In this fascinating book, Christine Buci-Glucksmann explores the condition of modernity - alienation, melancholy, nostalgia - through the works of a number of writers and philosophers, including the social and aesthetic philosophy of Walter Benjamin.

The author examines Baudelaire's haunting image of the city and its profound effect on conceptions of modernity. She goes on to consider how such influential figures as Nietzsche, Adorno, Musil, Barthes and Lacan constitute a baroque paradigm, united by their allegorical style, their conflation of aesthetics with ethics and their subject...

In this major new work - the result of a lifetime of intellectual engagement - one of the developing world's most famous thinkers reflects on the times we live in. He argues that US hegemony has reached a dangerous new level under George Bush Jr, and that the US President's hubristic militarism will both lead to a never-ending cycle of wars and block all hopes of social and democratic progress, not just in developing countries, but in the North as well.
Samir Amin also rejects the highly ideological notion that the current form of neoliberal capitalism - 'really existing capitalism' in...

'The world has enough for everyone's needs, but not enough for everyone's greed.' Mahatma Gandhi
Oil crisis, water conflicts, declining food security - we hear one report after another about resource scarcity - while with growing populations and huge poverty, nations are demanding their right to development. In the age of globalization this right cannot be disputed, yet the planet is already exhibiting signs of acute environmental stress. Indians want more roads and Chinese more oil: the struggle over nature will partly shape the crises of the twenty-first century. Clashes over...

Globalization creates growth without jobs in the North, structural adjustment in the South, privatization in the East and the dismantling of states everywhere. The author of this extraordinary book uses a mixture of case studies, examples and quotations to illustrate some hard facts. She looks at women across the world to show how their lives have been turned upside down, by industrialization in the South and a return to homeworking in the North. From New York to Phnom Penh, from Moscow to Dakar, we see the devastating effects of the unfettered power of transnational corporations on women's...

In his latest book in the study of power, Giacomo Marramao focuses on the work of two great Central European writers, Elias Canetti and Herta Muller, each of whom, in different periods and contexts, offered a philosophical genealogy of forms of domination and a radical diagnosis of power, command and law. To grasp the meaning of the transformations of power, it is necessary to go to the roots: to the arch that originated it as a factor common to all human cultures and all historical periods. Power cannot be suppressed: any attempt to overcome it (by eliminating one or another form of its...