Throughout life, your conscious and subconscious intelligences shift you from one mode of life to another, in order to render you more successful while fulfilling your needs. Life has always been this way, while you persist to ignore it for various reasons. And so you live your life randomly, more or less in tune with yourself, with society, and with nature, more or less against norms and expectations, one mode of life after another, just the way it comes and just the way it happens, since you can never understand what goes on, you never learn about it in school, you never see it on TV, and everyone around does just the same. While living your life randomly, your ‘bad’ or ‘unfortunate’ modes of life replace inevitably your ‘good,’ ‘pleasant,’ or ‘fortunate’ ones. What you do, you enjoy the good and you try to avoid the rest, never predicting your life, never understanding your modes of life for what they truly are, and therefore you are never capable to control them. This manner of unconscious, unpredictable living can become frustrating at times, even dangerous, with everyone telling you that you are abnormal, sick, malfunctioning, mean, or disobedient every time you are switched naturally to your ‘bad’ or ‘forbidden’ modes of life. You do your best while refraining from temptations and ‘bad’ behavior, you try to remain within the hypothetical ‘neutral’ or ‘good’ modes of life the way society demands from you, it does not work since your subconscious forces you in every way to obey all its needs, and consequently, you fall in the wrong side of everything. You feel bad and guilty then, you hate yourself, you get sick or you are punished by society, and even worse, you are labeled as sick and suffering by medicine and as criminal and dysfunctional by justice. Modes of life are neither bad nor dysfunctional, since they are meant to facilitate you to cope with and adapt to all sudden changes from your immediate physical and social environment. While if you fail to predict and identify your own modes of life, or if you act against them in any manner, then you might end up in a hospital, in jail, or at the morgue, since it happens often. Throughout this book, you learn to identify and understand your modes of life, modes of intelligence, and modes of existence influencing you the most, while learning the multitude of modes of life, what triggers them, and how to access or avoid them in order to live a healthy, successful, fulfilling life.

This title was first published in 2003. This book offers a challenging new approach to social theory, building on the concept of life-modes. Thomas Hojrup invites us to look at cultural analysis within a state perspective. He develops a mode of analysis based on principles of structural dialectics inspired by Aristotle, Leibniz, Bachelard and Hjelmslev. In doing so he offers a fresh perspective on classical theoretical problems in both the social sciences and humanities, a perspective which allows us to think beyond some of the dominant paradigms of these disciplines. The book is addressed to scholars from a variety of disciplines who are interested in new solutions to some of the fundamental theoretical problems concerning state, society and culture.

To Have Or to Be? is one of the seminal books of the second half of the 20th century. Nothing less than a manifesto for a new social and psychological revolution to save our threatened planet, this book is a summary of the penetrating thought of Eric Fromm. His thesis is that two modes of existence struggle for the spirit of humankind: the having mode, which concentrates on material possessions, power, and aggression, and is the basis of the universal evils of greed, envy, and violence; and the being mode, which is based on love, the pleasure of sharing, and in productive activity. To Have Or to Be? is a brilliant program for socioeconomic change.

Our Unsustainable Life: Why We Can't Have Everything We Want With the concept of the Imperial Mode of Living, Brand and Wissen highlight the fact that capitalism implies uneven development as well as a constant and accelerating universalisation of a Western mode of production and living. The logic of liberal markets since the 19thCentury, and especially since World War II, has been inscribed into everyday practices that are usually unconsciously reproduced. The authors show that they are a main driver of the ecological crisis and economic and political instability. The Imperial Mode of Living implies that people's everyday practices, including individual and societal orientations, as well as identities, rely heavily on the unlimited appropriation of resources; a disproportionate claim on global and local ecosystems and sinks; and cheap labour from elsewhere. This availability of commodities is largely organised through the world market, backed by military force and/or the asymmetric relations of forces as they have been inscribed in international institutions. Moreover, the Imperial Mode of Living implies asymmetrical social relations along class, gender and race within the respective countries. Here too, it is driven by the capitalist accumulation imperative, growth-oriented state policies and status consumption. The concrete production conditions of commodities are rendered invisible in the places where the commodities are consumed. The imperialist world order is normalized through the mode of production and living.

Modes of Thought was written 20 years ago from lectures delivered by Whitehead at Wellesley, the University of Chicago, and Harvard. In it Whitehead developed the brilliant new concepts of clarity and precision of statement which have since become fundamental principles of construction underlying all of the fields of modern intellectual analysis.

In a new approach to philosophical anthropology, Bruno Latour offers answers to questions raised in We Have Never Been Modern: If not modern, what have we been, and what values should we inherit? An Inquiry into Modes of Existence offers a new basis for diplomatic encounters with other societies at a time of ecological crisis.