Polity imprint: 1443 books

This book is a foundational text for our understanding of François Laruelle, one of France's leading thinkers, whose ideas have emerged as an important touchstone for contemporary theoretical discussions across multiple disciplines. One of Laruelle’s first systematic elaborations of his...

With his insightful and wide-ranging theory of recognition, Axel Honneth has decisively reshaped the Frankfurt School tradition of critical social theory. Combining insights from philosophy, sociology, psychology, history, political economy, and cultural critique, Honneth’s work proposes nothing...

This revised edition of this extremely popular introduction to social theory has been carefully and thoroughly updated with the latest developments in this continually changing field. Written in a refreshingly lucid and engaging style, Introducing Social Theory provides readers with a wide-ranging,...

In this important new book, the leading philosopher François Laruelle examines the role of intellectuals in our societies today, specifically with regards to criminal justice. He argues that, rather than concerning themselves with abstract philosophical notions like justice, truth and violence, intellectuals...

In Roland Barthes's eyes, Philippe Sollers embodied the figure of the contemporary writer forever seeking something new. Thirty-six years after Barthes produced his study Sollers Writer, Sollers has written a book on the man who was his friend and who shared with him a total faith in literature as...

This book ventures into the world beyond Lampedusa: the crisis belt that stretches from Kashmir across Pakistan and Afghanistan to the Arab world and beyond, to the borders and coasts of Europe. Celebrated author Navid Kermani reports from a region which is our immediate neighbour, despite all too...

Indigenous peoples have gained increasing international visibility in their fight against longstanding colonial occupation by nation-states. Although living in different locations around the world and practising highly varied ways of life, indigenous peoples nonetheless are affected by similar patterns...

'Greed' is a visceral insult. It jabs below the belt, evoking guilty sensations of gluttony and lust. It taunts the rich and powerful, penetrating the cover of modern ideologies and institutions. Today, old-fashioned accusations of greed drag the larger-than-life corporate fat cats down to human bodily...

From Paris to San Bernardino, Barcelona to Manchester, home-grown terrorism is among the most urgent challenges confronting Western nations. Attempts to understand jihadism have typically treated it as a form of political violence or religious conflict. However, the closer we get to the actual people...

In this path-breaking work, Mark Poster highlights the nature of the newly emerging forms of social life, in the current era. The flexibility of language which the computer allows makes the written word less certain and less concrete. The result of these changes, Poster argues, is a new communication...

This book sets out to unravel and explain the puzzle of the global rise of China: how, in just forty years, China has been quickly transformed from a poor, backward third-world country to one of the world’s core economic powerhouses. Exactly how did this Chinese developmental miracle happen? Focusing...

After Terror presents sustained reflections by some of the world's most celebrated thinkers on the most pressing question of our time: how can we find ways to defuse the ticking bombs of terrorism and excessive interventions against it? It offers an antidote to the fatalistic global holy war perspective...

From its inception as a public communication network, the Internet was regarded by many people as a potential means of escaping from the stranglehold of top-down, stage-managed politics. If hundreds of millions of people could be the producers as well as receivers of political messages, could that...

This book is a timely and wide-ranging account of the relationship between the development of a 'free market society' in Europe and North America and the fears and anxieties provoked by crime. It offers an evaluation of the theoretical schools in social theory and in criminology which continue to dominate the academy, but whose purchase on contemporary realities is everywhere slipping.