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Nihilistic Times
Thinking with Max Weber
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Nihilistic Times
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Wendy Brown diagnoses a late-modern nihilism that trivializes values—including truth itself—and reduces politics to narcissism and power-mongering. Rereading Max Weber, who saw a similar predicament in his own time, Brown seeks to reground political action in responsibility and reorient classrooms to the critical thinking citizens need today.
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One of America's leading political theorists analyses the nihilism degrading and confounding political and academic life today. Through readings of Max Weber's Vocation Lectures, she proposes ways to counter nihilism's devaluations of both knowledge and political responsibility.
How has politics become a playpen for vain demagogues? Why has the university become an ideological war zone? What has happened to truth? Wendy Brown places nihilism at the centre of these predicaments. Emerging from European modernity's replacement of God and tradition with science and reason, nihilism removes the foundation on which values, including that of truth itself, stand. It hyperpoliticises knowledge and reduces the political sphere to displays of narcissism and irresponsible power plays. It renders the profound trivial, the future unimportant, and corruption banal.
To consider remedies for this condition, Brown turns to Weber's famous Vocation Lectures, delivered at the end of World War I. There, Weber himself decries the effects of nihilism on both scholarly and political life. He also spells out requirements for re-securing truth in the academy and integrity in politics. Famously opposing the two spheres to each other, he sought to restrict academic life to the pursuit of facts and reserve for the political realm the pursuit and legislation of values.
Without accepting Weber's arch oppositions, Brown acknowledges the distinctions they aim to mark as she charts reparative strategies for our own times. She calls for retrieving knowledge from hyperpoliticisation without expunging values from research or teaching and reflects on ways to embed responsibility in radical political action. Above all, she challenges the left to make good on its commitment to critical thinking by submitting all values to scrutiny in the classroom and to make good on its ambition for political transformation by twinning a radical democratic vision with charismatic leadership.
Series: The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
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Nihilistic Times
A Seminary Co-op Notable Book "What makes Brown's book especially well worth reading is her impressive ability to show how key themes in Weber's scholarship - including his emphasis on the defining characteristics of modernity... speak to our own time." - Inside Higher Ed "Presses us to think more carefully and imaginatively about the relationships among human freedom, human value,...Paperback$4799Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 3-4 weeks -
Nihilistic Times
One of America's leading political theorists analyses the nihilism degrading and confounding political and academic life today. Through readings of Max Weber's Vocation Lectures, she proposes ways to counter nihilism's devaluations of both knowledge and political responsibility. How has politics become a playpen for vain demagogues? Why has the university become an ideological war zone? What has happened to truth?...Hardback$4799Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 3-4 weeks
Book Hero Magic summarised reviews for this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! HOW HAS THIS BEEN REVIEWED?
Wendy Brown's Nihilistic Times is well-reviewed for its insightful engagement with Max Weber's ideas in the context of modern political and social challenges. Critics highlight Brown's ability to connect Weber's concepts, like disenchantment and rationalization, to contemporary issues, arguing against nihilism by advocating for a democratic restoration of meaning in politics. The book is praised for its thought-provoking analysis, combining rigorous scholarship with an optimistic view on using education and critical thinking to address societal issues.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9780674279384
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Format: Hardback
Date Published: 11 April 2023
Country: United States
Imprint: Harvard University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 15.0mm
Width: 127.0mm
Height: 178.0mm
Weight: 249g
Pages: 144
About the Author
Wendy Brown is UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study and was for many years Class of 1936 First Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her books, which have been translated into more than twenty languages, include In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, States of Injury, Undoing the Demos, and Walled States, Waning Sovereignty.
Also by Wendy Brown
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Nihilistic Times
A Seminary Co-op Notable Book "What makes Brown's book especially well worth reading is her impressive ability to show how key themes in Weber's scholarship - including his emphasis on the defining characteristics of modernity... speak to our own time." - Inside Higher Ed "Presses us to think more carefully and imaginatively about the relationships among human freedom, human value,...Paperback$4799Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 3-4 weeks -
States of Injury
A landmark work from one of our leading political theorists A sympathetic critique that attempts to free Left politics from its own snares, States of Injury explores how woundedness became a basis for contemporary political identity. Without condemning identity politics, Wendy Brown carefully probes the varied historical forces generating them today and the ways these formative conditions constrain emancipatory desire....Paperback$5000Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 2-3 weeks -
Walled States, Waning Sovereignty
A prize-winning examination of why nation-states wall themselves off despite widespread proclamations of global connectedness. Why do walls marking national boundaries proliferate amid widespread proclamations of global connectedness and despite anticipation of a world without borders? Why are barricades built of concrete, steel, and barbed wire when threats to the nation today are so often miniaturised, vaporous, clandestine, dispersed, or...Paperback$5499Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
In the Ruins of Neoliberalism
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...Paperback$4799Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 3-4 weeks -
Undoing the Demos
Tracing neoliberalism's devastating erosions of democratic principles, practices, and cultures. Neoliberal rationality—ubiquitous today in statecraft and the workplace, in jurisprudence, education, and culture—remakes everything and everyone in the image of homo oeconomicus. What happens when this rationality transposes the constituent elements of democracy into an economic register? In Undoing the Demos, Wendy Brown explains how democracy itself is imperiled. The...Paperback$5999Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Undoing the Demos
Tracing neoliberalism's devastating erosions of democratic principles, practices, and cultures. Neoliberal rationality—ubiquitous today in statecraft and the workplace, in jurisprudence, education, and culture—remakes everything and everyone in the image of homo oeconomicus. What happens when this rationality transposes the constituent elements of democracy into an economic register? In Undoing the Demos, Wendy Brown explains how democracy itself is imperilled. The...Hardback$8700Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 2-3 weeks
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