William Davies

"When Jeremy Bentham proposed that government should run 'for the greatest benefit of the greatest number,' he posed two problems: what is happiness and how can we measure it? With the rise of positive psychology, freakonimics, behavioural economics, endless TED talks, the happiness manifesto, the Happiness Index, the tyranny of customer service, the emergence of the quantified self movement, we have become a culture obsessed with measuring our supposed satisfaction. In anecdotes that include the Buddhist monk who lectured the business leaders of the world at Davos, why the Nike Fuel band makes us more worried about our fitness, how parts of our city are being rebuilt in response to scientific studies of oxytocin levels in our brain, and what a survey from Radisson hotels--that proves that 62% of us believe that well-being is a luxury worth more than work or a good relationship--really tells us about the way we measure ourselves, and continually find ourselves wanting"--

How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being

The Happiness Industry

An innovative new anthology exploring how science fiction can motivate new approaches to economics. From the libertarian economics of Ayn Rand to Aldous Huxley's consumerist dystopias, economics and science fiction have often orbited each other. In Economic Science Fictions, editor William Davies has deliberately merged the two worlds, asking how we might harness the power of the utopian imagination to revitalize economic thinking. Rooted in the sense that our current economic reality is no longer credible or viable, this collection treats our economy as a series of fictions and science fiction as a means of anticipating different economic futures. It asks how science fiction can motivate new approaches to economics and provides surprising new syntheses, merging social science with fiction, design with politics, scholarship with experimental forms. With an opening chapter from Ha-Joon Chang as well as theory, short stories, and reflections on design, this book from Goldsmiths Press challenges and changes the notion that economics and science fiction are worlds apart. The result is a wealth of fresh and unusual perspectives for anyone who believes the economy is too important to be left solely to economists. Contributors AUDINT, Khairani Barokka, Carina Brand, Ha-Joon Chang, Miriam Cherry, William Davies, Mark Fisher, Dan Gavshon-Brady and James Pockson, Owen Hatherley, Laura Horn, Tim Jackson, Mark Johnson, Bastien Kerspern, Nora O Murchú, Tobias Revell et al., Judy Thorne, Sherryl Vint, Joseph Walton, Brian Willems

Economic Science Fictions

"Wide-ranging yet brilliantly astute. . . . Davies is a wild and surprising thinker who also happens to be an elegant writer." -- Jennifer Szalai, New York Times

Democracy and the Decline of Reason

Nervous States

In this age of intense political conflict, we sense objective fact is growing less important. Experts are attacked as partisan, statistics and scientific findings are decried as propaganda, and public debate devolves into personal assaults. How did we get here, and what can we do about it?

In winter 2014, a Tibetan monk lectured the world leaders gathered at Davos on the importance of Happiness. The recent DSM-5, the manual of all diagnosable mental illnesses, for the first time included shyness and grief as treatable diseases. Happiness has become the biggest idea of our age, a new religion dedicated to well-being. In this brilliant dissection of our times, political economist William Davies shows how this philosophy, first pronounced by Jeremy Bentham in the 1780s, has dominated the political debates that have delivered neoliberalism. From a history of business strategies of how to get the best out of employees, to the increased level of surveillance measuring every aspect of our lives; from why experts prefer to measure the chemical in the brain than ask you how you are feeling, to why Freakonomics tells us less about the way people behave than expected, The Happiness Industry is an essential guide to the marketization of modern life. Davies shows that the science of happiness is less a science than an extension of hyper-capitalism.

صناعة السعادة

Aitor Ruiz-Redondo

Professor of Palaeoanthropology William Davies

Situating the South-Eastern European region at the crossroads between the Near East and the rest of Europe, The Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers of South-Eastern Europe provides an interdisciplinary exploration of the Balkan record of prehistoric foragers in terms of dispersal, ecologies, evolution, and symbolism. The Balkans can increasingly be seen as a key crossroads region, connecting the Near East with the rest of Europe. Such movements of ancient human foragers were not always from east to west; eastward dispersals into the Near East also occurred. The Balkans also served as an interaction zone, where encounters between incoming and indigenous human groups led to the exchange of ideas and genes. Recently increased intensity of study in the region has led to the discovery of genetic evidence for interbreeding (Neanderthals and modern humans), as well as rock art and possible early seafaring evidence. Ruiz-Redondo and Davies set out new frameworks for future research. The Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers of South-Eastern Europe is the first volume to evaluate the long hunter-gatherer prehistory of South-Eastern Europe, drawing together the latest evidence to restore this region to its full geographical and human evolutionary importance. This includes evidence of shifting raw material and subsistence economies, human remains and ancient DNA, and pre-Neolithic ceramics.

The Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers of South-Eastern Europe

Nick Taylor

Martina Tazzioli

Sahil Jai Dutta

A critical and evidence-based account of the COVID-19 pandemic as a political–economic rupture, exposing underlying power struggles and social injustices. The dawn of the COVID-19 pandemic represented an exceptional interruption in the routines of work, financial markets, movement across borders and education. The policies introduced in response were said to be unprecedented—but the distribution of risks and rewards was anything but. While asset-owners, outsourcers, platforms and those in spacious homes prospered, others faced new hardships and dangers. Unprecedented? explores the events of 2020-21, as they afflicted the UK economy, as a means to grasp the underlying dynamics of contemporary capitalism, which are too often obscured from view. It traces the political and cultural contours of a "rentier nationalism," that was lurking prior to the pandemic, but was accelerated and illuminated by COVID-19. But it also pinpoints the contradictions and weaknesses of this capitalist model, and the new sources of opposition that it meets. An empirical, accessible and critical analysis of the COVID economy, Unprecedented? is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the political and economic turbulence of the pandemic’s first eighteen months.

How COVID-19 Revealed the Politics of Our Economy

Unprecedented?

In this age of intense political conflict, we sense objective fact is growing less important. Experts are attacked as partisan, statistics and scientific findings are decried as propaganda, and public debate devolves into personal assaults. How did we get here, and what can we do about it? In this sweeping and provocative work, political economist William Davies draws on a four-hundred-year history of ideas to reframe our understanding of the contemporary world. He argues that global trends decades and even centuries in the making have reduced a world of logic and fact into one driven by emotions—particularly fear and anxiety. This has ushered in an age of “nervous states,” both in our individual bodies and our body politic. Eloquently tracing the history of accounting, statistics, science, and human anatomy from the Enlightenment to the present, Davies shows how we invented expertise in the seventeenth century to calm the violent disputes—over God and the nature of reality—that ravaged Europe. By separating truth from emotion, scientific, testable facts paved a way out of constant warfare and established a basis for consensus, which became the bedrock of modern politics, business, and democracy. Informed by research on psychology and economics, Davies reveals how widespread feelings of fear, vulnerability, physical and psychological pain, and growing inequality reshaped our politics, upending these centuries-old ideals of how we understand the world and organize society. Yet Davies suggests that the rise of emotion may open new possibilities for confronting humanity’s greatest challenges. Ambitious and compelling, Nervous States is a perceptive and enduring account of our turbulent times.

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason

Sarah Kember

przewodnik samopomocy w oparciu o techniki poznawczo-behawioralne

Przezwyciężanie gniewu i drażliwości

"Since the 2016 referendum, the UK has been in a crisis of its own making. But there are more reasons for this than Brexit alone. "This Is Not Normal" takes stock of a nation that no longer recognizes itself. Academic and author William Davies finds the narrative sense behind apparently chaotic and irrational events, extracting their underlying logic and long-term causes"--

The Collapse of Liberal Britain

This Is Not Normal

The Shepherd's Garden

Plays Written for a Private Theatre. By William Davies

From Its Mouth to Its Source with Some Accounts of Its Tributaries

The Pilgrimage of the Tiber

Ruth Charles

Dorothy Garrod opened many doors; not only was she the first female professor at Cambridge University, but she illuminated - and in some cases initiated - some of prehistoric archaeology's most central issues. The quiet yet self possessed woman was best known as a fieldworker, often venturing into dangerous regions such as Kurdistan. Her first and highly successful excavation revealed fragments of Neanderthal fossils in Gibralter. This volume reviews modern research on this site, as well as exploring other issues which interested the Disney Professor of Archaeology: hominid remains from Mount Carmel; Palaeolithic sites in the Zagros Mountains, Bulgaria and Britain; and the cultural evidence for the beginning of Near Eastern food production, which Garrod called Natufian. Also included are papers concerned with her life, background and published work. The topics' span and continuing relevance are testament to Dorothy Garrod's remarkable character and great achievements.

Dorothy Garrod and the Progress of the Palaeolithic

Yuval Noah Harari

Thomas Chatterton Williams

Kate Manne

Peter Wohlleben

Stephanie Kelton

David French

Richard Kearney

Mary Harrington

Martha Craven Nussbaum

Taylor Dotson

Vinciane Despret

Patrick Stokes

Amia Srinivasan

Judith Pamela Butler

Olivier Abel

Gwenola Ricordeau

Tess Johnson

Hugo Micheron

Shane Trotter

Kmele Foster

En 2022, dans un monde en proie à une profonde incertitude, la tendance du débat public est à la polarisation idéologique et identitaire, qu'il s'agisse de la gestion de la pandémie, de la libération de la parole des femmes ou de la question de la laïcité. Donner à entendre la diversité des voix qui tentent detrouver dans l'incertitude l'occasion de relancer la pensée : telle est l'ambition de cet ouvrage qui rassemble les grands textes de philosophes, écrivains, historiens ou économistes parus dans la presse internationale en 2021, sélectionnés par la rédaction de Philosophie magazine.

22 penseurs pour 2022

"In the wake of the Second World War, Samuel Beckett wrote some of the most important literary works of the 20th century. This is the first in-depth historical study to examine the far-reaching impact of the war on Beckett's writing. The book explores a range of Beckett's texts, from his plays and fiction to criticism and poetry, and draws on a substantial body of archival and historical sources, from the diaries describing Beckett's experiences in Nazi Germany before the war to accounts of his resistance work in occupied France, his involvement with the Irish Red Cross and his attitudes to Irish neutrality. Along the way, Samuel Beckett and the Second World War casts new light on Beckett's political commitments and his concepts of history as they were formed during Europe's darkest hour"--

Politics, Propaganda and a 'Universe Become Provisional'

Samuel Beckett and the Second World War

James Brophy

Samuel Beckett's Poetry is the first book-length study of Beckett's complete poetry, designed for students and scholars of twentieth century poetry and literature, as well as for specialists of Beckett's work. This volume explores how poetry provided Beckett a medium of expression during key moments in his life, from his earliest attempts at securing a reputation as a published writer, to the work of restoring his own speech while suffering aphasia shortly before his death. Often these were moments of desperation and discouragement, when more substantial works were not possible: moments of illness, of personal loss or of public disaster. This volume includes an introduction that contextualizes Beckett as a poet and a chronology of the composition and publication of all his known poems. Essays offer a range of critical perspectives, from translation theory, war poetics and Irish Studies to Beckett's debts to Modernism, Romanticism and the Jazz Age.

Samuel Beckett's Poetry

Its Development, Use and Maintenance

The Grass Crop

The story of 'The Irish Mail', the train which has travelled from London to Ireland via Holyhead for almost two centuries.

William Davies

Books

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