Verso: 737 books
General Intellects
Twenty-Five Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century
Language: English
Release Date: May 16, 2017
A guide to the thinkers and the ideas that will shape the future
What happened to the public intellectuals that used to challenge and inform us? Who is the Sartre or De Beauvoir of the internet age? General Intellects argues that we no longer have such singular figures, but we do have general...
The Pristine Culture of Capitalism
A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States
Language: English
Release Date: November 3, 2015
A historical essay on old regimes and modern states
In this lively and wide-ranging book, Ellen Meiksins Wood argues that what is supposed to have epitomized bourgeois modernity, especially the emergence of a “modern” state and political culture in Continental Europe, signaled the persistence...
Democracy Against Capitalism
Renewing Historical Materialism
Language: English
Release Date: March 1, 2016
Historian and political thinker Ellen Meiksins Wood argues that theories of “postmodern” fragmentation, “difference,” and con-tingency can barely accommodate the idea of capitalism, let alone subject it to critique. In this book she sets out to renew the critical program of historical materialism...
Late Victorian Holocausts
El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
Language: English
Release Date: June 17, 2002
Bestselling, magisterial melding of global environmental history and global political history. Winner of the World History Association Book Award.
Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis...
by Raymond Williams
Language: English
Release Date: May 29, 2018
Language: English
Release Date: May 29, 2018
Anniversary edition of the classic political manifesto
Urgently relevant to current arguments about the crisis of austerity, the 1968 manifesto set out a new agenda for socialist Britain, after the failure of the postwar consensus. It sought to change the nature of the state, to drive a wedge...
by Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch
Language: English
Release Date: July 10, 2018
Language: English
Release Date: July 10, 2018
No other country and no other period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. In Aesthetics and Politics the key texts of the great Marxist controversies over literature and art during these years are assembled...
by Walter Benjamin
Language: English
Release Date: October 28, 2014
Language: English
Release Date: October 28, 2014
Walter Benjamin was fascinated by the impact of new technology on culture, an interest that extended beyond his renowned critical essays. From 1927 to ’33, he wrote and presented something in the region of eighty broadcasts using the new medium of radio. Radio Benjamin gathers the surviving transcripts,...
The Fall of the Turkish Model
How the Arab Uprisings Brought Down Islamic Liberalism
Language: English
Release Date: March 8, 2016
The brief rise and precipitous fall of “Islamic liberalism”
Just a few short years ago, the “Turkish Model” was being hailed across the world. The New York Times gushed that prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) had “effectively integrated...
What Does the Ruling Class Do When it Rules?
State Apparatuses and State Power under Feudalism, Capitalism and Socialism
Language: English
Release Date: March 1, 2016
The intricate practices of the elite and how they maintain their dominance.
In his new book, Göran Therborn – author of the now standard comparative work on classical sociology and historical materialism, Science, Class and Society – looks at successive state structures in an arrestingly fresh...
The Bonds of Debt
Borrowing Against the Common Good
Language: English
Release Date: January 31, 2017
Indebtedness as the universal condition of modern life
The credit crisis has pushed the whole world so far into the red that the gigantic sums involved defy understanding. On a human level, what does such an enormous degree of debt and insolvency mean? In this timely book, cultural critic Richard...
Prisoners of the American Dream
Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class
Language: English
Release Date: July 24, 2018
A brilliant and comprehensive study of class struggle in the United States
Prisoners of the American Dream is Mike Davis’s brilliant exegesis of a persistent and major analytical problem for Marxist historians and political economists: Why has the world’s most industrially advanced nation...
Beyond Black and White
From Civil Rights to Barack Obama
Language: English
Release Date: November 8, 2016
Highly acclaimed dissection of the “new racism,” from one of the greatest radical black intellectuals of our time
Many in the United States, including Barack Obama, have called for a “post-racial” politics; yet race still divides the country politically, economically, and socially....
by Jean Baudrillard
Language: English
Release Date: January 7, 2014
Language: English
Release Date: January 7, 2014
‘Watching the president’s Christmas message produces this necropolar, white-mass sensation. Seeing the video broadcast of the Christmas service in the cathedral itself, with these pathetic screens and the young worshippers slumped around them here and there, you tell yourself that God and religion...
Alternatives to Capitalism
Proposals for a Democratic Economy
Language: English
Release Date: May 24, 2016
What would a viable free and democratic society look like? Poverty, exploitation, instability, hierarchy, subordination, environmental exhaustion, radical inequalities of wealth and power—it is not difficult to list capitalism’s myriad injustices. But is there a preferable and workable alternative?
Alternatives...