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This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1976

"Addressing Spinoza's perennial question: "why do the masses fight for their servitude as if it was salvation?" Capitalism and the Limits of Desire examines the ways in which self-love has become intertwined with a love of capitalism. With ongoing austerity and misery for so many, why does capitalism seem to be so insurmountable, so impossible to move beyond? John Roberts offers a scandalous and intriguing response: It is because we love capitalism more than we love ourselves. Capitalism in the form of commodities, and, more importantly, the online platforms through which we express ourselves, has become so much of who we are, of how we love ourselves that it is difficult to imagine ourselves outside of it. Roberts contends that disentangling ourselves from this collapsing of self into capitalism is possible and that understanding the insidious nature of capitalist thinking even when it comes to our deepest desires is the starting point. Using Marx, Lacan and Spinoza as his guides, Roberts lays out a way for individuals to move forward and forge a sense of self outside the oppressive demands of platform capitalism."

"The twenty-first century so far has seen the global rise of authoritarian populism, systematic racism, and dogmatic metaphysics. Even though these events demonstrate the growth of an age of 'unreason', in this original and compelling book John Roberts resists the assumption that such thinking displays an unthinking irrationality or loss of reason; instead he asserts that an important feature of modern reactionary politics is that it offers a supposedly convincing integration of the particular and the universal. This move is defined by what Roberts calls the 'reasoning of unreason' and has deep roots in the history of Western thought and politics. Tracing the dark history of enlightenment-disenlightenment, John Roberts explores 'the reasoning of unreason' across centuries from Aquinas, William of Ockham, the most important treatise on witchcraft Malleus Maleficarum, Locke, Kant, and Count Arthur de Gobineau, to Social Darwinism, Nazism, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Friedrich von Hayek. Roberts provides a new set of philosophical-political tools to understand the formation and denigration of the rational subject and the current reinvestment in various forms of political unreason globally. The Reasoning of Unreason is the first book to draw on the philosophy of reason, political philosophy, political theory and political history, in order to produce a dialectical account of the 'making of reason' internal to the forces of unreason and the limits of reason."--Bloomsbury Publishing

"Many theorists conceptualize the 'everyday' as a place where a democracy of taste is brought into being. After modernism and postmodernism, they argue, art is to be found everywhere celebrity magazines to shopping malls. John Roberts argues that this understanding of the everyday downgrades its revolutionary meaning and philosophical implications. Asserting that the everyday should not be narrowly identified with the popular, Roberts critiques the way in which the concept is now overly associated with consumption and 'ordinariness'. Engaging with the work of key thinkers including, Lukács, Arvatov, Benjamin, Lefebvre, Gramsci, Barthes, Vaneigem, and de Certeau, Roberts shows how the concept of the everyday continues to be central to debates on ideology, revolution and praxis. He offers a lucid account of different approaches that developed over the course of the twentieth century."--Book cover