Isaiah Berlin: Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (1980)

“In this outstanding collection of essays, Isaiah Berlin, one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century, discusses the importance of dissenters in the history of ideas–among them Machiavelli, Giambattista Vico, Montesquieu, Alexander Herzen, Georges Sorel, Verdi, and Moses Hess. With his unusual powers of imaginative re-creation, Berlin brings to life original minds that swam against the current of their times.”

Edited and with a Bibliography by Henry Hardy
With an Introduction by Roger Hausheer
Publisher The Viking Press, New York, 1980
ISBN 0670109444
394 pages

Reviews: Mark Lilla (New York Review of Books), James G. Hanink.

Wikipedia

PDF (50 MB, updated on 2016-12-23)

Francis Spufford: Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties’ Soviet Dream (2010)

This book is about the moment in the mid-20th century when people believed that the state-owned Soviet economy might genuinely outdo the market, and produce a world of rich communists and envious capitalists. Specifically, it’s about the last and cleverest version of the idea – central planning via cybernetics – and about how and why, in the 1960s, it failed. To give the economics some human depth, Red Plenty generates a miniature Soviet Union on the page, peopled by scientists and politicians, fixers and managers, dreamers and cynics.

Publisher Faber & Faber, 2010
ISBN 0571269478, 9780571269471
356 pages

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EPUB (updated on 2019-11-20)

See also:
Red Plenty Platforms, essay by Nick Dyer-Witheford, Culture Machine 14, 2013
Red Plenty: A Crooked Timber, collection of essays inspired by the book, 2012

Bruno Latour: An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns (2012–) [FR, EN]

“In this new book, Bruno Latour offers answers to questions raised in We Have Never Been Modern, a work that interrogated the connections between nature and culture. If not modern, he asked, what have we been, and what values should we inherit? Over the last twenty-five years, Latour has developed a research protocol different from the actor-network theory with which his name is now associated—a research protocol that follows the different types of connectors that provide specific truth conditions. These are the connectors that prompt a climate scientist challenged by a captain of industry to appeal to the institution of science, with its army of researchers and mountains of data, rather than to “capital-S Science” as a higher authority. Such modes of extension—or modes of existence, Latour argues here—account for the many differences between law, science, politics, and other domains of knowledge.

Though scientific knowledge corresponds to only one of the many possible modes of existence Latour describes, an unrealistic vision of science has become the arbiter of reality and truth, seducing us into judging all values by a single standard. Latour implores us to recover other modes of existence in order to do justice to the plurality of truth conditions that Moderns have discovered throughout their history. This systematic effort of building a new philosophical anthropology presents a completely different view of what Moderns have been, and provides a new basis for opening diplomatic encounters with other societies at a time when all societies are coping with ecological crisis.”

French edition
Publisher La découverte, Paris, 2012
504 pages

English edition
Translated by Catherine Porter
Publisher Harvard University Press, 2013
ISBN 0674724992, 9780674724990
520 pages

Reviews: Muecke (of FR ed., Los Angeles Review of Books, 2012), Norton (Interstitial, 2013), Hennion (Science, Technology, & Human Values, 2013), Davis (Reviews in Cultural Theory, 2014), Dusek (NDPR, 2014), Hebbing (Diffractions, 2014), Foster (Science and Technology Studies, 2014), Choat (Global Discourse, 2014).
Commentary: Skirbekk (Radical Philosophy, 2015).

Another Turn after ANT: An Interview with Bruno Latour by John Tresch (Social Studies of Science)
An Introduction to AIME by Latour, video, 16 min.

Participatory web platform of the project
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Enquête sur les modes d’existence. Une anthropologie des Modernes (French, added on 2013-9-26)
English translation was removed on 2013-9-20 upon request of the publisher.