Books published by Verso Books

Populism raises awkward question about modern forms of democracy. It often represents the ugly face of the people. It is neither the highest form of democracy nor its enemy. It is, rather, a mirror in which democracy may contemplate itself, warts and all, in a discovery of itself and what it lacks.

Debates the future of Europe in the light of the influence of the US and proposes new political understandings of the transatlantic alliance. This volume is intended to provide readers in the Anglophone world with the opportunity to gain access to the debate.

A critique of Afrocentrism that suggests an alternative historical understanding of Africa and its diaspora.

In this groundbreaking work, Ellen Meiksins Wood lays out her innovative approach to the history of political theory and traces the development of the Western tradition from classical antiquity through the late Middle Ages. Her ';social history' is a significant departure from other contextual interpretations. Treating canonical thinkers as passionately engaged human beings, Wood examines their ideas not simply in the context of political discourse but as creative responses to the social relations and conflicts of their time and place. From the Ancient Greek polis of Plato and Aristotle, through the Roman Republic of Cicero and the Empire of St. Paul and St. Augustine, to the medieval world of Averroes, Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham, Citizens to Lords offers a rich, dynamic exploration of thinkers and ideas that have stamped their imprint upon history and the present day.

Presents a gripping account of the Rwandan genocide, one of the most appalling events of the twentieth century. This indictment of almost all the key figures and institutions involved amounts to a catalogue of failures that only serves to sharpen the horror of a tragedy that could have been avoided.

This work looks anew at the belief that we are in an era of more intense violence than ever experienced before. It includes a demonstration of how the term "violence" is riddled with paradoxes. There is also an examination of the prospects for greater civility which rejects simple-minded pacifism.

A comprehensive biography of Walter Benjamin, an original and influential thinker of the 20th century. Brodersen stresses that during the Weimar Republic, Benjamin had been an important critic whose essays and reviews were published by the most distinguished papers of the time.

The themes of citizenship and community are today at the center of a fierce debate as both left and right try to mobilize them for their cause. For the left such notions are crucial in all the current attempts to redefine political struggle through extending and deepening democracy. But, argue the contributors to this volume, these concepts need to be made compatible with the pluralism that marks modern democracy. Rather than reject the liberal tradition, they argue, the aim should be to radicalize it.These essays set out to examine what types of ¿citizen¿ and ¿community¿ might be required by such a radical and plural democracy. From a range of disciplines and a fruitful diversity of theoretical perspectives, the contributors help us to address the following challenge: how to defend the greatest possible pluralism without destroying the very framework of the democratic political community.Despite their differences, a vision emerges from these essays which is sharply at odds both with the universalistic and rationalistic conception to be found in the work of Habermas, and with postmodern celebrations of absolute heterogeneity. For this book is an exploration of politics—of a politics where power, conflict and antagonism will always play a central role.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, Louis Althusser endured a period of mental instability during which he murdered his wife and was committed to a psychiatric hospital. Spanning this period, this fourth volume of political and philosophical writings reveals his wrestling with a series of theoretical problems to produce some of his work.

Colombia is the least understood of Latin American countries. This book explores its history of 150 years of political conflict, characterized by radical-popular mobilization and reactionary repression. It shows how patterns of political conflict after 1848 explain the war destroying Colombian lives, property, communities and territory.

Traces the debate sparked by the author's controversial effort to combine the social politics of equality and the cultural politics of difference, while probing the tensions between them.

This anthology offers a history of ACT UP for a new generation of activists and students. Divided into five sections, it explores the innovative use of civil rights era non-violent disobedience, media work and race and community building, to show how ACT UP has transformed activism.

This work explores the interrelation of Irish political history and Irish literature. It discusses a host of unusual topics, from Shaw and science and Irish attitudes, to nature and the question of language, and a full-scale investigation of the Celtic revival.

Some of the liveliest and most fruitful debates in recent historical writing have been about the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Rodney Hilton’s vast and distinguished body of work on medieval society has been a major reference point in these debates. Throughout his work the dominant theme has been his argument that the “prime mover” in the development of medieval society was the conflict between landlords and peasants over the appropriation of the peasants’ surplus product. This is the class conflict which gives the present volume its title.This wide-ranging collection, updated to include some of Hilton’s most recent writings, explores not only the peasant economy and peasant movements but also the nature of towns and their principal classes. Essays include a fascinating study of women traders in medieval England, and an account of medieval tax revolts—all informed by his lucid, undogmatic attention to broad theoretical issues as well as to empirical detail. This is a book not only for historians, but for anyone interested in the evolution of capitalism or the larger questions of historical process and social change.

A guide to the history of poetic debate and practice in 20th-century Latin America. The book argues that the possibility of universal emancipation is evoked in the transformation of language. Each chapter focuses on key texts by poets such as Cardenal, Neruda, Vallejo and the Andrades.

Attempts to provide a thorough, balanced account of Althusser's ideas and the issues he brought to the forefront of Marxist theory. This volume brings together international work in history, philosophy, economics, sociology and literary criticism, all significantly influenced by Althusser.

This work brings together trends of current thinking - Lacanian psychoanalysis, deconstruction, neo-Hegelianism and political philosophy - to illuminate the question of identity in the contemporary world. It also examines some of the new political identities which have emerged in recent decades.

This work provides a defence and illustration of deconstruction. Bennington demonstrates the possibility of clear and rigorous explication of deconstructive thought, and explores the political potential of deconstruction, via readings of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Freud, De Man and Lyotard.

Historians generally—and Marxists in particular—have presented the revolution of 1789 as a bourgeois revolution: one which marked the ascendance of the bourgeois as a class, the defeat of a feudal aristocracy, and the triumph of capitalism. Recent revisionist accounts, however, have raised convincing arguments against the idea of the bourgeois class revolution, and the model on which it is based.In this provocative study, George Comninel surveys existing interpretations of the French Revolution and the methodological issues these raise for historians. He argues that the weaknesses of Marxist scholarship originate in Marx’s own method, which has led historians to fall back on abstract conceptions of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Comninel reasserts the principles of historical materialism that found their mature expression in Das Kapital; and outlines an interpretation which concludes that, while the revolution unified the nation and centralized the French state, it did not create a capitalist society.

A survey of Foucault's corpus, from his early work on madness to the "History of Sexuality", this book portrays Foucault's as falling into neither the relativist nor the positivist categories, but rather as the inventor of a new analysis of modern mechanisms of control and exclusion.