Verso Books – serie

Jürgen Habermas must be accounted one of the foremost philosophers and social theorists of the present day. Over several decades he has developed an analysis of modernity which is rooted in the tradition of the Frankfurt School, but offers strikingly novel answers to longstanding questions of critical theory. In these illuminating and wideranging interviews, he recounts for the first time his own intellectual and political biography, and discusses his views on contemporary social theory and social movements. This new edition contains an extended introduction and an additional five interviews in which Habermas considers, among other things, the significance of the Frankfurt School, changing mentalities in postwar Germany, and the relations between ethics, morality and law.

In his most accessible book to date, Roy Bhaskar sets out to diagnose, explain and resolve the 'problems of philosophy'. Plato Etc. reviews all the main areas of the subject: the theory of knowledge and the philosophy of science; the philosophy of logic and language; the philosophies of space, time and causality; the philosophy of the social and life sciences and of dialectic; ethics, politics and aesthetics; and the history and sociology of philosophy.Among the issues discussed are the problems of induction and universals, the question of relativism, Heidegger's 'scandal of philosophy' (the search for a proof of the reality of the external world), the nature of moral truth, and the conundrum of free will and determinism. The last two chapters consist of a synoptic account of the development of Western philosophy from the pre-Socratics to poststructuralism.Plato Etc. seeks to revindicate the idea of the philosophical project, and to demonstrate that Bhaskar's 'dialectical critical realism' has the categorial power to remedy the problem fields of philosophy. The book serves both as an introduction to philosophy and as an invaluable resource for the scholar.

How did Hitler win the allegiance of ordinary Germans? The answer is as shocking as it is persuasive. By engaging in a campaign of theft on an almost unimaginable scale-and by channelling the proceeds into generous social programmes-Hitler bought his people's consent. Drawing on secret files and financial records, Götz Aly shows that while Jews and people of occupied lands suffered crippling taxation, mass looting, enslavement, and destruction, most Germans enjoyed a much-improved standard of living. Buoyed by the millions of packages soldiers sent from the front, Germans also benefited from the systematic plunder of conquered territory and the transfer of Jewish possessions into their homes and pockets. Any qualms were swept away by waves of government handouts, tax breaks, and preferential legislation. Gripping and significant, Hitler's Beneficiaries makes a radically new contribution to our understanding of Nazi aggression, the Holocaust, and the complicity of a people.

Too many of our convictions about the fifty-four nations of Africa come from non-African sources. Western media often treat the continent as a simulacrum of Western anxieties. In contrast, Jeremy Harding focuses on specific historical episodes and cultural practices - cinema, art, ethnography and journalism - to steer us away from treacherous generalisations.Analogue Africa celebrates the ingenuity with which African artists - and a handful of Europeans - have reimagined the colonial encounter and voiced their impatience with white minority rule. Among his illustrious cast of filmmakers, photographers, writers and painters are Seydou Keïta, Sanlé Sory, Ernest Cole, Sarah Maldoror, John Akomfrah, William Kentridge and Binyavanga Wainaina. Harding argues that Western museums with priceless African holdings - the British Museum, the Musée du Quai Branly, the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Belgium - are now the sites of a struggle over the colonial past, adding the latest chapter to an unfinished history.

The end of Soviet Socialism signalled to some observers that the ghost of Marx had finally been laid to rest. But history's refusal to grind to a halt and the global credit crisis that began in 2008 have rekindled interest in capitalism's most persistent critic.Written during the mid-nineties, a period of Western complacency and neo-liberal reaction, Marx for Our Times is a critical reading of dialectical materialism as a method of resistance. Without denying the contradictory character of Marx's thought, and with a sensitivity to the plurality of theories it has inspired, Daniel Bensaid sets out to discover what in Marx remains dynamic and relevant in our era of accelerating economic change.Marx's theory emerges, not as a doctrinal system, but as an intellectual tool of social struggle and global transformation in a world where capital continues to dominate social relations.