Books published by Verso Books

This text examines documentary in print, photography and film from the 1930s to the 1990s, using the lens of feminist film theory as well as scholarship on race, class and gender. Rabinowitz discusses the ways in which the media have shaped the truth over the decades.

The debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism, originally published in Science and Society in the early 1950s, is one of the most famous episodes in the development of Marxist historiography since the war. It ranged such distinguished contributors as Maurice Dobb, Paul Sweezy, Kohachiro Takahshi and Christopher Hill against each other in a common, critical discussion. Verso has now published the complete texts of the original debate, to which subsequent discussion has returned again and again, together with significant new materials produced by historians since then. These include articles on the same themes by such French and Italian historians as Georges Lefebvre and Giuliano Procacci. What was the role of trade in the Dark Ages? How did feudal rents evolve during the Middle Ages? Where should the economic origins of mediaeval towns be sought? Why did serfdom eventually disappear in Western Europe? What was the exact relationship between city and countryside in the transition from feudalism to capitalism? How should the importance of overseas expansion be assessed for the 'primitive accumulation of capital' in Europe? When should the first bourgeois revolutions be dated, and which social classes participated in them? All these, and many other vital questions for every student of mediaeval and modern history, are widely and freely explored.Finally, for this Verso edition, Rodney Hilton, author of Bond Men Made Free, has written a special introductory essay, reconsidering and summarising relevant scholarship in the two decades since the publication of the original discussion. The result is a book that will be essential for history courses, and fascinating for the general reader.

Raymond Williams’s work was always concerned with the relation between culture and society. This book focuses on specific texts and authors, exploring the historical and cultural sources of their particular forms of writing. In it, Williams examines dramatic form and language in Racine and Shakespeare; the politics of fiction in the English Jacobin novel; David Hume and Charles Dickens and the changing characteristics of English prose; Robert Tressell, The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, and the role of region and class in the English novel. Also included are Williams’s reflections on the rise of English studies, on their crisis as the literary traditions of Cambridge University were beset by the ‘structuralist controversy’, and on the wider implications of this redefinition of the critical field.

A remarkable history of the formation of Marxist thought

A forceful advocacy of a psychoanalysis that is social not individualist in its view of human life, The Good Society and the Inner World surveys the implications of recent psychoanalytical work for political and cultural thought.Michael Rustin identifies in the work of Melanie Klein and her successors one of the most theoretically powerful and clinically rigorous traditions in psychoanalysis. The first part of the book examines the political meanings of Kleinian concepts, demonstrating their relevance for a radical agenda and to the understanding of many social issues, including racism. A second section is sociological in focus, looking at the organization of the analytic profession and defending its methods in the light of recent work in the philosophy of science. This explores cur-rent developments in psychoanalysis, describing its origins in modernism and outlining the traces of post-modernist thought in the work of Wilfred Bion. The final section of the book addresses issues of cultural theory and offers a radical revision of established psychoanalytical views on aesthetics.This wide-ranging and accessible book will be of use both to the analytic profession and to all those who wish to examine the politics and culture of psychoanalysis.

Reification is the process by which an intangible idea is transformed into an identifiable "thing". This book opens up a new formulation of the theory, claiming that, in this age of late capitalism, reification itself is inseparable from the anxiety people feel towards it.

A bold proposal for new thinking on education: the formation of a National Education Service

Pocket colour manifesto for a new futuristic feminism

Japan: The "other", lesser-known 1968

Everything you have been told about creativity is wrong.

How the Feminist Five and the rise of China's feminist movement are challenging China's authoritarian government

How do mass protests become an organized activist collective? Crowds and Party channels the energies of the riotous crowds who took to the streets in the past five years into an argument for the political party. Rejecting the emphasis on individuals and multitudes, Jodi Dean argues that we need to rethink the collective subject of politics. When crowds appear in spaces unauthorized by capital and the statesuch as in the Occupy movement in New York, London and across the worldthey create a gap of possibility. But too many on the Left remain stuck in this beautiful moment of promisethey argue for more of the same, further fragmenting issues and identities, rehearsing the last thirty years of left-wing defeat. In Crowds and Party, Dean argues that previous discussions of the party have missed its affective dimensions, the way it operates as a knot of unconscious processes and binds people together. Dean shows how we can see the party as an organization that can reinvigorate political practice.

Argues that the liberal idea of the end of history, declared by Francis Fukuyama during the 1990s, has had to die twice.

A iA ek analyses the end of the world at the hands of the 'four riders of the apocalypse'.