Steven Best

This work offers a detailed comparison of the historical visions of both Foucault and Habermas, using Marx as a modernist contrast. The book clearly illustrates the advantages and disadvantages of each thinker's theory for the productive analysis of history and society, relating the work of each to current debates over modern and postmodern theory. While Steven Best engages these debates throughout the book, he challenges the claim that there are sharp lines of difference between the modern and the postmodern. Instead, he argues that the differences between Foucault and Habermas, both in relation to each other and to Marx, are best understood as competing responses within modern theory itself - responses that attempt to articulate Hegelian and Nietzschean visions of history. Avoiding partisan defenses of one theorist over another, Best shows that the problems of each are illuminated through the perspectives of the others.

The Global Industrial Complex: Systems of Domination is a groundbreaking collection of essays by a diverse set of leading scholars who examine the entangled and evolving global array of corporate-state structures of hegemonic power-what the editors refer to as "the power complex"--That was first analyzed by C. Wright Mills in his 1956 classic work, The Power Elite. In this new volume edited by Steven Best, Richard Kahn, Anthony J. Nocella II, and Peter McLaren, the power complex is conceived as co-constituted, interdependent and imbricated systems of domination. Spreading insidiously on a global level, the transnational institutional relationships of the power complex combine the logics of capitalist exploitation and profits and industrialist norms of efficiency, control, and mass production, While some have begun to analyze these institutional complexes as separate entities, this book is unique in analyzing them as overlapping, mutually-enforcing systems that operate globally and which will undoubtedly frame the macro-narrative of the 21st century (and perhaps beyond). The global industrial complex-a grand power complex of complexes-thus poses one of the most formidable challenges to the sustainability of planetary democracy, freedom and peace today. But there can be no serious talk of opposition to it until it is more popularly named and understood. The Global Industrial Complex aims to be a foundational contribution to this emerging educational and political project.

"The first anthology of writings on the history, ethics, politics and tactics of the Animal Liberation Front. Terrorists Or Freedom Fighters? features both academic and activist perspectives and offers powerful insights into this international organisation and its position within the animal right movement. Calling on sources as venerable as Thomas Aquinas and as current as the patriot act - and, in some cases, personal experience - the contributors explore the history of civil disobedience and sabotage, and examine the philosophical and cultural meanings of words like 'terrorism', 'democracy' and 'freedom', in a book that ultimately challenges the values and assumptions that pervade our culture. Contributors include Robin Webb, Rod Coronado, Ingrid Newkirk, Paul Watson, Karen Davies, Bruce Friedrich and others"--Back cover.