Philosophy: A Verso Bookshelf

With calls for a reorientation of the Left, how do we find a way to disentangle ourselves from a global order that shapes our politics as well as our imagination? Expect psychopolitics, Big Data, the disobedient precarious, and new possibilities for organization and resistance.

See all our Philosophy student reading here.

What makes a fascist? Are there character traits that make someone more likely to vote for the far right? The Authoritarian Personality is not only one of the most significant works of social psychology ever written, it also marks a milestone in the development of Adorno’s thought, showing him grappling with the problem of fascism and the reasons for Europe’s turn to reaction. Over half a century later and with the rise of right-wing populism and the reemergence of the far-right in recent years, this hugely influential study remains as insightful and relevant as ever.

In this radical and visionary new book, McKenzie Wark argues that information has empowered a new kind of ruling class. While techno-utopian apologists still celebrate these innovations as an improvement on capitalism, for workers—and the planet—it’s worse. Drawing on the writings of a surprising range of classic and contemporary theorists, Wark offers an illuminating overview of the contemporary condition and the emerging class forces that control—and contest—it.

Fredric Jameson takes on the allegorical form.

In The Security Principle, French philosopher Frédéric Gros takes a historical approach to the concept of security, looking at its evolution from the Stoics to the social network. With lucidity and rigour, Gros’s approach is fourfold, looking at security as a mental state, as developed by the Greeks; as an objective situation and absence of all danger, as prevailed in the Middle Ages; as guaranteed by the nation-state and its trio of judiciary, police, and military; and finally biosecurity, control, regulation, and protection in the flux of contemporary society. In this deeply thought-provoking account, Gros’s exploration of security shines a light both on its past meanings and its present uses, exposing the contemporary abuses of security and the pervasiveness of it in everyday life in the Global North.

The Authoritarian Personality

by Theodor Adorno

What makes a fascist? Are there character traits that make someone more likely to vote for the far right? The Authoritarian Personality, written in the shadow of Fascism and the Holocaust, looked t...

Capital Is Dead

by McKenzie Wark

In this radical and visionary new book, McKenzie Wark argues that the all-pervasive presence of data in our networked society has given rise to a new mode of production, one not ruled over by capit...

Allegory and Ideology

by Fredric Jameson

Works do not have meanings, they soak up meanings: a work is a machine for libidinal investments (including the political kind). It is a process that sorts incommensurabilities and registers contra...

The Security Principle

by Frédéric Gros

In The Security Principle, French philosopher Frédéric Gros takes a historical approach to the concept of “security”, looking at its evolution from the Stoics to the social network. With lucidity a...

The End of the French Intellectual

by Shlomo Sand

Translated by David Fernbach

Internationally acclaimed Israeli historian Shlomo Sand made his mark with books such as The Invention of the Jewish People and The Invention of the Land of Israel. Returning here to an early fasci...

The Right to Have Rights

by Stephanie DeGooyer, Alastair Hunt, Samuel Moyn and Astra Taylor

Sixty years ago, the political theorist Hannah Arendt, an exiled Jew deprived of her German citizenship, observed that before people can enjoy any of the “inalienable” Rights of Man—before there ca...

Supercommunity

by E-Flux

“I am the supercommunity, and you are only starting to recognize me. I grew out of something that used to be humanity. Some have compared me to angry crowds in public squares; others compare me to ...

General Intellects

by McKenzie Wark

What happened to the public intellectuals that used to challenge and inform us? Who is the Sartre or De Beauvoir of the internet age? General Intellects argues that we no longer have such singular ...

Radical Happiness

by Lynne Segal

Why are we so obsessed by the pursuit of happiness? With new ways to measure contentment we are told that we have a right to individual joy. But at what cost? In an age of increasing individualis...

The Xenofeminist Manifesto

by Laboria Cuboniks

The Xenofeminist Manifesto is an attempt to articulate a feminism fit for the twenty-first century. Unafraid of exploring the potentials of technology, exploring both oppressive and emancipatory po...

Grand Hotel Abyss

by Stuart Jeffries

In 1923, a group of young radical German thinkers and intellectuals came together to at Victoria Alle 7, Frankfurt, determined to explain the workings of the modern world. Among the most prominen...

Inventing the Future

by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams

Neoliberalism isn’t working. Austerity is forcing millions into poverty and many more into precarious work, while the left remains trapped in stagnant political practices that offer no respite.Inve...

Walter Benjamin's Archive

by Walter Benjamin

Edited by Ursula Marx, Michael Schwartz, Gudrun Schwarz and Erdmut Wizisla

Translated by Esther Leslie

The work of the great literary and cultural critic Walter Benjamin is an audacious plotting of history, art, and thought; a reservoir of texts, commentaries, scraps, and fragments of everyday lif...

Heroes

by Franco Berardi

What is the relationship between capitalism and mental health? Through an exhilarating mix of philosophical and psychoanalytical theory and reportage - from the suicide epidemic in Korea to the wav...

Fire Alarm

by Michael Löwy

Translated by Chris Turner

Revolutionary critic of the philosophy of progress, nostalgic of the past yet dreaming of the future, romantic partisan of materialism — Walter Benjamin is in every sense of the word an “unclassifi...

Psychopolitics

by Byung-Chul Han

Translated by Erik Butler

Byung-Chul Han, a star of German philosophy, continues his passionate critique of neoliberalism, trenchantly describing a regime of technological domination that, in contrast to Foucault’s biopower...

Nightwalking

by Matthew Beaumont

Foreword by Will Self

“Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night,” wrote the poet Rupert Brooke. Before the age of electricity, the nighttime city was a very different place to the one we know today – home to t...

Futurability

by Franco Berardi

We live in an age of impotence. Stuck between global war and global finance, between identity and capital, we seem to be incapable of producing that radical change that is so desperately needed. Is...

Critique of Everyday Life

by Henri Lefebvre

The three-volume text by Henri Lefebvre is perhaps the richest, most prescient work about modern capitalism to emerge from one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers and is now availabl...

Reading Capital

by Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey and Jacques Rancière

Translated by Ben Brewster and David Fernbach

Originally published in 1965, Reading Capital is a landmark of French thought and radical theory, reconstructing Western Marxism from its foundations. Louis Althusser, the French Marxist philosophe...

Humankind

by Timothy Morton

What is it that makes humans human? As science and technology challenge the boundaries between life and non-life, between organic and inorganic, this ancient question is more timely than ever. Accl...

State of Insecurity

by Isabell Lorey

Foreword by Judith Butler

Translated by Aileen Derieg

Years of remodelling the welfare state, the rise of technology, and the growing power of neoliberal government apparatuses have established a society of the precarious. In this new reality, produ...

C.L.R. James

by Paul Buhle

Afterword by Paul Buhle and Lawrence Ware

Foreword by Robin D.G. Kelley

C.L.R. James was a protean 20th century Marxist intellectual, widely recognized as a pioneering scholar of slave revolt; a leading voice of Pan-Africanism; a peripatetic revolutionary and scholar w...

Frames of War

by Judith Butler

In this urgent response to violence, racism and increasingly aggressive methods of coercion, Judith Butler explores the media’s portrayal of armed conflict, a process integral to how the West prose...

Philosophy for Militants

by Alain Badiou

Translated by Bruno Bosteels

An urgent and provocative account of the modern 'militant', a transformative figure at the front line of emancipatory politics. Around the world, recent events have seen the creation of a radical p...

Utopia

by Ursula K. Le Guin and Thomas More

Introduction by China Miéville

Five hundred years since its first publication, Thomas More’s Utopia remains astonishingly radical and provocative. More imagines an island nation where thousands live in peace and harmony, men and...

A Philosophy of Walking

by Frédéric Gros

Translated by John Howe

By walking, you escape from the very idea of identity, the temptation to be someone, to have a name and a history ... The freedom in walking lies in not being anyone; for the walking body has no...

The Future

by Marc Augé

Translated by John Howe

For Marc Augé, best-selling author of Non-Places, the prevailing idea of “the Future” rests on our present fears of the contemporary world. It is to the future that we look for redemption and pr...

Radio Benjamin

by Walter Benjamin

Edited by Lecia Rosenthal

Translated by Jonathan Lutes, Diana Reese and Lisa Harries Schumann

Walter Benjamin was fascinated by the impact of new technology on culture, an interest that extended beyond his renowned critical essays. From 1927 to ’33, he wrote and presented something in the...

Crowds and Party

by Jodi Dean

Crowds and Party channels the energies of the riotous crowds who took to the streets in the past five years into an argument for the political party. Rejecting the emphasis on individuals and multi...

Four Futures

by Peter Frase

“It is easier to imagine the end of the world,” the theorist Fredric Jameson has remarked, “than to imagine the end of capitalism.” Jacobin Editor Peter Frase argues that technological advancements...

Allegory and Ideology

by Fredric Jameson

Works do not have meanings, they soak up meanings: a work is a machine for libidinal investments (including the political kind). It is a process that sorts incommensurabilities and registers contra...

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