This book provides an introduction to Baudrillard's cultural theory: the conception of modernity and the complex process of simulation. It examines his literary essays: his confrontation with Calvino, Styron, Ballard and Borges. It offers a coherent account of Baudrillard's theory of cultural ambience, and the culture of consumer society. It provides an introduction to Baudrillard's fiction theory, and the analysis of transpolitical figures.

This book explores the influence of Foucault's later writings on basic theoretical and research concerns in the social sciences. The introduction contextualizes the development of Foucault's writings within a biographical frame and leads into Foucault's College de France lecture, Kant on Enlightenment and Revolution which, along with Colin Gordon's commentary, raises the issues crucial to Foucault's latter project - the relationship between reason and liberty. The answer suggested - involving a reformulation of the relationship between the subject and power - connects with the issues raised...

Harmless Lovers reconstructs a decisive and neglected aspect of modern social thought: the evolution of modern gender theory from Mary Wollstonecraft at the end of the 18th century to the beginning of the 20th century and Max Weber. It examines the responses of major intellectual figures - Comte, Marx, Engels, Mill, Durkheim, Enfantin and Nietzsche - to the new woman and women's emancipation in the period immediately following the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The pressure for social equality between men and women, and the fact that writers like Mary...