Image Credit: Autumn Conker (Ian Hindmarsh)
Most Read:
Waging War: A New Philosophical Introduction. 2nd Edition. Ian Clark. Oxford University Press. 2015.
Ian Clark offers a far-reaching engagement with both the practice of, and theorisations on, waging war today. Ignas Kalpokas finds that it effectively questions many seemingly self-evident assumptions regarding warfare, thereby avoiding the reiteration of familiar conceptual categorisations and binaries that otherwise preoccupy the field.
The End of Representative Politics. Simon Tormey. Polity Press. 2015.
Simon Tormey challenges the assumption that politics and democracy are ‘dead’, blighted by chronic distrust of the political class and undermined by the perceived failure of representative democracy to secure social justice. Ali Dadgar argues that Tormey proposes a novel expansion of the scope of ‘democracy’ and ‘politics’ in the contemporary moment by pointing towards emergent forms of ‘subterranean’ politics indicative of a ‘post-representative’ era.
Developing Cultural Industries: Learning from the Palimpsest of Practice. Christiaan De Beukelaer. European Cultural Foundation. 2015.
What role have culture and the creative industries come to play as ‘tools’ for social and economic development? Christiaan De Beukelaer examines the implementation of culturally focused development policies in Ghana and Burkina Faso. Jonathan Vickery finds that the book offers critical insight into the under-researched emergence of culture as a major strand of development discourse.
Hard Times: Inequality, Recession, Aftermath. Tom Clark with Anthony Heath. Yale University Press. 2015.
Tom Clark explores growing inequalities in US and British society, contributing to existing work by other leading intellectuals such as Thomas Piketty, Tyler Cowen and Robert Reich. Florian Bon argues that Clark looks beyond ostensibly glowing statistics testifying to economic growth to examine the ‘social recession’ and resultant ‘hard times’ experienced in the aftermath of the financial crisis.
Christopher Hood and Ruth Dixon offer a new study of the impact of ‘New Public Management’ theory, introduced in the UK during the administration of Margaret Thatcher. Tom Thatcher suggests that this is required reading for researchers of New Public Management and the administrative reforms it introduced.
The Question of Peace in Modern Political Thought. Toivo Koivukoski and David Edward Tabachnick (eds). Wilfrid Laurier University Press. 2015.
Can the study of peace be separated from the study of war? This edited collection interrogates peace as an independent strand of philosophical inquiry. Alexander Blanchard welcomes the volume for exploring philosophers not usually associated with the concept of peace and for its timely reflections on the question of cosmopolitan rights in the light of the current refugee crisis.
Steven Harkins took us on a tour of the best bookshops in Glasgow, Scotland.
You May Have Missed…
The European Union Illuminated: Its Nature, Importance and Future. Ali M. El-Agraa. Palgrave MacMillan. 2015.
A useful resource for those wishing to understand the history, economic development, political engagement and legal evolution of the EU, argues João de Sousa Assis. By looking directly at the UK as a case study, Ali M. El-Agraa explores the proposed referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU. See also LSE’s new Brexit Vote blog.
Fishers and Plunderers: Theft, Slavery and Violence at Sea. Alastair Couper, Hance D. Smith and Bruno Ciceri. University of Chicago Press. 2015.
What are the consequences of a globalised fishing industry that pursues and lands 90 million tonnes of fish every year? Kathleen Chiappetta positions this book as a valuable introductory overview. The authors draw upon their wealth of collective experience to address issues of over-fishing and sustainability as well as the often harrowing working conditions of fishers.
Coming up in November:
In November, LSE is staging a number of exciting book-related events. LSE will be welcoming two Nobel Prize winners: Professor Amartya Sen will be in conversation about his new collection of essays, The Country of First Boys (#LSESen).
Professor Robert J. Shiller will also be discussing his new work, Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception (#LSEecon).
9-16 November also marks Academic Book Week (#AcBookWeek) with a number of fascinating and innovative events debating the academic book being held across the UK and beyond as part of the Academic Book of the Future project. Watch out for the review of related publication, The Academic Book on the Future (Palgrave Pivot, 2015), on Monday 9 November!
