Books in the Polemics series

This book presents an accessible and carefully argued challenge to conventional approaches to thinking about free speech. Anthony Leaker provides a richer, more nuanced understanding of what free speech is and how it operates, explaining how free speech arguments are situated within a broader liberal humanist ideology.

This book explores the rise of a new militarism in America since the end of the Cold War. Carl Boggs deftly shows how the culture of militarism is transforming American society and foreign policy, leading Americans to dominate the world without examining the consequences.

Media Wars is a timely assessment of what we are and are not being told in the most important story of our new century.

Argues that ordinary people exercise real power in American politics mainly at those extraordinary moments when they rise up in anger and hope, defy the rules that ordinarily govern their daily lives, and by doing so, disrupt the workings of the institutions in which they are enmeshed.

Freud's Foes, the latest title in the Polemics series, addresses Freud's fiercest contemporary critics. The book defends psychoanalysis (while accepting that it has inherent flaws) and argues that although today's 'foes' pose as daring savants, they are only the latest wave of critiques that psychoanalysis has encountered since its controversial birth and their arguments are easily debunked.

In this bold new book, political scientist John Ehrenberg critically analyzes the rise of an ideologically coherent Right. He dissects their themes of military weakness, moral decay, racial anxiety, and hostility to social welfare to reveal their central organizing objective of protecting wealth and assaulting equality.

Argues that the fundamental principles of American democracy not only allow but require the legalisation of same-sex marriage. In addition to explaining the theoretical issues at stake, this book provides a short history of marriage, disentangling its interpersonal, communal, religious and civil components.

This book presents an accessible and carefully argued challenge to conventional approaches to thinking about free speech. Anthony Leaker provides a richer, more nuanced understanding of what free speech is and how it operates, explaining how free speech arguments are situated within a broader liberal humanist ideology.

Kidnapped Democracy uses the metaphor of captivity to illustrate the differences and similarities between conventional kidnappings and the hijacking of a political system.