Books published by Verso Books

A war that has killed over a million Iraqis was a ';humanitarian intervention', the US army is a force for liberation, and the main threat to world peace is posed by Islam.Those are the arguments of a host of liberal commentators, ranging from Christopher Hitchens to Kanan Makiya, Michael Ignatieff, Paul Berman, and Bernard-Henri Levy. In this critical intervention, Richard Seymour unearths the history of liberal justifications for empire, showing how savage policies of conquestincluding genocide and slaveryhave been retailed as charitable missions.From the Cold War to the War on Terror, Seymour argues that the colonial tropes of ';civilization' and ';progress' still shape liberal pro-war discourse, and still conceal the same bloody realities.

In this definitive historical investigation, Italian author and philosopher Domenico Losurdo argues that from the outset liberalism, as a philosophical position and ideology, has been bound up with the most illiberal of policies: slavery, colonialism, genocide, racism and snobbery.Narrating an intellectual history running from the eighteenth through to the twentieth centuries, Losurdo examines the thought of preeminent liberal writers such as Locke, Burke, Tocqueville, Constant, Bentham, and Sieys, revealing the inner contradictions of an intellectual position that has exercised a formative influence on todays politics. Among the dominant strains of liberalism, he discerns the counter-currents of more radical positions, lost in the constitution of the modern world order.

Mass protest movements in disparate places such as Greece,Argentina, and the United States ultimately share an agendatoraise the question of what democracy should mean. These horizontalistmovements, including Occupy, exercise and claim participatorydemocracy as the ground of revolutionary social change today.Written by two international activist intellectuals and based on extensiveinterviews with movement participants in Spain, Venezuela,Argentina, across the United States, and elsewhere, this book is anexpansive portrait of the assemblies, direct democracy forums, andorganizational forms championed by the new movements, as wellas an analytical history of direct and participatory democracy fromancient Athens to Zuccotti Park. The new movements put forwardthe idea that liberal democracy is not democratic, nor was it ever.