Download or read book The Road to Unfreedom written by Timothy Snyder and published by Crown. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of On Tyranny comes a stunning new chronicle of the rise of authoritarianism from Russia to Europe and America. “A brilliant analysis of our time.”—Karl Ove Knausgaard, The New Yorker With the end of the Cold War, the victory of liberal democracy seemed final. Observers declared the end of history, confident in a peaceful, globalized future. This faith was misplaced. Authoritarianism returned to Russia, as Vladimir Putin found fascist ideas that could be used to justify rule by the wealthy. In the 2010s, it has spread from east to west, aided by Russian warfare in Ukraine and cyberwar in Europe and the United States. Russia found allies among nationalists, oligarchs, and radicals everywhere, and its drive to dissolve Western institutions, states, and values found resonance within the West itself. The rise of populism, the British vote against the EU, and the election of Donald Trump were all Russian goals, but their achievement reveals the vulnerability of Western societies. In this forceful and unsparing work of contemporary history, based on vast research as well as personal reporting, Snyder goes beyond the headlines to expose the true nature of the threat to democracy and law. To understand the challenge is to see, and perhaps renew, the fundamental political virtues offered by tradition and demanded by the future. By revealing the stark choices before us--between equality or oligarchy, individuality or totality, truth and falsehood--Snyder restores our understanding of the basis of our way of life, offering a way forward in a time of terrible uncertainty.
Download or read book Unfreedom written by Jared Hardesty and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2016-04-26 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2016 Reveals the lived experience of slaves in eighteenth-century Boston Instead of relying on the traditional dichotomy of slavery and freedom, Hardesty argues we should understand slavery in Boston as part of a continuum of unfreedom. In this context, African slavery existed alongside many other forms of oppression, including Native American slavery, indentured servitude, apprenticeship, and pauper apprenticeship. In this hierarchical and inherently unfree world, enslaved Bostonians were more concerned with their everyday treatment and honor than with emancipation, as they pushed for autonomy, protected their families and communities, and demanded a place in society. Drawing on exhaustive research in colonial legal records – including wills, court documents, and minutes of governmental bodies – as well as newspapers, church records, and other contemporaneous sources, Hardesty masterfully reconstructs an eighteenth-century Atlantic world of unfreedom that stretched from Europe to Africa to America. By reassessing the lives of enslaved Bostonians as part of a social order structured by ties of dependence, Hardesty not only demonstrates how African slaves were able to decode their new homeland and shape the terms of their enslavement, but also tells the story of how marginalized peoples engrained themselves in the very fabric of colonial American society.
Download or read book A Spectrum of Unfreedom written by Leslie Peirce and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-30 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Without the labor of the captives and slaves, the Ottoman empire could not have attained and maintained its strength in early modern times. With Anatolia as the geographic focus, Leslie Peirce searches for the voices of the unfree, drawing on archives, histories written at the time, and legal texts. Unfree persons comprised two general populations: slaves and captives. Mostly household workers, slaves lived in a variety of circumstances, from squalor to luxury. Their duties varied with the status of their owner. Slave status might not last a lifetime, as Islamic law and Ottoman practice endorsed freeing one’s slave. Captives were typically seized in raids, generally to disappear, their fates unknown. Victims rarely returned home, despite efforts of their families and neighbors to recover them. The reader learns what it was about the Ottoman environment of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that offered some captives the opportunity to improve the conditions of their bondage. The book describes imperial efforts to fight against the menace of captive-taking despite the widespread corruption among the state’s own officials, who had their own interest in captive labor. From the fortunes of captives and slaves the book moves to their representation in legend, historical literature, and law, where, fortunately, both captors and their prey are present.
Download or read book Unfreedom written by Jared Ross Hardesty and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2018-03-06 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2016 Reveals the lived experience of slaves in eighteenth-century Boston Instead of relying on the traditional dichotomy of slavery and freedom, Hardesty argues we should understand slavery in Boston as part of a continuum of unfreedom. In this context, African slavery existed alongside many other forms of oppression, including Native American slavery, indentured servitude, apprenticeship, and pauper apprenticeship. In this hierarchical and inherently unfree world, enslaved Bostonians were more concerned with their everyday treatment and honor than with emancipation, as they pushed for autonomy, protected their families and communities, and demanded a place in society. Drawing on exhaustive research in colonial legal records – including wills, court documents, and minutes of governmental bodies – as well as newspapers, church records, and other contemporaneous sources, Hardesty masterfully reconstructs an eighteenth-century Atlantic world of unfreedom that stretched from Europe to Africa to America. By reassessing the lives of enslaved Bostonians as part of a social order structured by ties of dependence, Hardesty not only demonstrates how African slaves were able to decode their new homeland and shape the terms of their enslavement, but also tells the story of how marginalized peoples engrained themselves in the very fabric of colonial American society.
Download or read book Unfreedom of the Press written by Mark R. Levin and published by Threshold Editions. This book was released on 2020-08-11 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Six-time New York Times bestselling author, FOX News star, and radio host Mark R. Levin “trounces the news media” (The Washington Times) in this timely and groundbreaking book demonstrating how the great tradition of American free press has degenerated into a standardless profession that has squandered the faith and trust of the public. Unfreedom of the Press is not just another book about the press. In “Levin’s finest work” (Breitbart), he shows how those entrusted with news reporting today are destroying freedom of the press from within—not through actions of government officials, but with its own abandonment of reportorial integrity and objective journalism. With the depth of historical background for which his books are renowned, Levin takes you on a journey through the early American patriot press, which proudly promoted the principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. This is followed by the early decades of the Republic during which newspapers around the young country were open and transparent about their fierce allegiance to one political party or another. It was only at the start of the Progressive Era and the 20th century that the supposed “objectivity of the press” first surfaced, leaving us where we are today: with a partisan party-press overwhelmingly aligned with a political ideology but hypocritically engaged in a massive untruth as to its real nature.
Download or read book Unfreedom for All written by Thomas J. Donahue-Ochoa and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-14 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is often said that we live under systems of injustice. But if so, who ought to combat them, and why? Many in the world's liberal elite hold that only the perpetrators or the victims have such duties, because of their special connections to the injustice. Others hold that all of the privileged have them, because they have duties to relieve suffering or to redress their complicity in the injustice. This book challenges those answers. It argues that everyone living under such injustices ought to combat them: victim, perpetrator, and bystander alike. Moreover, they all have the same reason for doing so: such injustices suppress everyone's resistance to their workings. But there is a name for such suppression: "authoritarianism." Hence such injustices make everyone unfree, because they subject everyone to authoritarian tactics. The book thus reinterprets and defends a core doctrine of the global left, "No one is free while others are oppressed!" For it shows how oppression subjects everyone--including you--to arbitrary power. The book argues that systematic injustice occurs when one group finds that its political voice is unjustly marginalized, its members exploited and subject to systematic violence, and that society's dominant norms unjustly favor a privileged group. It diagnoses three global injustices of this kind: gender, race, and poverty. It then shows how such injustices always suppress everyone's resistance to them, making everyone unfree. But if so, it argues, then this shared unfreedom should be the ground on which victims, bystanders, and perpetrators unite in solidarity against injustice.
Download or read book Pelevin and Unfreedom written by Sofya Khagi and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sofya Khagi’s Pelevin and Unfreedom: Poetics, Politics, Metaphysics is the first book-length English-language study of Victor Pelevin, one of the most significant and popular Russian authors of the post-Soviet era. The text explores Pelevin’s sustained Dostoevskian reflections on the philosophical question of freedom and his complex oeuvre and worldview, shaped by the idea that contemporary social conditions pervert that very notion. Khagi shows that Pelevin uses provocative and imaginative prose to model different systems of unfreedom, vividly illustrating how the present world deploys hyper-commodification and technological manipulation to promote human degradation and social deadlock. Rather than rehearse Cold War–era platitudes about totalitarianism, Pelevin holds up a mirror to show how social control (now covert, yet far more efficient) masquerades as freedom and how eagerly we accept, even welcome, control under the techno-consumer system. He reflects on how commonplace discursive markers of freedom (like the free market) are in fact misleading and disempowering. Under this comfortably self-occluding bondage, the subject loses all power of self-determination, free will, and ethical judgment. In his work, Pelevin highlights the unprecedented subversion of human society by the techno-consumer machine. Yet, Khagi argues, however circumscribed and ironically qualified, he holds onto the emancipatory potential of ethics and even an emancipatory humanism.
Download or read book To Be Unfree written by Christian Dahl and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2014-09-30 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: »To Be Unfree« is a collection of essays investigating how political unfreedom has been and can be articulated within the republican tradition of political thought. The book combines a theoretical discussion of how freedom and its opposites have been conceptualized in the republican tradition with a broader perspective on this tradition's impact on the representation of unfreedom in Western literature and cultural history. It thus complicates our understanding of what it means to be unfree and unveils a series of distinctions which also shape our modern notions of freedom.
Download or read book Mobility in Daily Life written by Malene Freudendal-Pedersen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do we choose specific modes of transport and what are the perceived rationalities for our choice? How are different theoretical concepts within mobility research actually perceived and lived in everyday life? At this book's core is a conceptual and empirical contribution to critical mobility research. It focuses on the tension between freedom and unfreedom, articulated through the dichotomy between individuality and community, as well as critical perspectives on the multitude of unintended consequences of mobility. In a range of everyday life narratives, this tension is analyzed through the concept of 'structural stories'. In teasing out the ambivalences of late modern everyday life, Malene Freudendal-Pedersen exposes how mobility both generates and helps to overcome and live with these ambivalences.
Download or read book On Tyranny written by Timothy Snyder and published by Crown. This book was released on 2017-02-28 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A “bracing” (Vox) guide for surviving and resisting America’s turn towards authoritarianism, from “a rising public intellectual unafraid to make bold connections between past and present” (The New York Times) “Timothy Snyder reasons with unparalleled clarity, throwing the past and future into sharp relief. He has written the rare kind of book that can be read in one sitting but will keep you coming back to help regain your bearings.”—Masha Gessen The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. On Tyranny is a call to arms and a guide to resistance, with invaluable ideas for how we can preserve our freedoms in the uncertain years to come.
Download or read book The People Vs Democracy written by Yascha Mounk and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-05 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uiteenzetting over de opkomst van het populisme en het gevaar daarvan voor de democratie.
Download or read book Human Programming written by Scott Selisker and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2016-08-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do our ways of talking about contemporary terrorism have a history in the science, technology, and culture of the Cold War? Human Programming explores this history in a groundbreaking work that draws connections across decades and throughout American culture, high and low. Scott Selisker argues that literary, cinematic, and scientific representations of the programmed mind have long shaped conversations in U.S. political culture about freedom and unfreedom, and about democracy and its enemies. Selisker demonstrates how American conceptions of freedom and of humanity have changed in tandem with developments in science and technology, including media technology, cybernetics, behaviorist psychology, and sociology. Since World War II, propagandists, scientists, and creative artists have adapted visions of human programmability as they sought to imagine the psychological manipulation and institutional controls that could produce the inscrutable subjects of totalitarian states, cults, and terrorist cells. At the same time, writers across the political spectrum reimagined ideals of American freedom, democracy, and diversity by way of contrast with these posthuman specters of mental unfreedom. Images of such “human automatons” circulated in popular films, trials, travelogues, and the news media, giving form to the nebulous enemies of the postwar and contemporary United States: totalitarianism, communism, total institutions, cult extremism, and fundamentalist terrorism. Ranging from discussions of The Manchurian Candidate and cyberpunk science fiction to the cases of Patty Hearst and the “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh, Human Programming opens new ways of understanding the intertwined roles of literature, film, science, and technology in American culture.
Download or read book Development as Freedom written by Amartya Sen and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2011-05-25 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Economics, an essential and paradigm-altering framework for understanding economic development--for both rich and poor--in the twenty-first century. Freedom, Sen argues, is both the end and most efficient means of sustaining economic life and the key to securing the general welfare of the world's entire population. Releasing the idea of individual freedom from association with any particular historical, intellectual, political, or religious tradition, Sen clearly demonstrates its current applicability and possibilities. In the new global economy, where, despite unprecedented increases in overall opulence, the contemporary world denies elementary freedoms to vast numbers--perhaps even the majority of people--he concludes, it is still possible to practically and optimistically restain a sense of social accountability. Development as Freedom is essential reading.
Download or read book Mary Wollstonecraft and Feminist Republicanism written by Lena Halldenius and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mary Wollstonecraft is a writer whose work continues to provoke scholarly debate. Halldenius explores Wollstonecraft’s political philosophy, focusing on her treatment of republicanism and independence, to propose a new way of reading her work – that of a ‘feminist republican’.
Download or read book Diverse Unfreedoms written by Sarada Balagopalan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-11 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The legacies of plantation slavery continue to inhabit, animate, and haunt the diverse forms of unfreedom that mark our present. Diverse Unfreedoms charts a new way of thinking through these legacies of unfreedom via a more entangled and multidirectional model of what makes for historical change and continuity in practices and relationships of subjugation. This volume troubles the stark opposition between slavery and freedom by foregrounding the diversity of types of exploitation above and beyond the most extreme forms of dehumanization characterized by slavery. The chapters, from multiple disciplines and discussing diverse regions and historical periods, illustrate the significance of interdisciplinary and international perspectives in understanding diverse unfreedoms, and offer a nuanced account of historical change and continuity in systems that generate and perpetuate unfreedom. Through examining the frictions that mark certain key moments of legal, social, and institutional transition, the essays in this volume express the limits of liberal humanist projects and present a critique of the liberal notion of freedom as the necessary horizon of emancipatory imagination and labor.
Download or read book Labour Regime Change in the Twenty First Century written by Tom Brass and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-09-09 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historical debates about capitalism, unfreedom and primitive accumulation suggest Marxism accepts that, where class struggle is global, capitalists employ unfree workers. Labour-power as commodity means the free/unfree distinction informs the process of becoming, being, remaining, and acting as a proletariat.
Download or read book Slavery After Rome 500 1100 written by Alice Rio and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happened to slavery in Europe in the centuries following the fall of the Roman Empire? This work spans the whole of early medieval Western Europe and addresses issues of slave-taking and slave-trading; people who became slaves as a result of a debt or a crime; even people who chose to become slaves
