This penetrating and informative book provides readers with the perfect systematic critical guide to the file-sharing phenomenon. Combining inter-disciplinary resources from sociology, history, media and communication studies and cultural studies, Matthew David unpacks the economics, psychology, and philosophy of file-sharing. It fuses a deep knowledge of the music industry and the new technologies of mass communication with a powerful perspective on how multinational corporations operate to monopolize markets, how international and state agencies defend property, while a global multitude undermine and/or reinvent both.

This important, theoretically sophisticated work explores the concepts of liberal democracy, citizenship and rights. Grounded in critical original research, the book examines Australia's political and legal institutions, and traces the history and future of citizenship and the state in Australia. The central theme is that making proof of belonging to the national culture a precondition of citizenship is inappropriate for a multicultural society such as Australia. This becomes an object lesson for the multicultural regional polities forming throughout the world.

Slavoj Zizek was born in 1949 and is a Slovenian political philosopher, sociologist, and cultural critic best known for work with French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Zizek writes on many topics, including the Iraq War, political correctness, globalization, human rights, and multiculturalism. His thought has received mixed receptions, from celebratory to deeply critical, but his politics are the element that most needs critical reassessment. This book introduces Zizek's primary areas of interest and the fields in which he has made his most influential contributions: ideology and political subjectivity; political totalitarianism; and contemporary culture. It explores political topics about which Zizek's interventions have been called partial or flawed, including liberalism, capitalism, the politics of religion, and political decisionism. A final section assesses Zizek and politics today. Each chapter considers the debates in which Zizek has intervened, his position, his positive contribution, and the limits of his position.

This study is the work of a scholar who has long specialized in Norse and Germanic mythology. She describes the more familiar gods of war, of fertility, of the sky and the sea and the dead, and also discusses those most puzzling figures of Norse mythology - Heimdall, Balder and Loki

The concept of a social contract has been central to political thought since the seventeenth century. Contract theory has been used to justify political authority, to account for the origins of the state, and to provide foundations for moral values and the creation of a just society.In The Social Contract from Hobbes to Rawls, leading scholars from Britain and America survey the history of contractarian thought and the major debates in political theory which surround the notion of social contract. The book examines the critical reception to the ideas of thinkers including Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx, and includes the more contemporary ideas of John Rawls and David Gauthier. It also incorporates discussions of international relations theory and feminist responses to contractarianism. Together, the essays provide a comprehensive introduction to theories and critiques of social contract, within a broad political theoretical framework.