politics
Capitalism: A Graphic Guide
The history, philosophy and politics of one of the biggest, most successful but most controversial ideas ever.
Capitalism now dominates the globe and influences everything from laws, wars and government to interpersonal relationships. Introducing Capitalism tells the story of its remarkable and often ruthless rise, evolving through strife and struggle as much as innovation and enterprise.
Dan Cryan and Sharron Shatil, with Piero’s brilliant graphics, cover the major economic, social and political developments that shaped the world we live in, such as the rise of banking, the founding of America and...
Critical Theory: A Graphic Guide
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, 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 a tradition of critical analysis...
Ethics: A Graphic Guide
Are humans really selfish and greedy, or generous and kind? Does anyone have the right to tell you what ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mean? Is morality about obeying a set of rules or thinking about the consequences?
Ethics affects everyone. Moral dilemmas can be big or small, from whether to keep pets or recycle assiduously to how to use your vote, or whether it’s right to assist someone who wants to die. We all have our own ideas about what is right and what is wrong, but is this something we can know rather than merely believe?
Introducing Ethics traces the arguments of great moral philosophers...
Keynes: A Graphic Guide
John Maynard Keynes was arguably the twentieth century’s greatest economist. As a new recession bites, it is Keynesian ideas being called into action by governments across the globe.
In the wake of the Great Depression, Keynes advocated that governments spend vast amounts in order to create jobs and prosperity. His ideas, the bedrock of Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1930s America, revolutionised government and helped create an economic consensus only shattered by the monetarism of Reagan and Thatcher’s 1980s.
Keynes himself was a complex man – an establishment figure who married a Russian ballerina in...
Marxism: A Graphic Guide
Was Marx himself a ‘Marxist’?
What is ‘dialectical materialism’ or the ‘superstructure’?
Did Lenin and Stalin betray Marx and his ideas?
Along with Freud and Darwin, Karl Marx was among the most influential thinkers of the late 19th century. Yet Marx inspired not only revolutions in people’s minds, but colossal political upheavals, radically transforming the lives of many millions of people and the geopolitical map of the entire world.
Introducing Marxism provides a fundamental account of Marx’s original philosophy, its roots in 19th-century European...
Feminism: A Graphic Guide
Is biology destiny?
Why is the personal political?
Is pornography anti-feminist?
The term ‘feminism’ came into English usage around the 1890s, but women’s conscious struggle to resist discrimination and sexist oppression goes much further back.
Cathia Jenainati and Judy Groves highlight the key social, political and literary ideas which have shaped our thinking about the status of women across the globe, and tell the story of remarkable individuals who actively challenged and changed traditions, social customs and laws.
Surveying the major developments that have affected...
Plato: A Graphic Guide
Plato is the most widely studied, and probably the greatest, philosopher of all time.
He asked his contemporary Athenians all the questions that we now call ‘philosophical’, and then recorded their ideas in the form of lively dramatic debates.
Plato also had his own views about the nature of knowledge and reality, politics, ethics, mathematics, economics, the size of the ideal city, and much else besides.
How did philosophers like Socrates and Pythagoras influence Plato? What is his puzzling theory of knowledge all about, and how did it direct his provocative views on politics, ethics and individual...
Baudrillard: A Graphic Guide
Did the first Gulf War really take place? Is it possible to fake a bank robbery? Was sexual liberation a disaster?
Jean Baudrillard, who died in 2007, was one of France’s most subtle and powerful theorists. But his provocative style won him as many enemies as admirers. Introducing Baudrillard cuts beneath the controversy to present Baudrillard’s radical claims that reality has been replaced by a simulated world of images. Chris Horrocks and Zoran Jevtic provide a clear account of Baudrillard’s work on obesity, pornography and terrorism and trace his development from...
Economics: A Graphic Guide
Economics was described by the English economist Lionel Robbins in 1935 as ‘the science of scarcity’ but these days economics is everywhere, and it’s never been more popular.
But what is economics really all about? What do the great economists think, and what can economics do for us today?
David Orrell, author of Economyths, explains all in Introducing’s trademark intelligent but witty title, accompanied by brilliant illustrations from the legendary Borin van Loon.
Thatcherism: A Graphic Guide