Books published by Verso Books

This work is based on John Roemer's model of "coupon socialism". Roemer's model aims to combine the market with a commitment to equality through a radical proposal: all citizens would receive an equal number of coupons with which to buy ownership rights (voting, dividends) in companies.

This comprehensive survey of the field of postcolonial theory presents the complex work of the principal representatives of postcolonial theory, Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said and Homi Bhabha. It considers the criticisms they have faced, from an alleged Eurocentrism to an obfuscatory prose style.

This polemical work presents to the English-speaking world one of the most original philosophical thinkers to have emerged within post-war Europe. Sebastiano Timpanaro is an Italian classical philologist by training, an author of scholarly studies on the nineteenth-century poet Leopardi, and a Marxist by conviction. With great force and wit, On Materialism sets itself against what it sees as the virtually universal tendency within western Marxism since the war, to dissociate historical materialism from biological or physical materialism. Whereas the philosophical legacy of the later Engels has been decried by most prominent Marxists since the 1920s, Timpanaro eloquently defends its essential purpose and relevance, by unfashionably re-emphasising the permanent weight of nature within history. In doing so, he returns to the heritage of Lucretius and Leopardi, and argues for a more consistent materialism that is at once more pessimistic and more hedonistic than any other contemporary version of Marxism. Timpanaro emphasises the insuperable limits of frailty and mortality as unalterable conditions of society whose transformation is the goal of revolutionary socialism. Timpanaro vigorously attacks what he regards as the widespread entente between a diluted Marxism and a fashionable idealism in the west, whether in the form of an ¿existentialist¿ or a ¿structuralist¿ union of the two. The aversion of the former to the work of Darwin and Engels receives a spirited refutation, no less than the indulgence of the latter towards the work of Saussure or Levi-Strauss. A special introduction written for this English edition deals with the phenomenon of the recent revival of ¿vulgar materialism¿ in the Anglo-Saxon world, in the fields of psychology and anthropology, and its relationship to racism. On Materialism will be one of the central focuses of cultural and intellectual controversy within and beyond Marxism in the next decade.

Raymond Williams made a central contribution to the intellectual culture of the Left in the English-speaking world. He was also one of the key figures in the foundation of cultural studies in Britain, which turned critical skills honed on textual analysis to the examination of structures and forms of resistance apparent in everyday life. Politics and Letters is a volume of interviews with Williams, conducted by New Left Review, designed to bring into clear focus the major theoretical and political issues posed by his work. Introduced by writer Geoff Dyer, Politics and Letters ranges across Williams's biographical development, the evolution of his cultural theory and literary criticism, his work on dramatic forms and his fiction, and an exploration of British and international politics.

Analyses of bureaucratic power and privilege have an academic pedigree but have also long preoccupied socialists. The collapse of communist rule in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe puts to a new test the classical theories concerning the relationship between bureaucracy and class. Power and Money is a timely contribution to this renewal of theory, exploring the social and historical roots of bureaucracy, both within the capitalist state and in workers’ mass organizations.Ernest Mandel draws on archival and contemporary accounts in an analysis of both capitalist administration and the ideology and practice of bureaucratic dictatorship in the communist bloc. He measures the actual performance of western and eastern societies against the forecasts of Lenin and Trotsky, Ludwig von Mises and Roberto Michels, or the more recent reflections of Amitai Etzioni and Alvin Gouldner. This lucid study challenges those theories—Stalinist, Weberian or social-democratic—which claim that an autonomous officialdom is a necessary feature of modern societies. It also furnishes a perceptive account of the specific dynamics of communist and post-communist society.

Argues that by meeting the vast administrative challenge of the British Empire - thorough maps and surveys, censuses and statistics - Victorian administrators developed a new symbiosis of knowledge and power. The book draws on works by Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells and Bram Stoker.

Ours is an era marked by extraordinary human migrations, with some 200 million people alive today having moved from their country of origin. The political reaction in Europe and the United States has been to raise the drawbridge: immigrant workers are needed, but no longer welcome. So migrants die in trucks or drown en route; they are murdered in smuggling operations or ruthlessly exploited in illegal businesses that make it impossible for the abused to seek police help. More than 15,000 people have died in the last twenty years trying to circumvent European entry restrictions.In this beautifully written book, Jeremy Harding draws haunting portraits of the migrants and anti-immigrant zealots he encountered in his investigations in Europe and on the USMexico border. Harding's painstaking research and global perspective identify the common characteristics of immigration policy across the rich world and raise pressing questions about the future of national boundaries and universal values.

This text offers a user's guide to the philosophical work of Roy Bhaskar. The author expounds the main concepts of Bhaskar's work and defends his theory of knowledge. He explores Bhaskar's understanding of the human world and the ways in which it is studied.

This collection invites a wide range of academics who have been influenced by Stuart Hall's writing to contribute not a memoir or a eulogy but a piece of social, cultural or historical analysis which develops the field of thinking opened up by his contribution.

An extraordinary montage of sound-bites and testimonies

Ike Okonta and Oronto Douglas present a devastating case against Shell and the Nigerian military, demonstrating (in contrast to Shell's public profile) how irresponsible practices have degraded land and left a people destitute. Compelling and angry, it draws attention to a grave injustice.

In this critique of both traditional and Marxist notions of feudalism and of the pre-capitalist state, John Haldon considers the configuration of state and social relations in medieval Europe and Mughal India, as well as in Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire.

This collection of essays questions the often ambivalent place of Africa in the imaginations, cultures and politics of its American and British descendants. It combines literary analysis, history, biography, cultural studies, critical theory and politics.

Never before has imperialist victory or defeat so much depended on a struggle for hegemony in the world of images; and never before has the dominant world power been subject to real catastrophe in the realm of the Spectacle, as happened to the US on September 11.

The texts in this volume offer critical assessments of a number of leading figures in contemporary intellectual life, who are in different ways thinkers at the intersection of history and politics. They include Roberto Unger, advocate of plasticity; the historians of antiquity and of revolution, Geoffrey de Ste. Croix and Isaac Deutscher; the philosophers of liberalism, Norberto Bobbio and Isaiah Berlin; the sociologists of power, Michael Mann and W.G. Runciman; the exponents of national identity, Andreas Hillgruber and Fernand Braudel; the ironists of science, Max Weber and Ernest Gellner; Carlo Ginzburg, explorer of cultural continuity, and Marshall Berman, herald of modernity. A concluding chapter looks at the idea of the end of history, recently advanced by Francis Fukuyama, in its successive versions from the nineteenth century to the present, and considers the situation of socialism today in the light of it.