Download or read book The Utopia of Rules written by David Graeber and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2015-02-24 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the international bestseller Debt: The First 5,000 Years comes a revelatory account of the way bureaucracy rules our lives Where does the desire for endless rules, regulations, and bureaucracy come from? How did we come to spend so much of our time filling out forms? And is it really a cipher for state violence? To answer these questions, the anthropologist David Graeber—one of our most important and provocative thinkers—traces the peculiar and unexpected ways we relate to bureaucracy today, and reveals how it shapes our lives in ways we may not even notice…though he also suggests that there may be something perversely appealing—even romantic—about bureaucracy. Leaping from the ascendance of right-wing economics to the hidden meanings behind Sherlock Holmes and Batman, The Utopia of Rules is at once a powerful work of social theory in the tradition of Foucault and Marx, and an entertaining reckoning with popular culture that calls to mind Slavoj Zizek at his most accessible. An essential book for our times, The Utopia of Rules is sure to start a million conversations about the institutions that rule over us—and the better, freer world we should, perhaps, begin to imagine for ourselves.
Download or read book Utopia written by Thomas More and published by e-artnow. This book was released on 2019-04-08 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utopia is a work of fiction and socio-political satire by Thomas More published in 1516 in Latin. The book is a frame narrative primarily depicting a fictional island society and its religious, social and political customs. Many aspects of More's description of Utopia are reminiscent of life in monasteries.
Download or read book Debt written by David Graeber and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2014-12-09 with total page 709 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in paperback, the updated and expanded edition: David Graeber’s “fresh . . . fascinating . . . thought-provoking . . . and exceedingly timely” (Financial Times) history of debt Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom: he shows that before there was money, there was debt. For more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods—that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors. Graeber shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Italy to China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion (words like “guilt,” “sin,” and “redemption”) derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. We are still fighting these battles today without knowing it.
Download or read book The Last Utopia written by Samuel Moyn and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-05 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future. For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront. It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.
Download or read book Law and the Utopian Imagination written by Austin Sarat and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-21 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Law and the Utopian Imagination seeks to explore and resuscitate the notion of utopianism within current legal discourse. The idea of utopia has fascinated the imaginations of important thinkers for ages. And yet—who writes seriously on the idea of utopia today? The mid-century critique appears to have carried the day, and a belief in the very possibility of utopian achievements appears to have flagged in the face of a world marked by political instability, social upheaval, and dreary market realities. Instead of mapping out the contours of a familiar terrain, this book seeks to explore the possibilities of a productive engagement between the utopian and the legal imagination. The book asks: is it possible to re-imagine or revitalize the concept of utopia such that it can survive the terms of the mid-century liberal critique? Alternatively, is it possible to re-imagine the concept of utopia and the theory of liberal legality so as to dissolve the apparent antagonism between the two? In charting possible answers to these questions, the present volume hopes to revive interest in a vital topic of inquiry too long neglected by both social thinkers and legal scholars.
Download or read book Anarchy State and Utopia written by Robert Nozick and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 1974 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Nozicka s Anarchy, State, and Utopia is a powerful, philosophical challenge to the most widely held political and social positions of our age ---- liberal, socialist and conservative.
Download or read book The Utopia Reader written by Gregory Claeys and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1999-11 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Child-molesting priests, embezzled church treasures, philandering ministers and rabbis, even church-endorsed pyramid schemes that defraud gullible parishioners of millions of dollars: for the past decade, clergy misconduct has seemed continually to be in the news. Is there something about religious organizations that fosters such misbehavior? Bad Pastors presents a range of new perspectives and solidly grounded data on pastoral abuse, investigating sexual misconduct, financial improprieties, and political and personal abuse of authority. Rather than focusing on individuals who misbehave, the volume investigates whether the foundation for clergy malfeasance is inherent in religious organizations themselves, stemming from hierarchies of power in which trusted leaders have the ability to define reality, control behavior, and even offer or withhold the promise of immortality. Arguing that such phenomena arise out of organizational structures, the contributors do not focus on one particular religion, but rather treat these incidents from an interfaith perspective. Bad Pastors moves beyond individual case studies to consider a broad range of issues surrounding clergy misconduct, from violence against women to the role of charisma and abuse of power in new religious movements. Highlighting similarities between other forms of abuse, such as domestic violence, the volume helps us to conceptualize and understand clergy misconduct in new ways.
Download or read book Utopia Is Creepy And Other Provocations written by Nicholas Carr and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2016-09-06 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A freewheeling, sharp-shooting indictment of a tech-besotted culture. With razor wit, Nicholas Carr cuts through Silicon Valley’s unsettlingly cheery vision of the technological future to ask a hard question: Have we been seduced by a lie? Gathering a decade’s worth of posts from his blog, Rough Type, as well as his seminal essays, Utopia Is Creepy is “Carr’s best hits for those who missed the last decade of his stream of thoughtful commentary about our love affair with technology and its effect on our relationships” (Richard Cytowic, New York Journal of Books). Carr draws on artists ranging from Walt Whitman to the Clash, while weaving in the latest findings from science and sociology. Carr’s favorite targets are those zealots who believe so fervently in computers and data that they abandon common sense. Cheap digital tools do not make us all the next Fellini or Dylan. Social networks, diverting as they may be, are not vehicles for self-enlightenment. And “likes” and retweets are not going to elevate political discourse. Utopia Is Creepy compels us to question the technological momentum that has trapped us in its flow. “Resistance is never futile,” argues Carr, and this book delivers the proof.
Download or read book Bullshit Jobs written by David Graeber and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From David Graeber, the bestselling author of The Dawn of Everything and Debt—“a master of opening up thought and stimulating debate” (Slate)—a powerful argument against the rise of meaningless, unfulfilling jobs…and their consequences. Does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world? In the spring of 2013, David Graeber asked this question in a playful, provocative essay titled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.” It went viral. After one million online views in seventeen different languages, people all over the world are still debating the answer. There are hordes of people—HR consultants, communication coordinators, telemarketing researchers, corporate lawyers—whose jobs are useless, and, tragically, they know it. These people are caught in bullshit jobs. Graeber explores one of society’s most vexing and deeply felt concerns, indicting among other villains a particular strain of finance capitalism that betrays ideals shared by thinkers ranging from Keynes to Lincoln. “Clever and charismatic” (The New Yorker), Bullshit Jobs gives individuals, corporations, and societies permission to undergo a shift in values, placing creative and caring work at the center of our culture. This book is for everyone who wants to turn their vocation back into an avocation and “a thought-provoking examination of our working lives” (Financial Times).
Download or read book A Modern Utopia written by H. G. Wells and published by tredition. This book was released on 2022-05-03 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Modern Utopia - H. G. Wells - A Modern Utopia is a dystopian book by H. G. Wells. In his preface, Wells says that A Modern Utopia would be the last of a series of volumes on social problems. This book is a tale of two travelers who fall into a space-warp and suddenly find themselves upon a Utopian Earth controlled by a single World Government. It is told to us by a sketchily described character known only as the Owner of the Voice. Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946) was an English writer. Prolific in many genres, he wrote dozens of novels, short stories, and works of social commentary, history, satire, biography and autobiography. His work also included two books on recreational war games. Wells is now best remembered for his science fiction novels and is sometimes called the "father of science fiction. During his own lifetime, however, he was most prominent as a forward-looking, even prophetic social critic who devoted his literary talents to the development of a progressive vision on a global scale. A futurist, he wrote a number of utopian works and foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television and something resembling the World Wide Web. His science fiction imagined time travel, alien invasion, invisibility, and biological engineering. Brian Aldiss referred to Wells as the "Shakespeare of science fiction", while American writer Charles Fort referred to him as a "wild talent". Wells rendered his works convincing by instilling commonplace detail alongside a single extraordinary assumption per work – dubbed "Wells's law" – leading Joseph Conrad to hail him in 1898 as "O Realist of the Fantastic!". His most notable science fiction works include The Time Machine (1895), which was his first novel, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898) and the military science fiction The War in the Air (1907). Wells was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times.
Download or read book Revolutions in Reverse written by David Graeber and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today's capitalist systems appear to be coming apart - but what is the alternative? In a generation or so, capitalism may no longer exist as it's impossible to maintain perpetual growth on a finite planet. David Graeber explores political strategy, global trade, violence, alienation and creativity looking for a new common sense.
Download or read book Possibilities written by David Graeber and published by AK Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anthropologist investigates the revolution of everyday life.
Download or read book Utopian Road to Hell written by William J. Murray and published by Post Hill Press. This book was released on 2021-03-26 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "William Murray provides a unique perspective that should be read, particularly by America's youth, at a time central planners are once again promising utopian dreams at a cost to the most productive among us.” ―Governor Mike Huckabee Utopian dreamers are deceived and deceiving. Their “fight for the people” rhetoric may sound good at first, but history proves egalitarian governments and the cultures they try to create destroy freedom, destroy creativity, destroy human lives, create poverty and misery, and often spread beyond their borders to bring others under slavery. Utopians believe that through their own personal brilliance a better society can be created on earth. When the belief in man as a creation in the image of God is completely rejected, the use of slavery and mass execution can be justified in the name of the creation of a utopian state for the masses. Pol Pot, Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-tung―together these so-called visionaries through their fanciful policies are responsible for the deaths of millions of people. In Utopian Road to Hell William J. Murray, son of atheist apologist Madelyn Murray O’Hair, describes the totalitarians throughout history and the current utopians who are determined to engage in social engineering to control the lives of every person on earth. From Marx to Hitler, Murray explains the progression of socialist engineering from its occultist roots to the extreme madness of the Nazis’ nationalistic racism. From Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood and Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, the rebellious desire to be free from morality drives the “at-any-cost” campaigns such as abortion on demand, no-fault divorce, same-sex marriage, and overreaching government provisions. From Woodrow Wilson’s “living document” distortion of the Constitution and his income tax to FDR’s New Deal to Obama’s executive orders, those who seek centralized power typically do so by proclaiming some utopian scheme that they claim will perfect mankind and eliminate competition, greed, poverty, and war. William J. Murray masterfully educates us on the utopians’ swath of destruction throughout history and warns us of the dangers of present-day utopians fighting to hold power. We must heed the warning of George Washington when he said in his 1796 Farewell Address that it is important for those entrusted with the administration of this great and free nation, “to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another.” We must reclaim the freedom of the individual to avoid the continued path down the utopian road to hell.
Download or read book Open Utopia written by Saint Thomas More and published by . This book was released on 2012-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Opinion polls, volatile voting patterns, and street protests demonstrate widespread dissatisfaction with the current system, yet the popular response so far has largely been limited to the angry outcry of No! But negation, by itself, affects nothing. The dominant system doesn't dominate because people agree with it; it rules because we're convinced there is no alternative. We need to be able to imagine a radical alternative - a Utopia - yet we are haunted by the disasters of "actually existing" Utopias of the past century, from fascism to authoritarian socialism. In this re-issue of Thomas More's generative volume, scholar and activist Stephen Duncombe re-imagines Utopia as an open text, one designed by More as an imaginal machine freeing us from the tyranny of the present while undermining master plans for the future. Open Utopia is the first complete English language edition of Thomas More's Utopia that honors the primary precept of Utopia itself: that all property is common property. Open Utopia, licensed under Creative Commons, is free to copy, to share, to use. But Utopia is more than the story of a far-off land with no private property. It is a text that instructs us how to approach texts, be they literary or political, in an open manner: open to criticism, open to participation, and open to re-creation. Utopia is no-place, and therefore it is up to all of us to imagine it. In this volume ... Utopia is re-imagined and brought into the digital age as a participatory technology for undermining authority and facilitating new imagination"--Publisher's description
Download or read book Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology written by David Graeber and published by Prickly Paradigm. This book was released on 2004 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this work, David Graeber explores the implications of linking anthropology to anarchism.
Download or read book Anarchy In a Manner of Speaking written by David Graeber and published by Diaphanes. This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Graeber is not only one of the most important living thinkers, but also one of the most influential. However, he is one of the very few engaged intellectuals who has a proven track record of effective militancy on a world scale. It is possible that no one has had such an impact on the international left as he has. Graeber is perhaps the living intellectual who has offered up the most credible paths for exiting capitalism-- as much through his greater concepts of debt, bureaucracy, or "bullshit jobs" as through his crucial involvement in the Occupy Wall Street movement, which led to his more-or-less involuntary exile. In short, when we proposed doing a book of interviews with him and Assia Turquier-Zauberman, we were not only soliciting a first-rate intellectual, but a veritable modern hero on the order of Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Linus Torvald, Aaron Swartz, and Elon Musk. Having claimed to be an anarchist from the first, we wanted to ask Graeber not only about the history of anarchy, but also about its contemporary relevance and future. We also wanted to explore the ties between anthropology and anarchism, and the traces of its "DNA" in the Occupy Wall Street and Yellow Vest movements. Finally, we wanted to ask him about the meaning of anarchist ethics, not only in their political scope, but also in terms of art, love, sexuality, etc. With astonishing humor, verve, and erudition, this book contributes to the redefnining of the contours of what could be (in the words of Kropotkine) "anarchist morality" today
Download or read book The Utopia of Rules written by David Graeber and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2015-02-24 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the international bestseller Debt: The First 5,000 Years comes a revelatory account of the way bureaucracy rules our lives Where does the desire for endless rules, regulations, and bureaucracy come from? How did we come to spend so much of our time filling out forms? And is it really a cipher for state violence? To answer these questions, the anthropologist David Graeber—one of our most important and provocative thinkers—traces the peculiar and unexpected ways we relate to bureaucracy today, and reveals how it shapes our lives in ways we may not even notice…though he also suggests that there may be something perversely appealing—even romantic—about bureaucracy. Leaping from the ascendance of right-wing economics to the hidden meanings behind Sherlock Holmes and Batman, The Utopia of Rules is at once a powerful work of social theory in the tradition of Foucault and Marx, and an entertaining reckoning with popular culture that calls to mind Slavoj Zizek at his most accessible. An essential book for our times, The Utopia of Rules is sure to start a million conversations about the institutions that rule over us—and the better, freer world we should, perhaps, begin to imagine for ourselves.
