"In this collection of essays from 1969-2013, many in book form for the first time, Noam Chomsky exposes the real nature of state power. With unrelenting logic, he holds the arguments of empire up to critical examination and shatters the myths of those who protect the power and privilege of the few against the interests and needs to the many"--

Examines how states and civil societies interact in their formation of a new political community, focusing on authority patterns and relations established between individuals and states during nation- building. For students and scholars of political science, sociology, history, and comparative studies. Originally published in 1964 by John Wiley and Sons, with a 1977 enlarged edition published by University of California Press, this latest enlarged edition includes an introduction by the author's son. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

We are living in an open sea, caught up in a continuous wave, with no fixed point and no instrument to measure distance and the direction of travel. Nothing appears to be in its place any more, and a great deal appears to have no place at all. The principles that have given substance to the democratic ethos, the system of rules that has guided the relationships of authority and the ways in which they are legitimized, the shared values and their hierarchy, our behaviour and our life styles, must be radically revised because they no longer seem suited to our experience and understanding of a world in flux, a world that has become both increasingly interconnected and prone to severe and persistent crises. We are living in the interregnum between what is no longer and what is not yet. None of the political movements that helped undermine the old world are ready to inherit it, and there is no new ideology, no consistent vision, promising to give shape to new institutions for the new world. It is like the Babylon referred to by Borges, the country of randomness and uncertainty in which ‘no decision is final; all branch into others’. Out of the world that had promised us modernity, what Jean Paul Sartre had summarized with sublime formula ‘le choix que je suis’ (‘the choice that I am’), we inhabit that flattened, mobile and dematerialized space, where as never before the principle of the heterogenesis of purposes is sovereign. This is Babel.

A great contemporary German philosopher attacks the explosive problem of political myth in our day, and reveals how the myth of the state evolved from primitive times to prepare the way for the rise of the modern totalitarian state. "A brilliant survey of some of the major texts in the history of political theory."—Kenneth Burke, The Nation.

Laski's magnum opus

"These essays explore the relationship between culture and politics in the modern world. They range in space from Iran to Algeria, and the eastern marchlands of Europe to the Atlantic, and in time over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But they are all inspired by a cluster of linked preoccupations with the nature of the social order now emerging in the world and the kinds of moral and political legitimation it requires and permits. The essays are also linked by Ernest Gellner's distinctive, and highly arresting, intellectual temper and style. The volume will interest a wide range of readers in the social sciences and philosophy."--Book cover.