Anarchist-Inspired Socialist Experimentation in Richmond, California

Along with “middle class radicalism” in Santa Monica (Mark E. Kamm), “progressive politics” in San Francisco (Richard L. DeLeon), and “the leftmost city” in Santa Cruz (Richard Gendron and G. William Domhoff), we now have an anarchist-inspired experiment in socialist cooperation in Richmond, California. Yet another reason for why I love my home state!

As the Los Angeles Times article explains, “The flurry of democratic enterprise has been guided by Mayor Gayle McLaughlin, a former schoolteacher who visited Mondragon, Spain, and recognized a possible path out of the poverty and unemployment that plague her city.”

By way of background, I proffer the following readings:

• Cheney, George. Values at Work: Employee Participation Meets Market Pressures at Mondragon (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1999).
• Dolgoff, Sam, ed. The Anarchist Collectives: Workers’ Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution, 1936-1939 (New York: Free Life Editions, 1974).
• MacLeod, Greg. From Mondragon to America: Experiments in Community Economic Development (Sydney, Nova Scotia: University College of Cape Breton Press, 1997).
• Morrison, Roy. We Build the Road as We Travel (Philadelphia, PA: New Society Publishers, 1991).
• Thomas H. and C. Logan. Mondragon: An Economic Analysis (London: Allen and Unwin, 1982).
• Whyte, William Foote and Kathleen King Whyte. Making Mondragon: The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988).

On some of the difficulties involved in assessing such experiments, please see the introductory essay by Jon Elster and Karl Ove Moene to their edited volume, Alternatives to Capitalism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989): 1-35.

Addendum—I decided to add a few more titles by way of further (broader and deeper) historical and theoretical context:

• Case, John and Rosemary C.R. Taylor, eds. Co-ops, Communes, and Collectives: Experiments in Social Change in the 1960s and 1970s (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979).
• Clave, Pierre. The Progressive City: Planning and Participation, 1969-1984 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986).
• Hine, Robert V. California’s Utopian Colonies (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983 ed. [1953]).
• Logan, John R. and Harvey L. Molotch. Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987).
• Nichols, John. The “S” Word: A Short History of an American Tradition…Socialism (London: Verso, 2011).
• Santos, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ed. Democratizing Democracy: Beyond the Liberal Democratic Canon—Vol. 1 of Reinventing Social Emancipation: Toward New Manifestos (London: Verso, 2007).
• Santos, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ed. Another Production is Possible: Beyond the Capitalist Canon—Vol. 2 of Reinventing Social Emancipation: Toward New Manifestos (London: Verso, 2007).
• Schweickart, David. Against Capitalism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996).

Allen Wood on Kantian Ethics

There are a handful of more or less reliable interpreters of Kantian moral theory: Paul Guyer, Barbara Herman, Christine Korsgarrd, and Onora O’Neill are foremost among those I’m thinking of here. But there’s one expositer of Kant’s moral thinking that, for me at least, stands apart from the rest and that is Allen W. Wood. I’ve long relied for guidance in this regard on his book, Kant’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Several years ago, Wood penned another work, Kantian Ethics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008) this time as an “attempt[] to sketch an ethical theory based on the principles found in the writings of Immanuel Kant,” and thus it is “not primarily a study of those writings but an attempt to develop out of Kant’s thought the most defensible theory possible on that basis,” not unlike what Jonathan Lear has done for Freudian psychoanalytic theory and praxis. The latter book is absolutely essential by way of dispelling recalcitrant misleading and incorrect interpretations of Kant’s ethical thought. For instance, Wood writes that

“Kant’s moral outlook is...fundamentally determined by a subtle, shrew, historically self-conscious (and characteristically Enlightenment) conception of human nature and human psychology that most treatments of Kantian ethics (even sympathetic ones) have largely overlooked. This side of Kant owes a great deal to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and it belongs to a radical tradition in the social criticism of modernity whose later representatives include Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Karl Marx. The Kantian mistrust of our empirical desires reflects a Rousseauian picture of the way our natural desires have been influenced by the loss of innocence--the restless competitiveness—characteristic of human beings in the social condition, especially as found in the social inequalities of what Rousseau and Kant called the ‘civilized’ stage of human society but was later renamed ‘modern bourgeois society’ or ‘capitalism.’ Again, to miss this continuity is not only to misread Kant; it is badly to misread the history, and even the living reality, of the social order that is all around us. Kant’s famous mistrust of our empirical ‘inclinations’ is mistrust of ‘nature’ only insofar as our nature has been shaped by society. [....] [Thus our natural inclinations] become evil only insofar as vices have been ‘grafted onto them’ by an ‘invisible enemy, one who hides behind reason and is hence all the more dangerous.’ This enemy is competitiveness, social inequality, the passion for domination over others.”

Wood states that he’s changed his mind about a few facets of his earlier interpretation of Kant’s moral ideas, “especially regarding the aims of ethical theory and the Kantian conception of autonomy.” And important topics “that were much more briefly discussed, or not covered at all” in the earlier work, are now accorded whole chapters: “virtue, conscience, social justice, sex, punishment, lying, consequentialism, the personhood of persons, and the moral status of nonrational animals.”

The Study of Religions

At Mirror of Justice, Marc DeGirolami has (yet again) an insightful post in which he writes of

“an essay by journalist Nathan Schneider [….] [that endeavors] to explain why religious studies is an important and useful field for the problems of our day. The strangest and most anachronistic argument…is that religious studies came into its own as an academic discipline pretty much as of 1963 with the US Supreme Court’s decision in Abington v. Schempp.

In Schempp, the issue was the constitutionality of daily devotional readings from the Bible in public schools. The Court held that the practice violated both the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses. In dicta, Justice Clark (writing for the majority) also said this:

‘In addition, it might well be said that one’s education is not complete without a study of comparative religion or the history of religion and its relationship to the advancement of civilization. It certainly may be said that the Bible is worthy of study for its literary and historic qualities. Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or of religion, when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education, may not be effected consistently with the First Amendment.’ (374 U.S. at 225)

What that has to do with the origins of the discipline of religious studies is mysterious to me. To be sure, the study of religion as a distinct discipline is of comparatively recent vintage. But it was going on at least a century or more before Justice Clark got around to writing the Schempp majority. Eminent and learned writers like Schleiermacher, and then later Troeltsch, Durkheim, Weber, and many others were writing about religion qua religion extensively. One might object that these are not American writers, but one could then point to Harvard comparative religion professor Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s magisterial The Meaning and End of Religion, first published in 1962, which paved the way for much of the religious studies scholarship that exists today (Smith was Canadian, but lived and wrote in the United States for a large part of his career). Or one could point to Mircea Eliade’s wonderful, The Sacred and the Profane (first published 1957). If people of Eliade’s and Smith’s stature had already by 1962 made a career of the study of religion, it suggests that religious studies was already a mature field of academic inquiry by the time Schempp rolled around. Even the structuralist cultural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss did his influential work in Tristes Tropiques before 1963. And we haven’t even talked about William James yet, writing way back when it was Holmes’s court and Justice Clark was barely born.

The other odd feature about relying on the Schempp dictum as a kind of foundational moment for the field of religious studies is that it assumes that academics take their cues about what is worth studying from the Supreme Court. That isn’t even true in law any more, let alone in other disciplines. The premise is that non-legal academics actually know about Supreme Court dicta, and that they care enough about it to fashion their scholarly pursuits in conformity with what the Court thinks is worth studying.

That seems to me to get things backwards. The Supreme Court is generally (and rightly) a follower, not a leader. It does not shape the culture, but instead perceives the social trends and tendencies of the culture and attempts to conform itself to them. That was the thesis of the historical jurisprudents of the early 20th century, and it strikes me as exactly right in this and many other circumstances in religion clause law.

If Justice Clark’s dicta demonstrates anything, it isn’t that all of a sudden the Court decided that it ought to provide intellectual room for religious studies scholars the world round by brilliantly conceiving the distinction between teaching religion as true and teaching about religion in academic fashion. It’s that the Court finally got around to perceiving, and recognizing in law, a distinction which was all around it in the academic customs and cultural mores of society that already existed.”

*       *       *

I’m in whole-hearted agreement with virtually everything Marc says above. I’d simply like to fill out his story of the intellectual antecedents and origins of the field in which I was trained, namely, “Religious Studies,” a discipline that is also known by other names: History of Religions, Comparative Study of Religions, Study of Religions, Comparative Philosophy….

Historical accounts of this disciplinary field of intellectual inquiry often go back, most importantly, to the pioneering research of Max Müller, in particular, his Introduction to the Science of Religion (1873). Prior to Müller in the late eighteenth century, translations of classic religious texts from what we now term “Hinduism,” as well as the publication of Bopp’s comparative grammar of the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Persian and Germanic languages in 1816, helped set the stage for the “scientific” study of religions (the meaning of the term Wissenschaft blurring the boundaries between what we think of as science today and the humanities).

The cultural climate for such studies in this country was created, as Eric J. Sharpe has noted, “by little groups of freethinkers, Unitarians, Transcendentalists and romantics” (they had an impact abroad as well). French and German historians would help to ground their more speculative, idiosyncratic, non-contextual and non-historical musings. Cross-disciplinary cognitive battles, raiding, and trading brought the study of folklore, mythology, phenomenology, and sociology more explicitly into the mix in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century. During the latter part of this period, works by the likes of van Gennep, Durkheim, and Frazer came into prominence (with categories like ‘sacred’ and ‘profane,’ totemism, taboo).

In this country, William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), was extremely significant in sowing seeds for the nascent discipline, as was Evelyn Underhill’s somewhat unwieldy but trailblazing study, Mysticism (1911). While in Europe, the academic field, recognized in the first instance as the “history of religions” received official recognition first in Switzerland (1877), in Holland soon thereafter, and then in France and Germany. The discipline developed comparatively late in the United States, although the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 had a lasting influence, in large measure owing to the impact of Swami Vivekananda’s appearance and lectures. Works in psychology by Jung and Freud of course were not long in making their impact across the pond (the former’s influence conspicuous in Eliade’s writings). The Eranos conferences (beginning in 1933) and subsequent publications have to be given some pride of place, for they reveal a “roll of honour of comparative religion, including as [they do]” Martin Buber, Joseph Campbell, Jean Daniélou, Mircea Eliade, Friedrich Heller, C.G. Jung, C.A.F. Rhys Davids, Gershom Scholem, D.T. Suzuki, Paul Tillich, Guiseppe Tucci, R.C. Zaehner, and Heinrich Zimmer! One book that might be singled out for its enormous influence on the discipline both here and abroad prior to those produced by such seminal figures as Mircea Eliade and W. Cantwell Smith, is Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige (The Idea of the Holy, 1917, translated into English in 1923).

I find myself extremely fortunate to have trained under some of the crème de la crème of the second generation of pioneers in our field: Raimundo Panikkar, Gerald James Larson, and Ninian Smart (alas, only Larson is still with us) (those associated with Harvard and the University of Chicago would cite others). By way of reiterating Marc’s conclusion, I can assure readers that in the field’s own narrative accounts of its history, Supreme Court cases are not to be heard.

References and Further Reading:

• Clarke, J.J. Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter Between Asian and Western Thought. London: Routledge, 1997.
• Cottingham, John. The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
• Flood, Gavin. Beyond Phenomenology: Rethinking the Study of Religion. London: Cassell, 1999.
• Kellenberger, James. The Cognitivity of Religion: Three Perspectives. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985.
• Kitagawa, Joseph M. The History of Religions: Understanding Human Experience. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
• Larson, Gerald James and Eliot Deutsch, eds. Interpreting Across Boundaries: New Essays in Comparative Philosophy. Princeton, NL: Princeton University Press, 1988.
• McEvilley, Thomas. The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies. New York: Allworth Press, 2002.
• Panikkar, Raimundo. Myth, Faith, and Hermeneutics: Cross-Cultural Studies. New York: Paulist Press, 1979.
• Rudolph, Kurt. Historical Fundamentals and the Study of Religions. New York: Macmillan, 1985.
• Sharpe, Eric J. Comparative Religion: A History. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975.
• Smart, Ninian. The Science of Religion and the Sociology of Knowledge: Some Methodological Questions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973.
• Smart, Ninian. The Philosophy of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
• Smart, Ninian. Religion and the Western Mind. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1987.
• Smart, Ninian (Oliver Leaman, ed.). World Philosophies. London: Routledge, 2nd ed., 2008.
• Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja. Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Image: My late teacher, mentor, and friend, Ninian Smart, a brilliant doyen in the comparative study of religious worldviews.

Freud Among the Philosophers

This is the latest in a series of fairly brief posts dealing in one way or another with Freudian Psychoanalysis. Earlier posts are 1. here, 2. here, 3. here, 4. here, 5. here, 6, here, 7. here, 8. here, 9. here, and 10. here.

I’ve just finished reading, once again, Donald Levy’s Freud Among the Philosophers: The Psychoanalytic Unconscious and Its Philosophical Critics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). The following is a brief (evaluative) abstract:

Although Wittgenstein (pictured above) wrote comparatively little about Freudian psychoanalysis, his complex critical comments have been enormously influential. Donald Levy does a wonderful job of examining Wittgenstein’s assumptions and arguments, exposing his rather uncharitable understanding of psychoanalytic interpretation and the fundamental flaws of his critique (Freud thought to have succumbed to an untenable ‘reductionism’). In addition, he ably defends core Freudian ideas against less gifted philosophers: Alasdair MacIntyre, Karl Popper, and Frank Ciofi, for example. The second half of the book thoroughly exposes the glaring and not-so-obvious weaknesses of Adolf Grünbaum’s (pictured below) positivistically (with regard to the philosophy of science) inspired critique, based as it is on a rather niggardly conception of science (including a ‘false dichotomy’ between intra- and extra-clinical evidence) and an implausible rendering of Freud’s views on more or less axiomatic psychoanalytic propositions (in this case, Freud’s methods are not sufficiently ‘reductionist’). Of course Grünbaum’s argument has been dispatched with some force by others: David Sachs, Paul Robinson, and Sebastian Gardner come first to mind, but I think Levy’s analysis can justly lay claim to being the most definitive of the bunch.

Fundamental Features of Moral Psychology & Moral Responsibility from a Psychoanalytic Perspective

“If we take the implications of psychoanalysis [for moral responsibility] seriously, we are responsible in several different ways for our multiply motivated conduct. We are responsible retrospectively, in the sense of deserving modest praise, reward, or punishment for what we have consciously intended, unless we have been impeded in our decision making or action by a mental aberration, such as an irresistible compulsion, neurotic conflict, or serious mental illness. There is nothing in psychoanalysis that refutes this ordinary, everyday meaning of moral responsibility for past actions.

What Freud teaches us is that because our actions are multiply motivated, their voluntary aspects tend to be mixed with behavior that is involuntary. [….] The ratio of the voluntary component of an action to its involuntary elements varies both among persons (in accordance with differences in basic personality configuration) and in the same person from moment to moment. Even in the relatively healthy individual, the fact that so much in the mind remains unconscious makes it exceedingly difficult to be confident that we know enough about an individual’s inner mental life to be sure about the degree to which an act is voluntary or involuntary. Nonetheless, Freud felt that in the absence of evidence of mental aberration, ordinary judgments of intentional actions normally suffice. ‘Actions and consciously expressed opinions are as a rule enough for practical purposes in judging men’s character.’

Psychoanalytic understanding would also have us be prospectively responsible for increasing our self-knowledge and gaining control over those unconscious motives that contribute, perhaps decisively, to our conduct. This is similar to the time-honored notion that a person must take responsibility for his own character, though psychoanalysis expands the realm with which one is morally charged to include typical unconscious motives, spontaneous reactions, and settled behavioral patterns that were previously consider beyond conscious control.* [….]

[There is thus another mode of retrospective moral responsibility, for psychoanalysis holds that we are responsible for actions that we did not consciously intend.] If, in acting as I consciously intend, I also do something harmful that I unconsciously wished to bring about without being aware of it, I am responsible—that is, I deserve some degree of disapprobation—for the desire to injure and for any actual deleterious consequences that my conduct may have inflicted, once the causal consequences of my unconscious mental states become clear, even if, before I acted, I did not know that I wanted to do anything injurious and therefore did not form a conscious intention to do it. Responsibility for unconsciously guided actions that do harm is justified because the behavior is in fact my own (it proceeded ‘out of me,’ not some alien force). The action was self-determining in the broader meaning that depth psychology confers on the term ‘self.’ Freud even holds that I have no real choice about accepting responsibility for past unconsciously motivated behavior. ‘I am somehow compelled to do so’ as soon as I am aware that actions proceeded out of me. I own the action retrospectively by sincerely acknowledging that I caused it to happen and by sincerely regretting that I did not know myself well enough to succeed in monitoring my motivation so as to prevent the injury from occurring. Such sincere regret normally entails prospective responsibility in that in the act of acknowledging my responsibility for the regretted behavior I commit myself to do what is necessary not to act out of such motives in the same way in the future.

Psychoanalysis more fully supports assigning moral responsibility in such instances than does the Western moral tradition generally, because it reveals that the person who acts thoughtlessly or without any conscious intention to do harm unconsciously ‘intends’—in the sense of ‘aims at’—these consequences. The harmful behavior, though thoughtless, was not a random compulsion that must remain forever outside the agent’s ability to control. Rather, it was motivated by unconscious reasons for action that should be understood as aspects of the ‘self’ that acts. If these motives have not been subjected to conscious guidance, they should have been or should be, and the agent should assume responsibility for what he or she has failed to accomplish in this regard, even though the failure may be perfectly understandable.

In using the term moral responsibility in several senses, and broadening its usual limitations, Freud generally avoids such terms as guilt, guilty, and morally blameworthy. This is not because he denies the appropriateness of what might be referred to as realistic remorse for actual misdeeds. To the contrary, Freud clearly differentiates the ego-based sentiment of remorse from irrational guilt. He is leery of the term guilt and its variants because it connotes [for him] an indiscriminate self-punishment that is often irrational either because it is excessively harsh in light of the actual deed or because it is triggered by mere fantasies. Terms like guilt and blame are also avoided by Freud because they tend to be used intrapsychically against the self in ways that end up being morally self-defeating. This is likely to happen because the belittling, disparaging, and condemning connotations of these terms in combination with the superego’s proclivity for applying them indiscriminately to the entire self tend to trigger self-defensiveness. And self-defensiveness functions intrapsychically as an obstacle to the very self-understanding that is essential to responsibility. The accused ego feels like a terribly naughty or totally bad child, and these feelings in turn fuel motives of denial, repression, and revenge, rather than honest self-scrutiny and efforts at self-improvement.”

*As Wallwork explains in a note, “This prospective responsibility for our character is one reason why we hold persons retrospectively responsible for certain acts they were powerless to change at the moment of acting. We think they had something to do with the development of the characteristic style of behavior out of which they acted. Even if they did not directly choose it, we consider it possible that they may have had a part in choosing to be unconscious of both it and behavioral consequences.” No doubt a genetic explanatory role for self-deception would be necessary to fill out the reasons why one has such prospective responsibility and can thus be held retrospectively responsible.

—Ernest Wallwork, Psychoanalysis and Ethics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991): 92-96

Hermeneutic Considerations in Reading Freud

Freud stressed the need for psychoanalytic theory “to be filled out by research in such allied disciplines as neurophysiology, biology, normal psychiatry, academic psychology, sociology, and anthropology. [….] Psychoanalysis’s portrait of human nature thus encourages interdisciplinary bridge building among the several disciplines concerned with the study of human nature and behavior, including several of the humanities that deal with unconscious meaning, like literary criticism and aesthetics, at the same time it challenges most traditional views of human nature with its findings regarding unavowed impulses and processes, the persistence of infantile patterns in adult life, and unacknowledged defensive strategies.”

“Freud’s subtlety as a theorist is commonly missed by beginning students and some academic interpreters who are easily distracted by his penchant for dogmatic overstatements and what are by now archaic metaphors drawn form nineteenth-century physics and biology.”

Freud “repeatedly described the metapsychology as ‘tentative,’ ‘speculative,’ and ‘hypothetical,’ and even went so far as to call it a ‘phantasy,’ a ‘myth,’ a product of wish fulfillment on the part of its creator. [….] [The] side of Freud that works ‘closer to actual experience’ [….] is relatively free of the mechanistic and scientistic viewpoint of the metapsychology…. [All the same], Ricoeur is…right in insisting…that though imperfect, Freud’s metatheory nevertheless ‘preserves something essential,’ and that its economic, structuralist (id, ego, superego), and topographic (conscious, preconscious, unconscious) metaphors, while admittedly flawed, embody notions of the psyche that must be included in any adequate representation of psychoanalytic facts.”

“The Freud of materialistic reductionism and physicalist explanations thus exists side by side with the Freud who peppered his writings with quotations from Sophocles, Aeschylus and Homer, Euripedes and Virgil, the Bible, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Molière, Goethe, Ibsen, and Dostoevsky in the belief that these literary greats captured both the essence of human experience and its depth-psychological explanation better than most academic psychologists.”

—Ernest Wallwork, Psychoanalysis and Ethics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991)

Narratives and Sociological Framing of Social Protest on the Left: Toward a Democratically Motivated Critique of the Mass Media in the United States

• Alterman, Eric C. What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News. New York: Basic Books, 2003.
• Bagdikian, Ben H. The New Media Monopoly. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2004 ed.
• Baker, C. Edwin. Advertising and a Democratic Press. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.
• Baker, C. Edwin. Media, Markets, and Democracy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
• Baker, C. Edwin. Media Concentration and Democracy: Why Ownership Matters. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
• Bennett, W. Lance, Regina G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston. When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
• Chomsky, Noam. Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2nd ed., 2002.
• Cockburn, Alexander and Jeffrey St. Clair. End Times: The Death of the Fourth Estate. Oakland, CA: CounterPunch and AK Press, 2007.
• Cook, Timothy E. Governing with the News: The News Media as a Political Institution. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2nd ed., 2005.
• Dahlgren, Peter. Media and Political Engagement: Citizens, Communication and Democracy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
• Davenport, Christian. Media Bias, Perspective, and State Repression: The Black Panther Party. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
• Gans, Herbert J. Democracy and the News. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
• Gitlin, Todd. The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2nd ed., 2003.
• Herman, Edward S. Triumph of the Market: Essays on Economics, Politics, and the Media. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1999.
• Herman, Edward S. and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.
• Herman, Edward S. and Robert W. McChesney. The Global Media: The New Missionaries of Corporate Capitalism. London: Cassell, 1997.
• Hunt, Darnell M. Screening the Los Angeles “Riots:” Race, Seeing, and Resistance. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
• Iyengar, Shanto. Is Anyone Responsible? How Television Frames Political Issues. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
• Jenkins, Henry and David Thorburn, eds. Democracy and New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.
• Jones, Alex S. Losing the News: The Future of the News that Feeds Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
• Keller, Perry. Liberal Democracy and the New Media. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
• Martin, Christopher R. Framed: Labor and the Corporate Media. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004.
• McChesney, Robert W. Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times. New York: The New Press, 2000.
• McChesney, Robert W. The Political Economy of Media: Enduring Issues, Emerging Dilemmas. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008.
• McChesney, Robert W. and John Nichols. The Death and Life of American Journalism. New York: Nation Books, 2010.
• Parenti, Michael. Inventing Reality: The Politics of the Mass Media. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986.
• Shiffrin, Steven H. Dissent, Injustice, and the Meanings of America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Psyche & Spirituality

“A spirituality that does not take into account and engage with the complexities and dynamic nature of the psyche, in which our bodily life plays such an important part, will fail to touch people who are not incurably romantic. It will remain, in the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut’s felicitous phrase, experience-distant rather than experience-near. Equally, a psychology that refuses to recognize the potentialities of the psyche, of its possible extension into the realm of the spirit, a psychology which contents itself with Freud’s healing offer of replacing hysterical misery with common unhappiness, does not provide enough emotional sustenance to modern man.”—Sudhir Kakar, from the introduction to his book, Mad and Divine: Spirit and Psyche in the Modern World (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009)