Author: Christoph Hermann File Type: epub John Maynard Keynes expected that around the year 2030 people would only work 15 hours a week. In the mid-1960s, Jean Fourastie still anticipated the introduction of the 30-hour week in the year 2000, when productivity would continue to grow at an established pace. Productivity growth slowed down somewhat in the 1970s and 1980s, but rebounded in the 1990s with the spread of new information and communication technologies. The knowledge economy, however, did not bring about a jobless future or a world without work, as some scholars had predicted. With few exceptions, work hours of full-time employees have hardly fallen in the advanced capitalist countries in the last three decades, while in a number of countries they have actually increased since the 1980s. This book takes the persistence of long work hours as starting point to investigate the relationship between capitalism and work time. It does so by discussing major theoretical schools and their explanations for the length and distribution of work hours, as well as tracing major changes in production and reproduction systems, and analyzing their consequences for work hours. Furthermore, this volume explores the struggle for shorter work hours, starting from the introduction of the ten-hour work day in the nineteenth century to the introduction of the 35-hour week in France and Germany at the end of the twentieth century. However, the book also shows how neoliberalism has eroded collective work time regulations and resulted in an increase and polarization of work hours since the 1980s. Finally, the book argues that shorter work hours not only means more free time for workers, but also reduces inequality and improves human and ecological sustainability.

Author: Ellen Meiksins Wood File Type: pdf In this classic study, which won the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize, Ellen Wood provides a critical survey of influential trends in post-Marxist theory. Challenging their dissociation of politics from class, she elaborates her own original conception of the complex relations between class, ideology and politics. In the process, Wood explores the links between socialism and democracy and reinterprets the relationship between liberal and socialist democracy. In a new introduction, Wood discusses the relevance of The Retreat from Classin a post-Soviet world. She traces the connections between post-Marxism and current academic trends such as postmodernism and argues that a re-examination of class politics is a necessary counter to the current cynical acceptance of capitalism.

Author: Dudjom Lingpa File Type: pdf The revelations of Dudjom Lingpa, a highly influential mystic of 19th century Tibet,translated by B. Alan Wallace. The practice of Dzogchen, the Great Perfection, is the pinnacle of the nine vehicles of practice taught in the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism. The highly influential mystic Dudjom Lingpa (18351904) and his disciple Sera Khandro (18921940), the most prolific female writer in Tibetan history, here illuminate the methods to discover our own primordial purity and abide in uncontrived awareness. Buddhahood Without Meditation This is Dudjom Lingpas most widely taught visionary text. In it wisdom beings and historical figures in the Great Perfection lineage emphasize theview of cutting through (trekcho) to the original purity of pristineawareness via the four special samayas, or pledges, of the Great Perfection nonexistence, oneness,uniform pervasiveness, and spontaneous actualization. At each stage of his spiritual progress, Dudjom Lingpas doubts are dispelledand his realizations enhanced by pithy advice. The Fine Path to Liberation Sera Khandro establishes thenecessary motivation and conduct for receiving teachings such asBuddhahoodWithout Meditation. This sublime Dharma is to be seen in the contextof the five perfections of the sambhogakaya the teacher, place, time, disciples,and Dharma are fully perfected and must not be reified as ordinary. Garland for the Delight of the Fortunate Sera Khandro fills in the gaps ofBuddhahood Without Meditation, explainingthe metaphors, and spellingout the implications of the root texts highly condensedverses. This is an essential key for unlocking Dudjom Lingpas profound wisdom.**About the Author Dynamic lecturer, progressive scholar, and one of the most prolific writers and translators of Tibetan Buddhism in the West,B. Alan Wallacecontinually seeks innovative ways to integrate Buddhist contemplative practices with Western science to advance the study of the mind. A scholar and practitioner of Buddhism since 1970, Dr. Wallace has taught Buddhist theory and meditation worldwide since 1976. Having devoted fourteen years to training as a Tibetan Buddhist monk, ordained by H. H. the Dalai Lama, he went on to earn an undergraduate degree in physics and the philosophy of science at Amherst College and a doctorate in religious studies at Stanford. He is the founder and president of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies. He is the author ofStilling the MindandThe Attention Revolution. Wallace lives in Santa Barbara, CA.

Author: Rüdiger Safranski File Type: pdf One of the centurys greatest philosophers, without whom there would be no Sartre, no Foucault, no Frankfurt School, Martin Heidegger was also a man of great failures and flaws, a Faustus who made a pact with the devil of his time, Adolf Hitler. The story of Heideggers life and philosophy, a quintessentially German story in which good and evil, brilliance and blindness are inextricably entwined and the passions and disasters of a whole century come into play, is told in this brilliant biography. Heidegger grew up in Catholic Germany where, for a chance at pursuing a life of learning, he pledged himself to the priesthood. Soon he turned apostate and sought a university position, which set him on the path to becoming the star of German philosophy in the 1920s. Rudiger Safranski chronicles Heideggers rise along with the thought he honed on the way, with its debt to Heraclitus, Plato, and Kant, and its tragic susceptibility to the conservatism that emerged out of the nightmare of Germanys loss in World War I. A chronicle of ideas and of personal commitments and betrayals, Safranskis biography combines clear accounts of the philosophy that won Heidegger eternal renown with the fascinating details of the loves and lapses that tripped up this powerful intellectual. The best intellectual biography of Heidegger ever written and a best-seller in Germany, Martin Heidegger Between Good and Evil does not shy away from full coverage of Heideggers shameful transformation into a propagandist for the National Socialist regime nor does it allow this aspect of his career to obscure his accomplishments. Written by a master of Heideggers philosophy, the book is one of the best introductions to the thought and to the life and times of the greatest German philosopher of the century. From BooklistHeidegger towers above this century as a thinker able to wrest insights from ancient texts (Plato, Heraclitus, and Parmenides) while simultaneously opening distinctively modern perspectives for contemporaries (Sartre, Tillich, and Arendt). With admirable erudition and sophistication, Safranski recounts the evolution of this giant from a cautious Catholic seminarian to a daring explorer of the depths of anxiety and alienation. A different kind of subtlety--more psychological than philosophical--comes into play in the analysis of why Heidegger veered from his quest for truth to serve Adolf Hitler. While refusing to exculpate him for supporting an evil movement, Safranski shows how philosophical reasoning belatedly helped Heidegger distance himself from Nazism, so opening the way to a fruitful postwar investigation of the human place in a technological world. As the well-told story of a life that combined, as few have, a heroic rage for truth with a tragic vulnerability to error, this biography will make a valuable addition to larger public libraries. Bryce ChristensenFrom Kirkus ReviewsThe author sheds light on the varieties of darkness that shade the life and thought of, arguably, Germanys most influential 20th-century philosopher. Safranski (Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy, not reviewed) presents Heidegger in the context of what Osers, the books translator, so brilliantly calls codethat German specialty for extravagant wretchedness. More than most German philosophers, Heidegger, in quest of Being, pushes to the brink of incomprehensibility. The author comforts us with the knowledge that even so distinguished a friend of Heideggers as Karl Jaspers, missed what Heidegger meant bycodeBeing. But the darkness of incomprehension was itself a principle of Heideggers thought. Instead of the active, determining mind that Kant had posited, Heidegger found an intractable resistance to human reason--Being itself--of which we first become aware in amazement over the sheer fact that anything exists at all. We do not so much shape the world as find ourselves codebeing there, or in German, Dasein. Against this cognitive darkness, Safranski sets the moral obscurity of Heideggers Nazi involvement and tries to unravel the connections there between the philosophers thought and life. The picture that emerges is, appropriately, darkly unfocused. When Safranski observes at the end of his book that Heideggerscodebrusqueness and severity mellowed with age, readers will wonder whether theyve missed something Brusqueness is already too defined a quality for what Hannah Arendt called Heideggers ``lack of character, in the sense that he literally has none, certainly not a particularly bad one. Safranski suggests that the real Heidegger hovers between two self-portraits modern tower of philosophy and modest attendant in the museum of philosophys history, taking care that the works on display there are properly illuminated. Safranskis own take--both critical and appreciative--on Heidegger mirrors the complexity of his subject, and provides a welcome entre to a difficult thought world. -- 1998, Kirkus Associates, LP.