Bøker av Derek Sayer

"This book is the third in a trilogy that looks at the cultural history of Prague in order to tell the larger story of competing notions of European modernity-Reformation and Counter-Reformation, empire and nation, fascism and democracy-as they all played out on a single stage. This volume begins in 1938, when Czechoslovakia was dismembered by the Munich agreement and shortly before the invasion of the Third Reich, and it runs until the present day, when liberal democracy appears to be giving way to right-wing populism (as in much of the world). Like the previous volumes in the series, it sees Prague as a palimpsest of the cultures that overtook it-cultures that aimed to impose their own visions of modernity on the city. In this book, Sayer charts three major "modernities:" the Third Reich's brutal totalitarianism, the shifting face of Soviet communism, and the supposed freedoms of Western capitalist democracy. In Sayer's reading, the Nazis, Soviets, and Western democrats each believed that Prague had reached the end of history, that it had achieved "the final form of human government" (in Fukuyama's words). All were proved spectacularly wrong. As these political movements disintegrated, they returned the city to a state of banal surreality that Czech dissidents in the 1960s dubbed Absurdistan. Putting the notion of Absurdistan at the center of his story, Sayer engages with artists, creators and the things they produced, which unsparingly revealed the absurdity of the "modern" world and its notions of progress. He explores the work of Milan Kundera, Miloés Forman, Vâaclav Havel, and many others lesser known in the Anglophone world. He examines the tradition of vulgar absurdist comedy beginning with Kafka, and he shows how Prague's cultural products have been marked by persistent moral ambiguity, or in Kundera's words, "the intoxicating relativity of human things," since the mid-century. The overarching argument of this book is that, by looking to Prague's cultural history, we can see that modernity has never been a single or stable notion, and as different ideologies of modernity have come head-to-head, they have produced a rich culture of ambiguity and absurdity. We published the first two books in the trilogy, The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History (1998), which spanned the 18th to the turn of the 20th century, and Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century (2013), which looked at modernism and revolutionary thinking in Prague in the first half of the 20th century. Both books did well, and Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century won the prestigious George L. Mosse Prize for European cultural and intellectual history from the American Historical Association"

Surrealism was not merely an artistic movement to its adherents but an "instrument of knowledge," an attempt to transform the way we see the world by unleashing the unconscious as a radical, new means of constructing reality. Born out of the crisis of civilization brought about by World War I, it presented a sustained challenge to scientific rationalism as a privileged mode of knowing. In certain ways, surrealism's critique of white, Western civilization anticipated many later attempts at producing alternate non-Eurocentric epistemologies. With Making Trouble, sociologist and cultural historian Derek Sayer explores what it might mean to take surrealism's critique of civilization seriously. Drawing on a remarkable range of sources, Sayer first establishes surrealism as an important intellectual antecedent to the study of the human sciences today. He then makes a compelling and well-written argument for rethinking surrealism as a contemporary methodological resource for all those who still look to the human sciences not only as a way to interpret the world, but also to change it.

Artfully combining memoir with social theory, this bold sociological experiment shows how our memories work, and gives them social meaning.

The author has been involved in a dispute with his employer, Lancaster University, about what he sees as irregularities in the REF process. In this title, he criticizes the REF for discouraging innovation and harming staff morale, and questions the REF's claim to provide 'expert review of the outputs' - the very heart of its legitimacy.

A re-assessment of the opinions of Karl Marx and Max Weber on modernity, this book reveals a remarkable agreement between their sociologies of the modern condition. The author suggests that they produced a critique of the nature of power and subjectivity in modern society.

Presents a comprehensive history of the Czech people that is a remarkably original history of modern Europe. This book describes how Bohemia's ambiguities and contradictions are those of Europe itself, and it considers the ironies of viewing Europe, the West, and modernity from the vantage point of a country that has been too often ignored.