Verso Books – serie

Five hundred years since its first publication, Thomas More's Utopia remains astonishingly radical and provocative. More imagines an island nation where thousands live in peace and harmony, men and women are both educated, and property is communal. In a text hovering between fantasy, satire, blueprint and game, More explores the theories and realities behind war, political conflicts, social tensions and redistribution, and imagines the day-to-day lives of a citizenry living free from fear, oppression, violence and suffering.But there has always been a shadow at the heart of Utopia. If this is a depiction of the perfect state, why, as well as wonder, does it provoke a growing unease?In this quincentenary edition, published in conjunction with Somerset House, More's text is introduced by multi-award-winning author China Miéville and accompanied by four essays from Ursula K. Le Guin, today's most distinguished utopian writer and thinker.

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.

What happens when an idea born of genuine suffering is weaponized as a tool of social control? Traumatized is the story of how shell shock became PTSD, how Oprah turned pain into profit, and how "authenticity" became the ultimate brand. It is a history of surveillance cap­italism's greatest coup: convincing us that wounds define us and that accom­modating each other's trauma is more important than challenging the powerful.Catherine Liu delivers an unflinching diagnosis of our current crisis, rooted as it is in the collapse of liberal politics, the ascendance of performance fragil­ity, and the rise of emotional display as a surrogate for political action. Sharp, provocative, and urgently necessary, Traumatized argues that we must re­ject a politics of permanent victimhood since it destroys solidarity and leaves us defenseless against the systems that cause real harm.

What is English food? The award-winning podcaster Lewis Bassett is a chef in search of an answer. Whether examining the recent invention of sourdough or the aristocratic assumptions informing the rewilding of cuisine, Bassett discovers the deep roots of English food culture in the peculiar meanderings and great events of English history.Part culinary adventure, part political analysis, The Full English is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand this nation of eccentric eaters. Through eight iconic foodstuffs - including olive oil, Greggs sausage rolls, roast beef, and curry (naturally) - Bassett takes us through a menu transcending space and time. Working in an artisanal bakery and in Michelin-starred kitchens, boarding a fishing boat named the St George, drinking Huel, eating pastries, he discovers the ways in which our food was shaped by urbanisation, empire, industry, and war.The Full English uncovers the remarkable connections between food and power, class and culture, tradition and change to make an urgent case for a proud national taste that is both artisanal and modern.

The energy crisis of the early 2020s exposed the true nature of Britain's energy system: fragile, fragmented, comically complicated, and hopelessly dependent on imported fossil fuels. How did it come to this? Power and the People uncovers the hidden history of British energy from the Victorians to the present.The book tells the story of the private and publicly owned organisations that built the energy system, from local municipal electricity companies in the early twentieth century, to state-owned enterprises that built infrastructure at a massive scale and breakneck speed from 1926 to 1979. The frenzied construction bonanza changed the landscape of Britain and fabric of everyday life for citizens.From the 1980s the electricity and gas industries were broken apart and sold off. Privatization worked for a short time but then the model started to break down. Climate change introduced a new problem. In response, the privatised model was gradually adapted and over decades became a complex and contradictory system that is crumbling. Today, we're living under a zombie system that lurches from crisis to crisis. But there is hope. Arthur Downing offers an alternative future of what is possible, based on lessons from our own past.

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is an ambitious masterwork of political economy, detailing the impact of slavery and colonialism on the history of international capitalism. In this classic book, Rodney makes the unflinching case that African maldevelopment is not a natural feature of geography, but a direct product of imperial extraction from the continent, a practice that continues up into the present. Meticulously researched, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains an unshakably relevant study of the so-called "great divergence" between Africa and Europe, just as it remains a prescient resource for grasping the the multiplication of global inequality today. In this new edition, Angela Davis offers a striking foreword to the book, exploring its lasting contributions to a revolutionary and feminist practice of anti-imperialism.

In the fight for housing, we are caught between the world we know and the world we want. This book is both a road map and a reckoning. Drawing on his own experience of on-the-ground organizing, Samuel Stein presents practical policies for enacting a right to shelter, a right to a home, and a right to the city itself.With raw honesty, he then explores why these visions founder on the rocks of political reality. He reveals the forces blocking our path-from the power of real estate capital to the inadequacy of our institutions-and captures the complex feelings of a left that has lost faith in the future.Written in the heady weeks surrounding Zohran Mamdani's historic election for New York City mayor, Stein frames the book around the stirring possibilities and structural constraints of a socialist administration in the financial center of a sputtering empire. He opens a space for action in the absence of hope. This is an examination of life and politics at the intersection of optimism and pessimism, nihilism and naivety, faith and doubt-an essential book for activists, planners, and anyone who refuses to accept the housing crisis as inevitable or immutable.

The Care Manifesto is the fiercely argued demand to place care at the centre of our politics. Our lives are always interdependent. It is by nurturing these ties that we cultivate a world in which every one of us can not only survive but thrive. Care must be at the heart of the state and the economy, promoting collective joy, not the satisfaction of individual desire. It should inform how we work, interact with each other, and plan our cities. It is part of how we can rebalance our relationship with the natural world.

Grounded in personal experience, Eviction uncovers a hidden history of housing injustice and working-class resistance in what has become a perennial battleground for social conflict in modern Britain.In 2017, Jessica Field's parents and more than a hundred of their neighbours received warning of imminent eviction. Their corporate landlord intended to demolish their affordable, privately rented homes to replace them with middle-class houses for sale. Led by the women of the estate, tenants launched an anti-eviction campaign to save their close-knit community from destruction.The neighbourhood was the last remnant of a 1950s National Coal Board estate constructed to house local miners. When the coal industry declined in the 1970s, whole estates were auctioned off to speculators. Low-income tenants were at the mercy of global investors. Houses were left to rot. Rents soared. Tenants were exploited every step of the way. Yet time and again, tenant activists - especially women - fought back.Eviction is a history of the British housing crisis in microcosm.

Born in 1912, Christopher Hill was one of the foremost historians of his generation. Abandoning the respectable provincial Methodism of his youth, Hill embraced Marxism and pursued a celebrated intellectual career. His early enthusiasm as a member of the Communist Party eventually gave way to disillusionment with its doctrinaire practices. Hill embodied the conflicts and challenges of the postwar decades. Michael Braddick's astute biography situates Hill's life and work in the proper historical context, bringing him alive for twenty-first-century readers.

In this series of accessible lectures, Fredric Jameson explores German philosophy and critical theory as it de­veloped in the wake of World War Two. Focusing on key thinkers - Horkheimer, Adorno, Heidegger, Habermas, Marcuse, Beuys, Enzensberger, Kluge, and Sloterdijk - Jameson weaves close readings of texts with anecdotes and aperçus to craft a narrative about the uses of the­ory. He delves into world-historical phenomena, such as the legacy of Nazism and the formation of the European Union, in a story that stretches from the postwar division of Germany to its reunification at the end of the Cold War.After Year Zero is a vital account of the German critical tradition, as understood by the "most significant Marxist thinker in American culture."

Ironic plot twists and colorful characters abound in Afshin Matin-Asgari's accessible history of relations between the United States and Iran. The missionaries and educators who descended on Iran in the early nineteenth century made way for the next century's oilmen, CIA agents, scholars, and arms dealers in the assertion of US imperial priorities. Whether Iran resisted or succumbed to US interests, it couldn't fail to be shaped by the superpower.Matin-Asgari offers fresh takes on familiar topics: America's rise as a Middle East hegemon during the Cold War; the special relationship between Washington and the shah; the Iranian Revolution and hostage crisis; the Iran-Iraq war; the Islamic Republic's peculiar anti-imperialism; the decades of onerous American sanctions; Israel's intervention in Iran-US relations; the ascendance of Trump; and the 2025 attempt by the United States and Israel to bring regime change to Tehran.A labyrinthine tale of American imperial misadven­tures, Axis of Empire incorporates and challenges scholarly narratives while offering a sophisticated yet highly readable account of Iran-US history.

**Shortlisted for the NBCC Award for Criticism**Representations of Blackness have always been integral to our understanding of of the modern world. In Black Meme, Legacy Russell, award-winning author of the groundbreaking Glitch Feminism, explores the construct, culture, and material of the "meme" as mapped to Black visual culture from 1900 to present day. Mining both archival and contemporary media Russell explores the impact of Blackness, Black life, and death on contemporary conceptions of viral culture, borne in the age of the internet.These meditations include: the circulation of Lynching postcards; Jet Magazine's publication of a picture of Emmett Till in his open casket; how the televised broadcast of protesters in Selma enters the nation's living room and changed the debate on civil rights; how a citizen-recorded video of the Rodney King beating at the hands of the LAPD became known as the "first viral video"; what the Anita Hill hearings tell us about the media's creation of the Black icon; Tamara Lanier's fight to reclaim the photos of her enslaved ancestors, Renty and Delia, from Harvard's archive; the Facebook Live recording by Lavish "Diamond" Reynolds of the murder of her partner Philando Castile by the police after being stopped for a broken tail light; and more.Legacy Russell explores the power of these tokens and argues that without the contributions of Black people, digital culture would not exist in its current form.

The era of hyperglobalization once hailed as the 'end of history' was characterised by boundless capitalist expansion. The neoliberal revolution gave rise to a politics of scale aimed at the centralization and unification of states and state systems: the replacement of national with global governance or, in Europe, of the nation-state with a supranational superstate, the European Union. The 'New World Order' proclaimed by the United States in the wake of the Soviet collapse proved to be ungovernable by democratic means. Instead, it was ruled through a combination of technocracy and mercatocracy, failing spectacularly to provide for political stability, social legitimacy and international peace. Marked by a series of economic and institutional crises, hyperglobalization gave rise to various kinds of political countermovements that rebelled against and ultimately stopped the upward transfer of state authority in its tracks. This book analyses the ongoing tug-of-war between the forces of globalism and democracy, of centralization and decentralization, and unification and differentiation of states and state systems, and how they are tied to the advance of global capitalism and the prospects for its social and democratic regulation. Exploring the possibility for states and the societies they govern to take back control over their collective fate, the book is an attempt at a renewed theory of the state in political economy. Inspired by the work of Karl Polanyi and John Maynard Keynes, it discusses the potential outlines of a state system allowing for democratic governance within and peaceful cooperation between sovereign nation-states.

Capitalism isn't working. But is there a plausible alternative? The Blueprint lays one out: a system where workers control every lever of production, and competitive markets and state planning coexist side by side. Drawing on the history of socialist experiments and the economic debate over planning and markets, The Blueprint confronts the hardest questions about what went wrong in the past-and why it can go right in the future. The result is a socialism worthy of the twenty-first century.

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.