Books in the Critical Theory and Contemporary Society series

The first English-language collection of the work of Europe's top legal sociologists, introducing his influential theories of societal constitutionalism and legal autopoiesis. -- .

This volume reassesses the nature of the current global economic crisis and its implication for the 21st century, through the unique lens of Marx''s theory of the value-form as the unconscious matrix of modern society.Going beyond orthodox Marxist and postmodernist accounts, the author offers fresh new readings of Marx, Benjamin, Foucault, and Zi

The book explores critically disabling contexts using disability studies and phenomenology.

This Critical Theory and Contemporary Society volume offers a critical review of epistemological issues in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. -- .

This Critical Theory and Contemporary Society volume analyzes how cinema can help critical theory repoliticize culture and society.

Rearticulating critical theory with a contemporary focus, this book investigates how the conditions of democratic statehood have changed at key historical intervals since 1945. It argues that a sociological approach is needed to address conceptual deficits and explain how the mechanisms of democratic statehood can be updated today. -- .

This book examines the vital role of affect and feeling within the work of the early Frankfurt School. The author investigates a range of concepts - including melancholia, hope, (un)happiness, objects, and mimesis - and argues that a contemporary reading of critical theory needs to accommodate an adequate understanding of affect. -- .

This is the first study to make a detail case for the Frankfurt School's relevance to understanding contemporary populism. It reconstructs their analysis of 'modern demagogy' and demonstrates its advantages over orthodox 'populism studies' and the work of Laclau. The book also extends the Institute's analysis to assess 'counter-demagogic' forces. -- .

This book describes how human rights have given rise to a vision of benevolent governance that, if fully realised, would be antithetical to individual freedom. It describes human rights' evolution into a grand but nebulous project, rooted in compassion, with the overarching aim of improving universal welfare by defining the conditions of human well-being and imposing obligations on the state and other actors to realise them. This gives rise to a form of managerialism, preoccupied with measuring and improving the 'human rights performance' of the state, businesses and so on. The ultimate result is the 'governmentalisation' of a pastoral form of global human rights governance, in which power is exercised for the general good, moulded by a complex regulatory sphere which shapes the field of action for the individual at every turn. This, unsurprisingly, does not appeal to rights-holders themselves.