In Invisible Leviathan, Murray E.G. Smith refutes the main criticisms of Marx's theory of labour value and argues that human civilization is imperilled by the capitalist imperative to measure wealth in terms of 'abstract social labour' and money profit.

A “compelling” (Los Angeles Times) tale of friendship, betrayal, estrangement, and the unpredictable intrusions of violence in the everyday – from the author of the forthcoming 4 3 2 1: A Novel "Six days ago, a man blew himself up by the side of a road in northern Wisconsin. . . ." So begins the story by Peter Aaron about his best friend, Benjamin Sachs. Sachs had a marriage Aaron envied, an intelligence he admired, a world he shared. And then suddenly, after a near-fatal fall that might or might not have been intentional, Sachs disappeared. Now Aaron must piece together the life that led to Sach's death. His sole aim is to tell the truth and preserve it, before those who are investigating the case invent an account of their own.

For example, he describes how: --

The internationally bestselling author of The New York Trilogy, “one of America’s greatest living novelists,” dazzlingly reinvents the coming-of-age story (The Observer). Sinuously constructed in four interlocking parts, Paul Auster’s fifteenth novel opens in New York City in the spring of 1967, when twenty-year-old Adam Walker, an aspiring poet and student at Columbia University, meets the enigmatic Frenchman Rudolf Born and his silent and seductive girlfriend, Margot. Before long, Walker finds himself caught in a perverse triangle that leads to a sudden, shocking act of violence that will alter the course of his life. Three different narrators tell the story of Invisible, a novel that travels in time from 1967 to 2007 and moves from Morningside Heights, to the Left Bank of Paris, to a remote island in the Caribbean. It is a book of youthful rage, unbridled sexual hunger, and a relentless quest for justice. With uncompromising insight, Auster takes us into the shadowy borderland between truth and memory, between authorship and identity, to produce a work of unforgettable power that confirms his reputation as “one of America’s most spectacularly inventive writers” (The Times Literary Supplement). “Occasionally, a novel is so masterful it leaves you breathless. Paul Auster’s Invisible is such a novel.” —The Boston Globe “Magnificent . . . The results are revelatory.” —Houston Chronicle “As soon as you finish Paul Auster’s Invisible, you want to read it again . . . It is the finest novel Paul Auster has ever written.” —Clancy Martin, The New York Times Book Review “Auster has never been better.” —The Seattle Times

Twenty-first-century capitalism has little more to offer than a menu of despair: pandemics, deepening inequality, worsening depression, runaway climate change, intensifying authoritarianism and escalating militarism. Twilight Capitalism offers a wide-ranging analysis of the origins, implications and scope of the “combined” social crisis of 2020 and beyond. A compelling case is made that Karl Marx’s critical analysis of capitalism, along with his program of class-struggle socialism, is essential to understanding and addressing the most important social, economic and ecological problems of our time.

Written during a moment in English history when the political and social structures were in flux and open to interpretation, Leviathan played an essential role in the development of the modern world.

Looking to an increasingly perilous and inequitable future, many progressive activists and scholars are seriously questioning the capacity of global capitalism to guarantee the conditions for human well-being and sustainability in the 21st century. This development inspires the central inquiry of Marxist Phoenix: Will the intensifying contradictions and multiple crises of contemporary capitalism incite the emergence of a mass socialist workers' movement committed not merely to the "reform" of capitalism but to its overthrow? This collection of new and previously published essays, articles, and book chapters written over the last two decades makes the case for the indispensability of the Marxist-socialist project to the emancipation of humanity from material insecurity and ever-worsening social antagonism. Only a global workers' movement committed to the fundamental tenets of Marxism--a triumphant Marxist Phoenix rising from the ashes of the multiple defeats of the 20th century--can open the road to real social progress. Interdisciplinary, rigorous, and critically engaged with many currents in contemporary academic discourse, this volume is a timely contribution to the rebirth of a Marxist socialism that is at once scientific, emancipatory, and internationalist in its commitments.

Sixteen-year-old Sophie knows there is more to the story of her parents' death. And she's on a mission to find the truth. To aid her in solving the decades-old mystery, Sophie has enlisted her best friend, Mikael, whose friendship has turned into something more. It's soon clear that Sophie's future is very much wrapped up in the details of her family's past, and the key lies with information only one man can provide: her parents' former employer, the elusive billionaire Alfred Nobel. As the threat of war looms in Europe, dangers to Sophie and her loved ones grow. While her determination to solve the mystery doesn't waver, forces beyond her control conspire to keep her from her purpose. Then, news of her great-aunt Tabitha's death sets off a chain of events that leaves Sophie questioning everything. The more Sophie learns, the more she realizes that nothing—and no one—in her life is what it seems. And coming to terms with the dark secrets she uncovers means imagining a truth that she never dreamed possible. Full of gorgeous settings, thrilling adventure, and romance, invisible things is a novel that dares to ask, what if?

Why did the language of contract become the dominant metaphor for the relationship between subject and sovereign in mid-seventeenth-century England? In Wayward Contracts, Victoria Kahn takes issue with the usual explanation for the emergence of contract theory in terms of the origins of liberalism, with its notions of autonomy, liberty, and equality before the law. Drawing on literature as well as political theory, state trials as well as religious debates, Kahn argues that the sudden prominence of contract theory was part of the linguistic turn of early modern culture, when government was imagined in terms of the poetic power to bring new artifacts into existence. But this new power also brought in its wake a tremendous anxiety about the contingency of obligation and the instability of the passions that induce individuals to consent to a sovereign power. In this wide-ranging analysis of the cultural significance of contract theory, the lover and the slave, the tyrant and the regicide, the fool and the liar emerge as some of the central, if wayward, protagonists of the new theory of political obligation. The result is must reading for students and scholars of early modern literature and early modern political theory, as well as historians of political thought and of liberalism.