Insurrections of the Mind

Insurrections of the Mind
Author: Franklin Foer
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2014-09-16
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0062340387

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of The New Republic, an extraordinary anthology of essays culled from the archives of the acclaimed and influential magazine Founded by Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann in 1914 to give voice to the growing progressive movement, The New Republic has charted and shaped the state of American liberalism, publishing many of the twentieth century’s most important thinkers. Insurrections of the Mind is an intellectual biography of this great American political tradition. In seventy essays, organized chronologically by decade, a stunning collection of writers explore the pivotal issues of modern America. Weighing in on the New Deal; America’s role in war; the rise and fall of communism; religion, race, and civil rights; the economy, terrorism, technology; and the women’s movement and gay rights, the essays in this outstanding volume speak to The New Republic’s breathtaking ambition and reach. Introducing each article, editor Franklin Foer provides colorful biographical sketches and amusing anecdotes from the magazine’s history. Bold and brilliant, Insurrections of the Mind is a celebration of a cultural, political, and intellectual institution that has stood the test of time. Contributors include: Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Philip Roth, Pauline Kael, Michael Lewis, Zadie Smith, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, James Wolcott, D. H. Lawrence, John Maynard Keynes, Langston Hughes, John Updike, and Margaret Talbot.

A Disease in the Public Mind

A Disease in the Public Mind
Author: Thomas Fleming
Publisher: Hachette UK
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2013-05-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0306822016

By the time John Brown hung from the gallows for his crimes at Harper's Ferry, Northern abolitionists had made him a “holy martyr” in their campaign against Southern slave owners. This Northern hatred for Southerners long predated their objections to slavery. They were convinced that New England, whose spokesmen had begun the American Revolution, should have been the leader of the new nation. Instead, they had been displaced by Southern “slavocrats” like Thomas Jefferson. This malevolent envy exacerbated the South's greatest fear: a race war. Jefferson's cry, “We are truly to be pitied,” summed up their dread. For decades, extremists in both regions flung insults and threats, creating intractable enmities. By 1861, only a civil war that would kill a million men could save the Union.

Unarmed Insurrections

Unarmed Insurrections
Author: Kurt Schock
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2005
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0816641927

In the last two decades of the twentieth century, a wave of "people power" movements erupted throughout the nondemocratic world. In South Africa, the Philippines, Nepal, Thailand, Burma (Myanmar), China, and elsewhere, mass protest demonstrations, strikes, boycotts, civil disobedience, and other nonviolent actions were brought to bear on a rigid political status quo. Kurt Schock compares the successes of the antiapartheid movement in South Africa, the people power movement in the Philippines, the pro-democracy movement in Nepal, and the antimilitary movement in Thailand with the failures of the pro-democracy movement in China and the anti-regime challenge in Burma. Schock develops a synthetic framework that allows him to identify which characteristics increase the resilience of a challenge to state repression, and which aspects of a state's relations can he exploited by such a challenge. By looking at how these methods of protest promoted regime change in some countries but not in others, this book provides rare insight into the often overlooked and little understood power of nonviolent action.

Self and Emotional Life

Self and Emotional Life
Author: Adrian Johnston
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2013-06-11
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 023153518X

Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou defy theoretical humanities' deeply-entrenched resistance to engagements with the life sciences. Rather than treat biology and its branches as hopelessly reductive and politically suspect, they view recent advances in neurobiology and its adjacent scientific fields as providing crucial catalysts to a radical rethinking of subjectivity. Merging three distinct disciplines—European philosophy from Descartes to the present, Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis, and affective neuroscience—Johnston and Malabou triangulate the emotional life of affective subjects as conceptualized in philosophy and psychoanalysis with neuroscience. Their experiments yield different outcomes. Johnston finds psychoanalysis and neurobiology have the potential to enrich each other, though affective neuroscience demands a reconsideration of whether affects can be unconscious. Investigating this vexed issue has profound implications for theoretical and practical analysis, as well as philosophical understandings of the emotions. Malabou believes scientific explorations of the brain seriously problematize established notions of affective subjectivity in Continental philosophy and Freudian-Lacanian analysis. She confronts philosophy and psychoanalysis with something neither field has seriously considered: the concept of wonder and the cold, disturbing visage of those who have been affected by disease or injury, such that they are no longer affected emotionally. At stake in this exchange are some of philosophy's most important claims concerning the relationship between the subjective mind and the objective body, the structures and dynamics of the unconscious dimensions of mental life, the role emotion plays in making us human, and the functional differences between philosophy and science.

Rebellion in the Ranks

Rebellion in the Ranks
Author: John A. Nagy
Publisher:
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2007
Genre: History
ISBN:

How General Washington Avoided the Peril From Within His Own Forces "It gives me great pain to be obliged to solicit the attention of the honorable Congress to the state of the army...the greater part of the army is in a state not far from mutiny...I know not to whom to impute this failure, but I am of the opinion, if the evil is not immediately remedied and more punctuality observed in future, the army must absolutely break up."--George Washington, September 1775 Mutiny has always been a threat to the integrity of armies, particularly under trying circumstances, and since Concord and Lexington, mutiny had been the Continental Army's constant traveling companion. It was not because the soldiers lacked resolve to overturn British rule or had a lack of faith in their commanders. It was the scarcity of food--during winter months it was not uncommon for soldiers to subsist on a soup of melted snow, a few peas, and a scrap of fat--money, clothing, and proper shelter, that forced soldiers to desert or organize resistance. Mutiny was not a new concept for George Washington. During his service in the French and Indian War he had tried men under his command for the offense and he knew that disaffection and lack of morale in an army was a greater danger than an armed enemy. In Rebellion in the Ranks: Mutinies of the American Revolution, John A. Nagy provides one of the most original and valuable contributions to American Revolutionary War history in recent times. Mining previously ignored British and American primary source documents and reexamining other period writings, Nagy has corrected misconceptions about known events, such as the Pennsylvania Line Mutiny, while identifying for the first time previously unknown mutinies. Covering both the army and the navy, Nagy relates American officers' constant struggle to keep up the morale of their troops, while highlighting British efforts to exploit this potentially fatal flaw.

Mind of My Mind

Mind of My Mind
Author: Octavia E. Butler
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2023-03-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1538765438

A young woman harnesses her newfound power to challenge the ruthless man who controls her, in this brilliant and provocative novel from the award-winning author of Parable of the Sower. Mary is a treacherous experiment. Her creator, an immortal named Doro, has molded the human race for generations, seeking out those with unusual talents like telepathy and breeding them into a new subrace of humans who obey his every command. The result is Mary: a young black woman living on the rough outskirts of Los Angeles in the 1970s, who has no idea how much power she will soon wield. Doro knows he must handle Mary carefully or risk her ending like his previous experiments: dead, either by her own hand or Doro's. What he doesn't suspect is that Mary's maturing telepathic abilities may soon rival his own power. By linking telepaths with a viral pattern, she will create the potential to break free of his control once and for all-and shift the course of humanity.

A Hedonist Manifesto

A Hedonist Manifesto
Author: Michel Onfray
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2015-11-10
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0231538367

Michael Onfray passionately defends the potential of hedonism to resolve the dislocations and disconnections of our melancholy age. In a sweeping survey of history's engagement with and rejection of the body, he exposes the sterile conventions that prevent us from realizing a more immediate, ethical, and embodied life. He then lays the groundwork for both a radical and constructive politics of the body that adds to debates over morality, equality, sexual relations, and social engagement, demonstrating how philosophy, and not just modern scientism, can contribute to a humanistic ethics. Onfray attacks Platonic idealism and its manifestation in Judaic, Christian, and Islamic belief. He warns of the lure of attachment to the purportedly eternal, immutable truths of idealism, which detracts from the immediacy of the world and our bodily existence. Insisting that philosophy is a practice that operates in a real, material space, Onfray enlists Epicurus and Democritus to undermine idealist and theological metaphysics; Nietzsche, Bentham, and Mill to dismantle idealist ethics; and Palante and Bourdieu to collapse crypto-fascist neoliberalism. In their place, he constructs a positive, hedonistic ethics that enlarges on the work of the New Atheists to promote a joyful approach to our lives in this, our only, world.

Factory of Strategy

Factory of Strategy
Author: Antonio Negri
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2014-02-04
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0231519427

Factory of Strategy is the last of Antonio Negri's major political works to be translated into English. Rigorous and accessible, it is both a systematic inquiry into the development of Lenin's thought and an encapsulation of a critical shift in Negri's theoretical trajectory. Lenin is the only prominent politician of the modern era to seriously question the "withering away" and "extinction" of the state, and like Marx, he recognized the link between capitalism and modern sovereignty and the need to destroy capitalism and reconfigure the state. Negri refrains from portraying Lenin as a ferocious dictator enforcing the proletariat's reappropriation of wealth, nor does he depict him as a mere military tool of a vanguard opposed to the Ancien Régime. Negri instead champions Leninism's ability to adapt to different working-class configurations in Russia, China, Latin America, and elsewhere. He argues that Lenin developed a new political figuration in and beyond modernity and an effective organization capable of absorbing different historical conditions. He ultimately urges readers to recognize the universal application of Leninism today and its potential to institutionally—not anarchically—dismantle centralized power.