Here are 100 books that Undoing the Demos fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am a retired professor of philosophy, but my academic training was in modern languages. I am also an active jazz saxophonist. My dissatisfaction with many established approaches to literature led me to look at literary theory, which then made me focus on philosophy. Academic philosophy, though, seemed to me too often to concentrate on questions about theorising knowledge that neglected questions about how we actually make sense of the world. This led me to reassess the importance of art, particularly music, for philosophy. My chosen books suggest alternative ways of looking at the concerns of philosophy at a time when humankind’s relationship to nature is clearly in deep crisis.
I like books that change the very ways in which I see and understand the world.
Polanyi’s The Great Transformation from the end of WW2 made it much clearer to me how a world which regularly finds technological solutions to humankind’s problems could also descend into barbarism. Modern capitalism’s subordinating the functioning of society to the demands of the market changes the status of nature itself in ways that I am increasingly aware of, as the ecological crisis threatens the very survival of humankind.
The book appeals to me not least because of the ways in which it draws important philosophical conclusions from a detailed historical narrative rather than just stating theoretical positions.
In this classic work of economic history and social theory, Karl Polanyi analyzes the economic and social changes brought about by the "great transformation" of the Industrial Revolution. His analysis explains not only the deficiencies of the self-regulating market, but the potentially dire social consequences of untempered market capitalism. New introductory material reveals the renewed importance of Polanyi's seminal analysis in an era of globalization and free trade.
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I have been a feminist for as long as I can remember. I recall seeing a billboard featuring Sophie Dahl sprawling on a sofa, completely naked. I recognized that I had no control over the images that dominate the visual landscape I inhabit, and I wanted to change this. These books might seem varied, but they all critique aspects of contemporary culture and offer ways to change things. In my academic writing and artwork, I examine these issues through a queer, feminist, and anti-capitalist lens, and these books offer a glimpse into the struggles that I think are important and the methods for change that I think could work.
To be honest, I could’ve picked any book by David Harvey–he writes about capitalism and how it affects people and the places we inhabit in a really accessible way. This brief introduction is a great way to get into his writing (a gateway book!). It is also a useful guide to thinking about contemporary issues with hope rather than despair.
Like the book by Ahmed, this one offers ideas for a socially just society, giving the reader solutions and not just problems. I think it is important when critiquing society to come up with tangible ways that we can move away from unequal systems to more equitable ones. This book makes change feel possible.
Neoliberalism - the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action - has become dominant in both thought and practice throughout much of the world since 1970 or so. Its spread has depended upon a reconstitution of state powers such that privatization, finance, and market processes are emphasized. State interventions in the economy are minimized, while the obligations of the state to provide for the welfare of its citizens are diminished. David Harvey, author of 'The New Imperialism' and 'The Condition of Postmodernity', here tells the political-economic story of…
I grew up outside of Flint, Michigan, which during my lifetime went from being a pretty nice place to live to being a perpetual basket case that still doesn’t have clean water. I’ve always been very concerned with the question of what went wrong, and very early in my graduate education, it became clear to me that the neoliberal agenda that started under Reagan has been at the root of the economic rot and destruction that has afflicted Flint and so many other places. That personal connection, combined with my background in theology, makes me well-suited to talk about how political belief systems “hook” us, even when they hurt us.
Davies offers an exceptionally clear and useful definition of neoliberalism: “the disenchantment of politics by economics.” But what really makes this book valuable is the research he has conducted on the office culture of the government officials who are actually implementing neoliberal policy—how they think, what they believe they’re achieving, and how they sometimes deviate from the letter of neoliberal theory while remaining true to its spirit.
Brilliant...explains how the rhetoric of competition has invaded almost every domain of our existence." -Evgeny Morozov, author of To Save Everything, Click Here"
"In this fascinating book Davies inverts the conventional neoliberal practice of treating politics as if it were mere epiphenomenon of market theory, demonstrating that their version of economics is far better understood as the pursuit of politics by other means." -Professor Philip Mirowski, University of Notre Dame
"A sparkling, original, and provocative analysis of neoliberalism. It offers a distinctive account of the diverse, sometimes contradictory, conventions and justifications that lend authority to the extension of…
A poisonous maiden, a Daoist sex cult, and a violent insurgency.
The polyandrous Yan family in China's rural Shaanxi Province takes in two carpenter brothers. When one brother is convicted of murder after killing their neighbor in a dispute, a constable threatens to expose the family's rumored polyandry and extorts…
I grew up outside of Flint, Michigan, which during my lifetime went from being a pretty nice place to live to being a perpetual basket case that still doesn’t have clean water. I’ve always been very concerned with the question of what went wrong, and very early in my graduate education, it became clear to me that the neoliberal agenda that started under Reagan has been at the root of the economic rot and destruction that has afflicted Flint and so many other places. That personal connection, combined with my background in theology, makes me well-suited to talk about how political belief systems “hook” us, even when they hurt us.
Most commentators see neoliberalism as primarily an economic project that tries to overcome old cultural prejudices and divisions. Cooper shows us that beneath this cosmopolitan façade, neoliberalism has always been about reinforcing traditional hierarchies of race, gender, and sexuality. Through a painstaking review of the actual roll-out of neoliberal policy from Reagan to Obama, she shows that racism, sexism, homophobia, and nationalism are not outdated “leftovers” from a previous era but an essential part of the neoliberal order.
An investigation of the roots of the alliance between free-market neoliberals and social conservatives.
Why was the discourse of family values so pivotal to the conservative and free-market revolution of the 1980s and why has it continued to exert such a profound influence on American political life? Why have free-market neoliberals so often made common cause with social conservatives on the question of family, despite their differences on all other issues? In this book, Melinda Cooper challenges the idea that neoliberalism privileges atomized individualism over familial solidarities, and contractual freedom over inherited status. Delving into the history of the American…
I came to activism at a young age, inspired by a book given to me by a friend in Grade 10. I also grew up poor; my trajectory into university was unusual for my demographic, a fact I only discovered once I was doing my PhD in the sociology of education. By the time I started interviewing activists for my doctorate, I had a burning desire to understand how social change could happen, what democracy really looked like, and who was left out of participating. I am still trying to figure these things out. If you are, too, the books on this list might help!
I’ve loved Wendy Brown’s work since I started reading it while I was doing my PhD back in 2003. I cite her stuff in almost everything I’ve written. This recent book pulls together her vast expertise and insights about political theory, inequality, and democratic practices to explain how neoliberalism has always been anti-democratic, and how it continues to prop up authoritarian styles of leadership, like that of Donald Trump in the US. Key to this, she argues, is how neoliberalism has always made an appeal to ‘tradition,’ which smuggles in patriarchal, classist, and heterosexist notions of the nuclear family, the supremacy of Christian ideals, and a sort of rugged individualism that denies the necessity of a welfare state.
Across the West, hard-right leaders are surging to power on platforms of ethno-economic nationalism, Christianity, and traditional family values. Is this phenomenon the end of neoliberalism or its monstrous offspring?
In the Ruins of Neoliberalism casts the hard-right turn as animated by socioeconomically aggrieved white working- and middle-class populations but contoured by neoliberalism's multipronged assault on democratic values. From its inception, neoliberalism flirted with authoritarian liberalism as it warred against robust democracy. It repelled social-justice claims through appeals to market freedom and morality. It sought to de-democratize the state, economy, and society and re-secure the patriarchal family. In key works…
I've always been fascinated by the ways religion reconciles contradiction. Both of my parents were public school teachers in the panhandle of Florida, and I now work at a public university in Texas, yet the culture in which I was raised, of white evangelicalism, supported economic policies of neoliberalism that defunded public life. My interest in American religion is motivated by the question of why we participate in systems that harm us. This is an economic question, but sufficient answers must address the power of religion to shape what we see as morally good and bad. These books all do that.
Austin, Texas, where I now live, is home to the first Whole Foods in America. Before the chain of grocery stores was bought out by Amazon, I used to shop there. Then I stopped, or well, I no longer went as often, because I learned in LoRusso's book that company founder John Mackey promoted a libertarian spirituality that considered government interference morally hostile and went as far as to proclaim Obama Care a form of fascism.
By the early twenty-first century, Americans had embraced a holistic vision of work, that one's job should be imbued with meaning and purpose, that business should serve not only stockholders but also the common good, and that, for many, should attend to the "spiritual" health of individuals and society alike.
While many voices celebrate efforts to introduce "spirituality in the workplace" as a recent innovation that holds the potential to positively transform business and the American workplace, James Dennis LoRusso argues that workplace spirituality is in fact more closely aligned with neoliberal ideologies that serve the interests of private wealth…
Big Ideas... For Small Businesses
by
John Lamerton,
Big Ideas… for Small Businesses is a straight-talking, no-nonsense guide to growing a small business without sacrificing your lifestyle. Written by a former civil servant turned entrepreneur, the book challenges hustle culture and instead champions the idea of an "ambitious lifestyle business" - one that provides freedom and financial stability,…
I'm a Professor in Geography at Trinity College Dublin and a Senior Research Associate in the School of Tourism and Hospitality at the University of Johannesburg. My research and teaching focus on the political economy of globalisation in Africa, and I'm interested in the ways in which current, massive global changes are impacting Africa and the prospects for its development based on constructed or available policy space. Sometimes there seems to be so much change in the world that it is hard to pick out what the most important trends are and their inter-relationships. I picked this book list based on what I see as some of the biggest changes in the world right now.
I loved this book because it explains how to understand our current politics, particularly in the United States and Europe.
Far-right parties have gained ground globally and have often come to power. Sometimes the political changes and events happen so quickly that they are bewildering, but there is a logic to them that has roots back to the rise of the ideology of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
The book traces this lineage and shows how the rise of the populist right reflects a fracture within this global movement, which now brings together libertarians, market liberals, racists, and nationalists in a new fusion. It reads easily and compellingly and helped me make sense of the current moment.
A revelatory exploration of how today's right-wing authoritarianism emerged not in opposition to neoliberalism, but from within it
Bracingly original... Hayek's Bastards demonstrates how a history of ideas can be riveting. Slobodian grounds intellectual abstractions in the lives of the people who espoused them... His book offers an illuminating history to our current bewildering moment, as right-wing populists join forces with billionaire oligarchs to take a chain saw to the foundations of public life, until there's nothing left to stand on' - Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times
After the end of the Cold War, neoliberalism, with its belief in…
I’ve been trying to understand people’s politics since I was a kid and wondered why my dad, who had been a boy in Sicily under Mussolini, spoke so fondly of “il Duce”—even though Dad was an otherwise independent thinker who believed in people’s inherent dignity, not to mention a man who was an immigrant and an outsider and thus exactly the kind of person fascists hate. I think this background partially explains why I focus my writing on interpreting the significance and appeal of widespread and, in some cases, morally indefensible and contradictory cultural-political ideologies such as neoliberalism and racism.
Folks familiar with the term “neoliberalism” usually describe it as the economic system that tries to unleash the market by getting the government out of the way. I like Globalists because it shows how unleashing the market demands that government gets in the way—of workers’ rights, movements for equality, and, most ominously, democracy itself. Since it’s impossible to understand fascism without tackling capitalism, a book explaining how we got to today’s market principles is vital.
I see this book as a history of the neoliberal economists who encouraged political leaders to use state violence and repression to unleash free trade and shape the global economy. Globalists tell the story of how modern capitalism developed into today’s vast landscape of inequality that makes a fertile ground for fascism and violent extremism to develop.
George Louis Beer Prize Winner Wallace K. Ferguson Prize Finalist A Marginal Revolution Book of the Year
"A groundbreaking contribution...Intellectual history at its best." -Stephen Wertheim, Foreign Affairs
Neoliberals hate the state. Or do they? In the first intellectual history of neoliberal globalism, Quinn Slobodian follows a group of thinkers from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire to the creation of the World Trade Organization to show that neoliberalism emerged less to shrink government and abolish regulations than to redeploy them at a global level. It was a project that changed the world, but was also undermined time and again…
I am the primary writer and podcaster behind The Blockchain Socialist, a platform for exploring the intersection of crypto and left politics. I’ve published over 35 blogs for my website and on the web3 native blogging platform Mirror as well as for outlets like FWB and Outland Magazine. I’ve also recorded over 150 podcasts which included incredible guests with a wide ranging spectrum of political views and expertises like Vitalik Buterin, Cory Doctorow, Douglas Rushkoff, Nick Srnicek, Lawrence Lessig, and many more. And I don’t just talk about but I do it as I am also a co-founder of Breadchain Cooperative where we make blockchain applications from a post-capitalist perspective.
In all of my observations of the web3 space, I’ve noticed that while there are plenty of radical propositions to completely disrupt how we relate to tech and finance, there’s often a lack of understanding of how we got here in the first place.
Reading this book helped me place our current situation onto the trajectory that neoliberalism has taken for the past half a century. The concept of hegemony from Gramsci, which Williams and Gilbert expand upon for the modern age, showed me how even in web3, we are not immune to the influence of neoliberalism.
I recommend this book to anyone looking to be able to identify the cracks in the system to shape a way where web3 could be useful in creating new institutions.
Today power is in the hands of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. How do we understand this transformation in power? And what can we do about it?
We cannot change anything until we have a better understanding of how power works, who holds it, and why that matters. Through upgrading the concept of hegemony-understanding the importance of passive consent; the complexity of political interests; and the structural force of technology-Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams offer us an updated theory of power for the twenty-first century.
Hegemony Now explores how these forces came to control our world. The authors show how…
The problem is not with the actions young women take but with the toxic, sexist conditions they are responding to.
Tanenbaum found, based on six years of interviews with young people ages 14-30, that young women are navigating a culture littered with gendered dress codes, revenge porn, and sexually explicit…
I have spent a great deal of time exploring how psychoanalytic theory might be the basis for a critique of capitalism. I had always heard the Marxist analysis of capitalist society, but what interested me was how psychoanalytic theory might offer a different line of thought about how capitalism works. The impulse that drives people to accumulate beyond what is enough for them always confused me since I was a small child. It seems to me that psychoanalytic theory gives us the tools to understand this strange phenomenon that somehow appears completely normal to us.
Although Ruti’s book is not directly about capitalism, it includes perhaps the best psychoanalytic proposal of confronting the imperatives of capitalist society that I have ever read. Ruti discusses how sexism operates within capitalism primarily in the book, but her point is always about how concepts from psychoanalysis that seem retrograde—such as penis envy—can actually be the basis for a critique of capitalism and sexism.
Mari Ruti combines theoretical reflection, cultural critique, feminist politics, and personal experience to analyze the prevalence of bad feelings in contemporary everyday life. Proceeding from a playful engagement with Freud's idea of penis envy, Ruti's autotheoretical commentary fans out to a broader consideration of neoliberal pragmatism. She focuses on the emphasis on good performance, high productivity, constant self-improvement, and relentless cheerfulness that characterizes present-day Western society. Revealing the treacherousness of our fantasies of the good life, particularly the idea that our efforts will eventually be rewarded-that things will eventually get better-Ruti demystifies the false hope that often causes us to…
