Critical Editions

The fascinating work of a Russian prince-turned-anarchist, Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921). Kropotkin one of the world's first international celebrities. In England, Kropotkin was known as a brilliant scientist, famous for his work on animal and human cooperation, but Kropotkin's fame in continental Europe centered more on his role as a founder and vocal proponent of anarchism. In the United States, he pursued both passions. Tens of thousands of people followed ex-Prince Peter during two speaking tours in America. Kropotkin's path to fame was unexpected and labyrinthine, with asides in prison, breathtaking 50,000-mile journeys through the wastelands of Siberia, and banishment, for one reason or another, from most respectable Western countries of the day. In his homeland of Russia, Peter went from being Czar Alexander II's favored teenage page, to a young man enamored with the theory of evolution, to a convicted felon, jail-breaker and general agitator, eventually being chased halfway around the world by the Russian Secret police for his radical - some might (and did) say enlightened - political views. Both while in jail, and while on the run when he was entertaining and enlightening huge crowds, Kropotkin found the energy and concentration to write books on a dazzling array of topics: evolution and behavior, ethics, the geography of Asia, anarchism, socialism and communism, penal systems, the coming industrial revolution in the East, the French Revolution, and the state of Russian literature. Though seemingly disparate topics, a common thread - the scientific law of mutual aid, which guided the evolution of all life on earth - tied these works together. This law boils down to Kropotkin's deep-seated conviction that what we today would call altruism and cooperation - but what the Prince called mutual aid - was the driving evolutionary force behind all social life, be it in microbes, animals or humans. Today, anthropologists, political scientists, economists and psychologists publish hundreds of studies each year on human cooperation, and researchers in these fields are just beginning to realize that so many of the topics they are investigating were first suggested and promulgated by Peter Kropotkin.

First published in 1921, this work by Nikolai Bukharin, a highly influential Marxist and Soviet Politician who would later become one of the most famous victims of Stalin's show trials, expands upon Karl Marx's theory of historical materialism. Offering a Marxist interpretation of sociology, this edition is important not only from a sociological and economic perspective, but is also extremely valuable as a socio-historical document of contemporary thought in the Soviet Union in the years following the Bolshevik revolution.

'The Debordian analysis of modern life resonates more deeply and darkly than perhaps even its creator thought possible...' - The New Yorker 'Never before has Debord's work seemed quite as relevant as it does now' - The Guardian 'Guy Debord is a time bomb, and a difficult one to defuse.' - Michael Löwy First published in 1967, Guy Debord's stinging revolutionary critique of contemporary society, The Society of the Spectacle has since acquired a cult status. The Das Kapital of the 20th century. An essential text, and the main theoretical work of the Situationists. Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative. From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960's up to the present, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism, and everyday life. 'In Society of the Spectacle, Debord sets out his best-known statement of how the categories of capitalism colonise everyday life to such an extent that we can barely imagine an existence beyond them.' - Sydney Review of Books 'The Society of the Spectacle [is] about not just the clamor of images but also the silence of power, a silence which, since the seventies, has become deafening.' - McKenzie Wark 'Never before has Debord's work seemed quite as relevant as it does now, in the permanent present that he so accurately foretold? Open his book, read it, be amazed, pour yourself a glass of supermarket wine - as he would wish - and then forget all about it, which is what the Spectacle wants.' - Will Self 'In The Society of the Spectacle, Debord made plain that a 'unified critique of culture' implied a critique of the social totality. This was his practico-theoretical method throughout his career as a revolutionary: he saw no distinction between cultural work and political work.' - Bruce Russell 'I read [The Society of the Spectacle] again and I thought, "This is a fucking amazing book!" I had forgotten how terrific it was, and it was actually quite different to how I remembered it. I insist that the key chapter is not the first one, on the spectacle itself, but the second to last - the chapter on détournement. To me, that concept is the great gift of the Situationists. [They] realized that one can exploit this critically - one can copy and correct in the direction of hope.' - McKenzie Wark About the author Guy Debord (1931-1994) was a Marxist theorist, writer, poet, filmmaker, hypergraphist, cultural revolutionary and a founding member of the Lettrist International and Situationist International - groups that fused avant-garde art and politics as an anti-capitalist weapon. Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative as Debord's Society of the Spectacle, which decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism and contemporary life.

“Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory” is the philosopher Herbert Marcuse's first major work in English-a masterful interpretation of Hegel's philosophy and the influence it has had on European political thought from the French Revolution to the present day. “Reason & Revolution”, written in 1941, was the first Hegelian Marxist text to appear in English, the first systematic study of Hegel by a Marxist, and the first work in English to discuss the young Marx seriously. It introduced introduced Hegelian and Marxist concepts such as alienation, subjectivity, negativity, and the Frankfurt School's critique of positivism to a wide international audience. Acclaimed for its profound and undistorted reading of Hegel's social and political theory, the appreciation of Reason and Revolution has remained high, more relevant now than ever before. There is no better guide than Marcuse to where we have been and to what we might expect. The most influential radical philosopher of the 1960s, Marcuse's writings are as relevant to today's society as they were at the time they were written.