Books published by Verso Books

These essays from the 1970s mark the inception of the distinctive project that Jacques Rancire has pursued across forty years, with four interwoven themes: the study of working-class identity, of its philosophical interpretation, of ';heretical' knowledge and of the relationship between work and leisure. For the short-lived journal Les Rvoltes Logiques, Rancire wrote on subjects ranging across a hundred years, from the California Gold Rush to trade-union collaboration with fascism, from early feminism to the ';dictatorship of the proletariat,' from the respectability of the Paris Exposition to the disrespectable carousing outside the Paris gates. Rancire characteristically combines telling historical detail with deep insight into the development of the popular mind. In a new preface, he explains why such ';rude words' as ';people,' ';factory,' ';proletarians' and ';revolution' still need to be spoken.

Voices of Sartre, Lukacs, Chomsky, Harvey and others in conversation with NLR.

The American Crucible furnishes a vivid and authoritative history of the rise and fall ofslavery in the Americas. For over three centuries enslavement promoted the rise ofcapitalism in the Atlantic world. The New World became the crucible for a succession offateful experiments in colonization, silver mining, plantation agriculture, racialenslavement, colonial rebellion, slave witness and slave resistance. Slave produce raised upempires, fostered new cultures of consumption and financed the breakthrough to anindustrial order. Not until the stirrings of a revolutionary age in the 1780s was there the first publicchallenge to the ';peculiar institution'. An anti-slavery alliance then set the scene for greatacts of emancipation in Haiti in 1804, Britain in 18338, the United States in the 1860s,and Cuba and Brazil in the 1880s. In The American Crucible, Robin Blackburn arguesthat the anti-slavery movement forged many of the ideals we live by today.';The best treatment of slavery in the western hemisphere I know of. I think it shouldestablish itself as a permanent pillar of the literature.' Eric Hobsbawm

Stinging revolutionary critique of contemporary society.

Against the centre groundSince 1989, politics has been a contest to see who can best serve the needs of the market. In this urgent and wideranging case for the prosecution, Tariq Ali looks at the people and events that have informed this development across the world. It is an investigation that reaches its logical conclusion with the presidency of Donald Trump, the success of En Marche! in France, and the dominance of Merkel's Germany throughout Europe.In this fully updated edition of The Extreme Centre, Ali considers recent events that suggest, despite everything, that there is room for hope. He finds promise in Latin America and at the edges of Europe. Emerging parties in Scotland, Greece, and Spain, formed out of the 2008 crisis, are offering new promise for democracy. Even in the UK, with the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, there are indications that the hegemony of the centre may be weaker than imagined.