New Releases by Stuart Sim

Daniel Defoe''s A Journal of the Plague Year has taken on a new relevance with the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic. Through an exploration of two chronologically distant societies in crisis, this study compares the attitudes, beliefs, and conduct of the public portrayed in the book and those in our own embattled Covid era. There are interesting similarities to note, with equivalents to the Covid-deniers and the anti-vaxxers to be found in Defoe''s bleak vision of London in the 1660s as it descends into a state of chaos. JPY offers us some uncomfortable truths about human nature that resonate strongly in our own times, revealing how responding to a pandemic can bring out both the best and the worst in our character as we face up to a world where the old certainties no longer seem to apply. Pandemics expose the fault-lines in ideology, putting the social contract at risk - the question they pose is whether we can continue to rely on our current socio-political set-up or whether it requires a radical rethink. There is a pressing need for more debate on this issue, and this project is designed to make a case for that.

Dogmatism, prejudice and bigotry are becoming ever more evident on the contemporary political scene and dissent is one of their main targets. The Politics of Dissent explores the negative impact this shift is having on public life, with radically-oriented governments striving to close down dissenting voices in both their political opponents and the mainstream media. It defends dissent as a critical element in the democratic process which ought to be encouraged instead of allowing ourselves to fall into an state of despair, as is increasingly occurring on the political left in the face of the dramatic rise of right-wing populism. The concept is explored in a wide sense to identify how it works in philosophy, religion, science and the arts as well as in politics.

It is Jean Francois Lyotard''s political focus that singles him out from his poststructuralist and postmodernist contemporaries. He is invariably ''thinking politics'': finding ways of translating philosophical thought into a basis for political action. Stuart Sim explores how Lyotard''s brand of pragmatism can provide a focus for political theory and action in our cultural climate, especially in light of the dramatic resurgence of right-wing extremism.

This book examines the concept of post-truth and the impact it is having on contemporary life, bringing out both its philosophical and political dimensions. Post-truth is contextualised within the philosophical discourse of truth, with particular reference to theories of scepticism and relativism, to explore whether it can take advantage of these to claim any intellectual credibility. Sim argues that post-truth cannot be defended on either sceptical or relativistic grounds – even those provided by recent iconoclastic philosophical movements such as poststructuralism and postmodernism. The affinity between post-truth and conspiracy theory is emphasised, and the extent to which post-truth plays a role in religious doctrine is also considered. Post-truth is seen to constitute a threat to liberal democratic ideals and our Enlightenment heritage, raising the question of whether we are moving into a post-liberal age where the far right would hold power. To prevent this, post-truth urgently needs to be countered.

The detective figure in contemporary American crime fiction increasingly relies on revenge to bring about justice in a society where there has been a sharp decline in moral values. This study demonstrates how the notion of the detective as a moral exemplar or heroic ideal breaks down in the works of writers such as James Ellroy and Sara Paretsky.

What might a ''theory of everything'' look like? Is science an ideology? Who were Adorno, Horkheimer or the Frankfurt School? The decades since the 1960s have seen an explosion in the production of critical theories. Deconstructionists, poststructuralists, postmodernists, second-wave feminists, new historicists, cultural materialists, postcolonialists, black critics and queer theorists, among a host of others, all vie for our attention. Stuart Sim and Borin Van Loon''s incisive graphic guide provides a route through the tangled jungle of competing ideas and provides an essential historical context, situating these theories within tradition of critical analysis going back to the rise of Marxism. They present the essential methods and objectives of each theoretical school in an incisive and accessible manner, and pay special attention to recurrent themes and concerns that have preoccupied a century of critical theoretical activity.

The A-Z Guide to Modern Social and Political Theories is a companion volume to the already published A-Z Guide to Modern Literary and Cultural Theorists. It ranges widely through the social sciences and related areas to identify thinkers who have had a major impact on the development of modern social and political theory and given clear, accessible summaries of their work. While the accent is on the later twentieth century, several up-and-coming theorists are included to ensure a contemporary edge to the volume, classic names in the field from the earlier twentieth century are not neglected, and the collection also delves back into the nineteenth century for such founding figures of the social sciences as Marx and Comte. The volume is therefore both up-to-date and mindful of the sources of modern debates.

Postmodernism is an important part of the cultural landscape which continues to evolve, yet the ideas and theories surrounding the subject can be diverse and difficult to understand. Fifty Postmodern Thinkers critically examines the work of fifty of the most important theorists within the postmodern movement who have defined and shaped the field, bringing together their key ideas in an accessible format. Drawing on figures from a wide range of subject areas including literature, cultural theory, philosophy, sociology and architecture those covered include: John Barth Umberto Eco Slavoj Zizek Cindy Sherman John Cage Jean-Francois Lyotard Charles Jencks Jacques Derrida Homi K. Bhabha Quentin Tarantino Each entry examines the thinkers’ career, key contributions and theories and refers to their major works. A valuable resource for those studying postmodern ideas at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, this text will appeal across the humanities and social sciences.

This book traces the crystallisation of post-Marxism as a specific theoretical position in its own right and considers the role played in its development by post-structuralism, postmodernism and second-wave feminism. It examines the history of dissenting tendencies within the Marxist tradition and considers what the future prospects of post-Marxism are likely to be.

Will our addiction to profit destroy the world we live in? The profit motive now exercises an effective tyranny over our lives: in the private as well as the public sector, nowhere seems immune from its reach. International tycoons, economists and politicians are obsessed with economic growth. Yet, as Stuart Sim shows, the pursuit of excessive profit brought the world to the brink of economic chaos in the recent credit crisis and threatens us with environmental disaster as well. Despite this, neoliberalism still sets the agenda for economic policy in the West. Sim suggests various ''act up'' strategies so that we might resist becoming slaves to personal gain and, in doing so, he demonstrates that life needn''t be all about profit.

Global financial crisis, global environmental crisis--what connects them? Stuart Sim claims they are both symptoms of the end of modernity, the cultural system that has prevailed in the West from the Enlightenment onwards.In this provocative book, Sim argues that the modern world''s insatiable need for technologically-driven economic progress is unsustainable, and potentially destructive of the planet and its socio-economic systems. The new landscape this creates--socially, politically, economically, intellectually--is explored through an interdisciplinary approach, providing a wide-ranging assessment of the collapse of modernity and the challenges it poses us. Sim calls for a radical alteration in our world view and for purposeful changes both to our economic and intellectual life: we need to jettison the free market, rein in conspicuous consumption, reinvigorate public service, and develop talents other than the entrepreneurial if we are to reconstruct our society satisfactorily.

Climate change is acknowledged to be the major problem currently facing the human race, and the need to reduce our carbon footprint becomes ever more urgent as the scientific predictions of the effects of climate change become increasingly dire. Whether we are fully aware of the social and political consequences of striving for a significant reduction is more questionable. The Carbon Footprint Wars identifies the many dangers inherent in the projected solutions - such as retreating from the spread of globalization, the current socio-economic paradigm for world trade. The war of words that is being waged over the appropriate way to deal with our collective carbon footprint has critical implications for us all. Stuart Sim examines the issues in detail, raising questions about the assumptions being made on both sides of the climate change divide. He argues that we must urgently address the problem of how to engineer the best possible trade-off between economic survival and ecological disaster - and he puts forward some radical suggestions about how we should set about doing so.

This study introduces readers to the eighteenth-century novel through a consideration of contemporary social issues. Eighteenth-century authors grappled with very similar problems to the ones we face today such as: what motivates a fundamentalist terrorist? What are the justifiable limits of state power? What dangers lie in wait for us when we create life artificially?The book discusses key authors from Aphra Behn in the late seventeenth century to James Hogg in the 1820s, covering the ''long'' eighteenth century. It guides readers through the main genres of the period from Realism, Gothic romance and historical romance to proto-science fiction. It also introduces a range of debates around race relations, anti-social behaviour, family values and born-again theology as well as the power of the media, surveillance, political sovereignty and fundamentalist terrorism. Each novel is shown to be directly relevant to some of the most urgent moral issues of our own time.

This book makes an urgent demand for silence. The ability to think, to reflect, and to create are all highly dependent on regular access to silence. Yet in today''s noisy, 24/7 society silence and quiet are under threat. And the business world only makes this worse with cynical marketing strategies abusing the power of noise: ever-diminishing oases of calm are hard to find. Stuart Sim argues that we need more, not less, silence. He explains why silence matters, where it matters--in our environment, in religion, philosophy, the arts, literature and science - and why the human race will suffer if we do not make space for it. The confrontation between the politics of noise and the politics of silence affects all of us profoundly: we cannot stay neutral on this issue.

Challenges all forms of fundamentalism and unexamined belief systems from a philosophical and sceptical viewpoint. Is unquestioning belief making a global comeback? The growth of religious fundamentalism seems to suggest so. For the sceptically minded, this is a deeply worrying trend, not just confined to religion. Political, economic, and scientific theories can demand the same unquestioning obedience from the general public. Stuart Sim outlines the history of scepticism in both the Western and Islamic cultural traditions, and from the Enlightenment to postmodernism. Setting out what a sceptical politics might be like, Empires of Belief argues that we need less belief and more doubt: an engaged scepticism to replace the pervasive dogmatism that threatens our democracies.

The French theorist, Jean-Francois Lyotard, is one of the major contemporary thinkers whose work seriously challenged foundationalist philosophy. This volume provides a survey of his works and comments on his postmodernism and Marxism, in particular through his most influential book, The Postmodern Condition. Attention is also given to his more specialized philosophical and political writings, which are sometimes marginalized in more general commentaries. The work engagies with Lyotardean concepts such as, grand narrative, differend, paganism and svelteness which have been generally adopted throughout the field of cultural enquiry.

Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard and Geoffrey Hartman all claim to have found a way to transcend value judgment. This book confronts these assertions and argues that tinkers such as these have, by their rejection of conventional methods of constructing value judgments, succeeded in problematizing the entire area of aesthetics. Stuart Sim treats posttructuralism and postmodernism as forms of anti-aesthetics and contextualises the movements within a longer-running tradition of anti-foundationalism and radical skepticism in Western philosophy. Arguing from a broadly socialist, historical materialist position he demands that discourses be made to declare their ideological commitments. While the radical skepticism of Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and their followers is shown to be ultimately philosophically unsustainable and ideologically suspect form a left-wing point of view, Sim concludes that these critics nevertheless point to a need for reassessment of methods and objectives among critical theorists on the left.