writing not under the shadow but in the spirit of Adornos negative dialectic, her work pursues speculation through its contested terrains of philosophy, finance, and art, to arrive at the most detailed analysis that we now possess of the role of speculation in the shaping of subjectivity by value relations. Featuring detailed critical discussions of recent tendencies in the artistic representation of labour, and a brilliant reconstruction of the philosophical concept of the speculative from its origins in German Romanticism, Speculation as a Mode of Production is an essential, widescreen theorisation of capitals drive to self-expansion, and an urgent corrective to the narrow and one-sided periodisations to which it is most commonly subjected. **

Author: Seraphim Seferiades File Type: pdf This volume of cutting-edge research comparatively analyzes violent protest and rioting, furthering our understanding of this increasingly prevalent form of claim making. Hank Johnston and Seraphim Seferiades bring together internationally recognized experts in the field of protest studies and contentious politics to analyze the causes and trajectories of violence as a protest tactic. Crossnational comparisons from North America, Britain, France, Germany, Greece, Iran, Thailand, and elsewhere contribute to the volumes theoretical elaboration, while several case studies add depth to the discussion. This title will be of key importance to scholars across the social sciences, including sociology, political science, geography and criminology. Johnston and Seferiadess exciting book is a significant contribution to the study of rioting and violent protest in the contemporary neoliberal state. **

Author: Mark Blyth File Type: mobi Governments today in both Europe and the United States have succeeded in casting government spending as reckless wastefulness that has made the economy worse. In contrast, they have advanced a policy of draconian budget cuts--austerity--to solve the financial crisis. We are told that we have all lived beyond our means and now need to tighten our belts. This view conveniently forgets where all that debt came from. Not from an orgy of government spending, but as the direct result of bailing out, recapitalizing, and adding liquidity to the broken banking system. Through these actions private debt was rechristened as government debt while those responsible for generating it walked away scot free, placing the blame on the state, and the burden on the taxpayer. That burden now takes the form of a global turn to austerity, the policy of reducing domestic wages and prices to restore competitiveness and balance the budget. The problem, according to political economist Mark Blyth, is that austerity is a very dangerous idea. First of all, it doesnt work. As the past four years and countless historical examples from the last 100 years show, while it makes sense for any one state to try and cut its way to growth, it simply cannot work when all states try it simultaneously all we do is shrink the economy. In the worst case, austerity policies worsened the Great Depression and created the conditions for seizures of power by the forces responsible for the Second World War the Nazis and the Japanese military establishment. As Blyth amply demonstrates, the arguments for austerity are tenuous and the evidence thin. Rather than expanding growth and opportunity, the repeated revival of this dead economic idea has almost always led to low growth along with increases in wealth and income inequality. Austerity demolishes the conventional wisdom, marshaling an army of facts to demand that we recognize austerity for what it is, and what it costs us.ReviewAusterity is an economic policy strategy, but is also an ideology and an approach to economic management freighted with politics. In this book Mark Blyth uncovers these successive strata. In doing so he wields his spade in a way that shows no patience for fools and foolishness. --Barry Eichengreen, George C. Pardee and Helen N. Pardee Professor of Economics and Political Science University of California, Berkeley Of all the zombie ideas that have been reanimated in the wake of the global financial crisis, austerity is the most dangerous. Mark Blyth shows how austerity created the disasters of the 1930s, and contributed to the descent of the world into global war. He shows how European austerity policies have prevented any recovery from the crisis of 2009, while rescuing and protecting the banks and financial institutions that created the crisis. An essential guide for anyone who wants to understand the current depression. --John Quiggin, author of author of Zombie Economics Most fascinating is the authors discussion of the historical underpinnings of austerity, first formulated by Enlightenment thinkers Locke, Hume and Adam Smith, around the (good) idea of parsimony and the (bad) idea of debt. Ultimately, writes Blyth, austerity is a zombie economic idea because it has been disproven time and again, but it just keeps coming. A clear explanation of a complicated, and severely flawed, idea. --* KIRKUS REVIEW * Mark Blyths fascinating analysis guides the reader through the historical ideology which has classified debt as problematic. In doing so he outlines the relevance of century-old debates between the advocates and opponents of laissez faire, and explains why, after a brief reemergence in 2008-09, and despite the lack of evidence supporting austerity, the world turned its back on Keynesian policies. --Robert Skidelsky, author of Keynes The Return of the Master Among all the calamities spawned by the global financial crisis, none was as easily avoidable as the idea that austerity policies were the only way out. In this feisty book, noted political scientist Mark Blyth covers new territory by recounting the intellectual history of this failed idea and how it came to exert a hold on the imagination of economists and politicians. It is an indication of the sorry state of macroeconomics that it takes a political scientist to expose so thoroughly one of the economics professions most dangerous delusions. --Dani Rodrik, Rafiq Hariri Professor of International Political Economy, The John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University Essential reading... The economy is much too important to leave to economists. We need to understand how ideas shape it, and Blyths new book provides an excellent starting point.--Washington Monthly An important polemic... valid and compelling.--Lawrence Summers, Financial Times splendid new book. Martin Wolf, Financial TimesAbout the AuthorMark Blyth is Professor of International Political Economy at Brown University. He is the author of Great Transformations Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century.

Author: Marcel Detienne File Type: pdf The human race is all too pre-disposed to think in terms of us and them. Europeans have always laid claim to the Ancient Greeks they are our Greeks, our ancestors but their legacy reaches further than we could ever imagine. Their influence stretches from the Japanese to the Cossacks, from Ancient Rome to Indonesia. In this path-breaking new volume, the great French historian Marcel Detienne focuses on Eurocentric approaches which have trumpeted the Greeks and their democratic practices as our ancestors and the superiority of the Western tradition to which they gave rise. He argues that such approaches can be seen as narrow-minded and often covertly nationalistic. Detienne advocates what he calls comparative anthropology which sets out to illuminate the comparisons and contrasts between the beliefs, practices and institutions of different ancient and modern societies. Detienne aims to put the Greeks in perspective among other civilisations and also to look afresh at questions of political structure, literacy, nationhood, intellect and mythology. The work of Marcel Detienne has made an enormous impact on our thinking about the Greeks in areas such as rationality, literacy and mythology, and in this new volume he challenges once again our conception of the Greeks and their impact on the modern world.ReviewRuthlessly, wittily, almost disarmingly, Detienne sets about discovering mythical emperors in all their nakedness, slaughtering sacred nationalistic cows and dethroning alleged democratic ancestors.Paul Cartledge, *Times Higher Education Supplement*Through his brilliant studies of Greek myth, religion and thought, Marcel Detienne has revolutionized our understanding of Greco-Roman antiquity. In this important new book the reader is treated to an exhilarating overview of Detiennes current thinking on the problems to which his extraordinarily fertile career has been devoted. It is a breathtaking intellectual Odyssey.Sir Geoffrey Lloyd, *Needham Research Institute*Book DescriptionThe human race is all too pre-disposed to think in terms of us and them. Europeans have always laid claim to the Ancient Greeks - they are our Greeks, our ancestors - but their legacy reaches further than we could ever imagine. Their influence stretches from the Japanese to the Cossacks, from Ancient Rome to Indonesia. In this path-breaking new volume, the great French historian Marcel Detienne focuses on Eurocentric approaches which have trumpeted the Greeks and their democratic practices as our ancestors and the superiority of the Western tradition to which they gave rise. He argues that such approaches can be seen as narrow-minded and often covertly nationalistic. Detienne advocates what he calls comparative anthropology which sets out to illuminate the comparisons and contrasts between the beliefs, practices and institutions of different ancient and modern societies. Detienne aims to put the Greeks in perspective among other civilisations and also to look afresh at questions of political structure, literacy, nationhood, intellect and mythology. The work of Marcel Detienne has made an enormous impact on our thinking about the Greeks in areas such as rationality, literacy and mythology, and in this new volume he challenges once again our conception of the Greeks and their impact on the modern world.