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Author: Alex Callinicos
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 074565939X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 153
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Book Description
Something dramatic happened in the late summer and autumn of 2008. The post-Cold War world came to an abrupt end. This was the result of two conjoined crises. First, in its brief war with Georgia in August 2008, Russia asserted its military power to halt the expansion of NATO to its very borders. Secondly, on 15 September 2008 the Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed. This precipitated a severe financial crash and helped to push the world economy into the worst slump since the 1930s. Both crises marked a severe setback for the global power of the United States, which had driven NATO expansion and forced through the liberalization of financial markets. More broadly they challenged the consensus that had reigned since the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989 that a US-orchestrated liberal capitalist order could offer the world peace and prosperity. Already badly damaged by the Iraq debacle, this consensus has now suffered potentially fatal blows. In Bonfire of Illusions Alex Callinicos explores these twin crises. He traces the credit crunch that developed in 2007-8 to a much more protracted crisis of overaccumulation and profitability that has gripped global capitalism since the late 1960s. He also confronts the interaction between economic and geopolitical events, highlighting the new assertiveness of nation-states and analysing the tense, complex relationship of interdependence and conflict that binds together the US and China. Finally, in response to the revelation that the market is not the solution to the world's problems, Callinicos reviews the prospects for alternatives to capitalism.
Author: Alex Callinicos
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 074565939X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 153
Get Book Here
Book Description
Something dramatic happened in the late summer and autumn of 2008. The post-Cold War world came to an abrupt end. This was the result of two conjoined crises. First, in its brief war with Georgia in August 2008, Russia asserted its military power to halt the expansion of NATO to its very borders. Secondly, on 15 September 2008 the Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed. This precipitated a severe financial crash and helped to push the world economy into the worst slump since the 1930s. Both crises marked a severe setback for the global power of the United States, which had driven NATO expansion and forced through the liberalization of financial markets. More broadly they challenged the consensus that had reigned since the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989 that a US-orchestrated liberal capitalist order could offer the world peace and prosperity. Already badly damaged by the Iraq debacle, this consensus has now suffered potentially fatal blows. In Bonfire of Illusions Alex Callinicos explores these twin crises. He traces the credit crunch that developed in 2007-8 to a much more protracted crisis of overaccumulation and profitability that has gripped global capitalism since the late 1960s. He also confronts the interaction between economic and geopolitical events, highlighting the new assertiveness of nation-states and analysing the tense, complex relationship of interdependence and conflict that binds together the US and China. Finally, in response to the revelation that the market is not the solution to the world's problems, Callinicos reviews the prospects for alternatives to capitalism.
Author: Eugen Weber
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307366189
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 307
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Book Description
Eugen Weber delivered the Barbara Frum Historical Lecture, based on Apocalypses, at the University of Toronto in March 1999. This annual lecture "on a subject of contemporary history in historical perspective" was established in memory of Barbara Frum. Apocalypses Prophecies, Cults and Millennial Beliefs through the Ages The Barbara Frum Historical Lectureship A national bestseller What drove eminent historian Eugen Weber to write Apocalypses? His desire to redress the historical and religious amnesia that has consigned the study of apocalyptic and millennialist thought to the lunatic fringe. An absolute belief in the end time was omnipresent until the 17th century, and retains many adherents even now. Apocalyptic visions and prophecies inspired crusades, scientific discoveries, works of art, voyages such as those of Columbus, rebellions and reforms. Elegantly written, as witty and entertaining as it is profound, Apocalypses displays Eugen Weber's talents as a stylist and historical detective; this is more a travel book of the apocalypse than a definitive academic treatment. On the eve of a billennium beset by a host of apocalyptic predictions and cults, Apocalypses offers a sympathetic review of creeds we ignore at our peril.
Author: Meghnad Desai
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1789609453
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 593
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Book Description
In this provocative and enthusiastically revisionist book, the distinguished economist Meghnad Desai argues that capitalism's recent efflorescence is something Karl Marx anticipated and indeed would, in a certain sense, have welcomed. Capitalism, as Marx understood it, would only reach its limits when it was no longer capable of progress. Desai argues that globalization, in bringing the possibility of open competition on world markets to producers in the Third World, has proved that capitalism is still capable of moving forwards. Marx's Revenge opens with a consideration of the ideas of Adam Smith and Hegel. It proceeds to look at the nuances in the work of Marx himself, and concludes with a survey of more recent economists who studied capitalism and attempted to unravel its secrets, including Joseph Schumpeter, John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek.
Author: Ravi Palat
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113479097X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
This book situates the evolution of capitalist economies along Asia's Pacific Rim after the Second World War within broader global, political and economic changes. Specifically, it charts their growth at the interface of periodic crises and successive waves of restructuring, and links changes in the world economy to shifts in regional dynamics in east and southeast Asia. It suggests that while the expansion of Japanese corporate networks was crucial to the emergence of the region as a low-cost exporter to the world, the reintegration of China into the world market will free the region from its dependence on the US as a market of last resort.
Author: Christian Ingrao
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745670040
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 685
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Book Description
There were eighty of them. They were young, clever and cultivated; they were barely in their thirties when Adolf Hitler came to power. Their university studies in law, economics, linguistics, philosophy and history marked them out for brilliant careers. They chose to join the repressive bodies of the Third Reich, especially the Security Service (SD) and the Nazi Party’s elite protection unit, the SS. They theorized and planned the extermination of twenty million individuals of allegedly ‘inferior’ races. Most of them became members of the paramilitary death squads known as Einsatzgruppen and participated in the slaughter of over a million people. Based on extensive archival research, Christian Ingrao tells the gripping story of these children of the Great War, focusing on the networks of fellow activists, academics and friends in which they moved, studying the way in which they envisaged war and the ‘world of enemies’ which, in their view, threatened them. The mechanisms of their political commitment are revealed, and their roles in Nazism and mass murder. Thanks to this pioneering study, we can now understand how these men came to believe what they did, and how these beliefs became so destructive. The history of Nazism, shows Ingrao, is also a history of beliefs in which a powerful military machine was interwoven with personal experiences, fervour, anguish, utopia and cruelty.
Author: Yann Moulier-Boutang
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 0745647324
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
This book argues that we are undergoing a transition from industrial capitalism to a new form of capitalism - what the author calls & lsquo; cognitive capitalism & rsquo;
Author: Melissa Gregg
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745637469
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
This book provides a long-overdue account of online technology and its impact on the work and lifestyles of professional employees. It moves between the offices and homes of workers in the knew "knowledge" economy to provide intimate insight into the personal, family, and wider social tensions emerging in today’s rapidly changing work environment. Drawing on her extensive research, Gregg shows that new media technologies encourage and exacerbate an older tendency among salaried professionals to put work at the heart of daily concerns, often at the expense of other sources of intimacy and fulfillment. New media technologies from mobile phones to laptops and tablet computers, have been marketed as devices that give us the freedom to work where we want, when we want, but little attention has been paid to the consequences of this shift, which has seen work move out of the office and into cafés, trains, living rooms, dining rooms, and bedrooms. This professional "presence bleed" leads to work concerns impinging on the personal lives of employees in new and unforseen ways. This groundbreaking book explores how aspiring and established professionals each try to cope with the unprecedented intimacy of technologically-mediated work, and how its seductions seem poised to triumph over the few remaining relationships that may stand in its way.
Author: Jean-Claude Michea
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 0745646212
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 159
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Book Description
Winston Churchill said of democracy that it was ‘the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.’ The same could be said of liberalism. While liberalism displays an unfailing optimism with regard to the capacity of human beings to make themselves ‘masters and possessors of nature’, it displays a profound pessimism when it comes to appreciating their moral capacity to build a decent world for themselves. As Michea shows, the roots of this pessimism lie in the idea – an eminently modern one – that the desire to establish the reign of the Good lies at the origin of all the ills besetting the human race. Liberalism’s critique of the ‘tyranny of the Good’ naturally had its costs. It created a view of modern politics as a purely negative art – that of defining the least bad society possible. It is in this sense that liberalism has to be understood, and understands itself, as the ‘politics of lesser evil’. And yet while liberalism set out to be a realism without illusions, today liberalism presents itself as something else. With its celebration of the market among other things, contemporary liberalism has taken over some of the features of its oldest enemy. By unravelling the logic that lies at the heart of the liberal project, Michea is able to shed fresh light on one of the key ideas that have shaped the civilization of the West.
Author: Tom Wolfe
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429960566
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 708
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Book Description
Vintage Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities, the #1 bestseller that will forever define late-twentieth-century New York style. "No one has portrayed New York Society this accurately and devastatingly since Edith Wharton" (The National Review) “A page-turner . . . Brilliant high comedy.” (The New Republic) Sherman McCoy, the central figure of Tom Wolfe's first novel, is a young investment banker with a fourteen-room apartment in Manhattan. When he is involved in a freak accident in the Bronx, prosecutors, politicians, the press, the police, the clergy, and assorted hustlers high and low close in on him, licking their chops and giving us a gargantuan helping of the human comedy, of New York in the 1980s, a city boiling over with racial and ethnic hostilities and burning with the itch to Grab It Now. Wolfe's novel is a big, panoramic story of the metropolis that reinforces the author's reputation as the foremost chronicler of the way we live in America. Adapted to film in 1990 by director Brian De Palma, the movie stars Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, and Morgan Freeman.
Author: Scott W. Fitzgerald
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739144030
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 473
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Book Description
Corporations and Cultural Industries: Time Warner, Bertelsmann, and News Corporation, by Scott Warren Fitzgerald, provides an introduction to the political economy of international media corporations. This text fills a fundamental gap in the critical media studies field, expanding on the relative paucity of academic studies. To ground the discussion, Fitzgerald focuses on the growth of three specific media conglomerates: Time Warner, Bertelsmann and News Corporation. Adopting an approach rooted in critical political economy, the book explains the corporations' growth through an engagement with broader social theories: the wider conditions of capital accumulation (especially theories of corporate competition and financialization); issues of institutional logic and corporate strategies; and the role of states as regulators, mediators of opposed interests, and facilitators of corporate expansion. The first section presents debates in social theory, addressing issues that pertain to cultural industries and dimensions in which they both challenge and extend these wider social theories. The second section presents detailed case studies of the three contemporary media 'mega companies' across the range of operations they coordinate, both within and outside the cultural industries. By analyzing the specifics and complexities of different media industries, Corporations and Cultural Industries examines how financialization processes re-gear the internal operations of media corporations in a manner that pits one sector against another. This book provides an in-depth study that can be used as stand-alone teaching resources or as a valuable supplement to a variety of media courses.
