The Future of Illusion

The Future of Illusion
Author: Victoria Kahn
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2014-01-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 022608390X
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In recent years, the rise of fundamentalism and a related turn to religion in the humanities have led to a powerful resurgence of interest in the problem of political theology. In a critique of this contemporary fascination with the theological underpinnings of modern politics, Victoria Kahn proposes a return to secularism—whose origins she locates in the art, literature, and political theory of the early modern period—and argues in defense of literature and art as a force for secular liberal culture. Kahn draws on theorists such as Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, Walter Benjamin, and Hannah Arendt and their readings of Shakespeare, Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Spinoza to illustrate that the dialogue between these modern and early modern figures can help us rethink the contemporary problem of political theology. Twentieth-century critics, she shows, saw the early modern period as a break from the older form of political theology that entailed the theological legitimization of the state. Rather, the period signaled a new emphasis on a secular notion of human agency and a new preoccupation with the ways art and fiction intersected the terrain of religion.

Capitalism

Capitalism
Author: Fred L. Block
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2018-05-04
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0520959078
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Virtually everyone—left, right, and center—believes that capitalist economies are autonomous, coherent, and regulated by their own internal laws. This view is an illusion. The reality is that economies organized around the pursuit of private profit are contradictory, incoherent, and heavily shaped by politics and governmental action. But the illusion remains hugely consequential because it has been embraced by political and economic elites who are convinced that they are powerless to change this system. The result is cycles of raised hopes followed by disappointment as elected officials discover they have no legitimate policy tools that can deliver what the public wants. In Capitalism, leading economic sociologist Fred L. Block argues that restoring the vitality of the United States and the world economy can be accomplished only with major reforms on the scale of the New Deal and the post–World War II building of new global institutions.

The End of an Illusion

The End of an Illusion
Author: Jean De Kervasdoue
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2023-04-28
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0520330501
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This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1984.

The Future of an Illusion

The Future of an Illusion
Author: Constance Penley
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 234
Release: 1989
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0816617724
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The Future of an Illusion was first published in 1989. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The Future of an Illusion documents the pivotal role Constance Penley has played in the development of feminist film theory. Penley analyzes the primary movements that have shaped the field: the conjunction of feminism, film theory, and psychoanalysis, and the inherent debates surrounding the politics of women and representation. These debates center on the position of women in the classical Hollywood narrative, the construction of the spectator's desire in pornography and eroticism, and the implicitly male bias in psychoanalytically oriented film theory. Essential to anyone studying the sexual policies of representation, The Future of an Illusion ranges from avant-garde films to video, popular cinema, television, literature, and critical and cultural theory. Constance Penley is associate professor of English and film studies at the University of Rochester. A co-editor of the journal Camera Obscura,she is the editor of Feminism and Film Theory.

Freud

Freud
Author: Frederick Crews
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
Total Pages: 768
Release: 2017-08-22
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1627797181
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From the master of Freud debunkers, the book that definitively puts an end to the myth of psychoanalysis and its creator Since the 1970s, Sigmund Freud’s scientific reputation has been in an accelerating tailspin—but nonetheless the idea persists that some of his contributions were visionary discoveries of lasting value. Now, drawing on rarely consulted archives, Frederick Crews has assembled a great volume of evidence that reveals a surprising new Freud: a man who blundered tragicomically in his dealings with patients, who in fact never cured anyone, who promoted cocaine as a miracle drug capable of curing a wide range of diseases, and who advanced his career through falsifying case histories and betraying the mentors who had helped him to rise. The legend has persisted, Crews shows, thanks to Freud’s fictive self-invention as a master detective of the psyche, and later through a campaign of censorship and falsification conducted by his followers. A monumental biographical study and a slashing critique, Freud: The Making of an Illusion will stand as the last word on one of the most significant and contested figures of the twentieth century.

The Money Illusion

The Money Illusion
Author: Scott Sumner
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 415
Release: 2023-05-06
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0226826562
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The first book-length work on market monetarism, written by its leading scholar. Is it possible that the consensus around what caused the 2008 Great Recession is almost entirely wrong? It’s happened before. Just as Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz led the economics community in the 1960s to reevaluate its view of what caused the Great Depression, the same may be happening now to our understanding of the first economic crisis of the 21st century. Foregoing the usual relitigating of problems such as housing markets and banking crises, renowned monetary economist Scott Sumner argues that the Great Recession came down to one thing: nominal GDP, the sum of all nominal spending in the economy, which the Federal Reserve erred in allowing to plummet. The Money Illusion is an end-to-end case for this school of thought, known as market monetarism, written by its leading voice in economics. Based almost entirely on standard macroeconomic concepts, this highly accessible text lays the groundwork for a simple yet fundamentally radical understanding of how monetary policy can work best: providing a stable environment for a market economy to flourish.

Free Will

Free Will
Author: Sam Harris
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 96
Release: 2012-03-06
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1451683405
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From the New York Times bestselling author of The End of Faith, a thought-provoking, "brilliant and witty" (Oliver Sacks) look at the notion of free will—and the implications that it is an illusion. A belief in free will touches nearly everything that human beings value. It is difficult to think about law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, morality—as well as feelings of remorse or personal achievement—without first imagining that every person is the true source of his or her thoughts and actions. And yet the facts tell us that free will is an illusion. In this enlightening book, Sam Harris argues that this truth about the human mind does not undermine morality or diminish the importance of social and political freedom, but it can and should change the way we think about some of the most important questions in life.