Left Is Not Woke

SUSAN NEIMAN

Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany

‘Susan Neiman is one of our most careful and principled thinkers on the genuine left. In this nuanced and impassioned plea for universalism she has done a public service for readers of every political stripe. If an alliance of conservatives, liberals, and progressives is to succeed in fending off an increasingly undemocratic far right, lucid thinking is our only hope. Left Is Not Woke is an urgent and powerful intervention into one of the most pressing struggles of our time.‘ Thomas Chatterton Williams, Bard College and contributing writer, The Atlantic

‘In these bleak times, Susan Neiman‘s book arrives as a breath of fresh air. Calmly but fiercely defending the principles of universalism and progress that once defined the left, she gives us a counter to the narrow tribalism that threatens to derail progressive politics.‘

Vivek Chibber, New York University

216 x 138mm • 160 pages • UK June 2023, US March 2023 HB 978-1-5095-5830-8 • £20.00 / $25.00 / €24.90

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Israelis and Palestinians

From the Cycle of Violence to the Conversation of Mankind

JONATHAN GLOVER

King's College London

Can Israelis and Palestinians end their long conflict? Peace deals have been sabotaged by extremists on both sides. A deeper understanding of the psychology of the cycle of violence is called for. This book looks at the human psychological flaws that entrap both sides: the urge to respond to wounds or humiliation with backlash; political or religious beliefs held with a rigidity that excludes compromise; and people’s identity being shaped by the conflict in ways that make it harder to imagine or necessarily desire alternatives. Drawing on comparable conflicts, Jonathan Glover proposes some ways to gradually weaken the grip of this psychology.

216 x 138mm • 200 pages • UK December 2023, US February 2024 HB • 978-1-5095-5978-7 • £20.00 / $25.00 / €24.90

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The Vicissitudes of Nature

From Spinoza to Freud

RICHARD J. BERNSTEIN

The New School for Social Research

‘Throughout his career, Richard Bernstein has served as a trusted guide through the European and American philosophical traditions. Lucid and fair-minded, his new book exemplifies his rare gift for synthesis, showing us how the idea of nature has changed over time, and how we have changed as well.‘ Peter E. Gordon, Harvard University and author of Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos

229 x 152mm • 304 pages • UK & US October 2022

HB • 978-1-5095-5519-2 • £55.00 / $69.95 / €67.90 PB • 978-1-5095-5520-8 • £18.99 / $26.95 / €22.90

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For more Bernstein titles, see backlist.

Also a History of Philosophy

Volume 1: The Project of a Genealogy of Postmetaphysical Thinking

JÜRGEN HABERMAS

Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt

Translated by Ciaran Cronin

This new work by Jürgen Habermas is also a history of philosophy. It presents, in the style of a genealogy, how the now dominant figures of Western postmetaphysical thinking arose. Habermas takes as his guide the discourse on faith and knowledge that developed out of two powerful Axial Age traditions in the Roman Empire. He traces how Western philosophy successively liberated itself from its symbiosis with religion and became secularized. From a systematic perspective, he elaborates the decisive conflicts, learning processes and caesuras, as well as the accompanying transformations in science, law, politics and society.

But Habermas‘s new book is not just a history of philosophy: it is also a reflection on the task of a philosophy committed to the reasonable freedom of communicatively socialized subjects. The task of philosophy, he argues, is to clarify what our growing scientific knowledge of the world means for us – for us as human beings, as inhabitants of the modern world and as individuals.

229 x 152mm • 422 pages • UK September 2023, US November 2023 HB • 978-1-5095-4389-2 • £35.00 / $45.00 / €42.90 ebook available

A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics

JÜRGEN HABERMAS

Translated by Ciaran Cronin

Habermas’s book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) has long been recognized as one of the most important works of twentieth-century social thought. Blending together philosophy and social history, he outlined a theory of the public sphere as a domain situated between civil society and the state, a domain in which citizens could scrutinize the activities of public officials and debate matters of common concern. In his later works, Habermas would repeatedly question the role played by the public sphere in the safeguarding of democratic community. Now, in view of the crisis of democracy and the digital revolution, he returns to the same theme.

The central concern of this new book is new media and their platform structure, which are increasingly relegating traditional mass media – significant drivers of the ‘old’ structural transformation – to the background. Habermas argues that the forms of communication associated with new media harm the self-awareness of the political public sphere, inducing a new structural transformation with grave consequences for deliberative democracy, the construction of public opinion and will formation.

190 x 124mm • 120 pages • UK November 2023, US February 2024

HB • 978-1-5095-5893-3 • £35.00 / $45.00 / €42.90

PB • 978-1-5095-5894-0 • £9.99 / $12.95 / €12.90

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For more Habermas titles, see backlist.