"Freedom Without Permission takes the idea of human liberty seriously, not just as a policy for a free society but a personal philosophy for free people. There is so much wisdom here. A careful reading will save you years of diversions and get you on the right track toward building a new way of life." -- Jeffrey Tucker Too many people seek permission when trying to advance their own lives. They want external actors to open gates for them without realizing that the gates don't exist. Permission isn't needed and those who think it is create their own barriers to advancing their lives and realizing personal achievement. People believe they must look to others for permission to live their lives. They elect politicians to change the world. They believe schools award education. They believe external validation is the way to a career. They externalize their personal hardships instead of recognizing how often they inflict the hardships onto themselves. They wait for an invitation to create value when the impetus lies in their own hands and minds. They develop dependencies and preconditions that keep them from entrepreneurship. These are all myths. You don't need to ask for permission. But how do you do create a life without permission? The point of this book is to break more than to build. We are not attempting to provide a full-fledged philosophy on life without permission. Instead, the goal is to deconstruct and then offer exercises and habits of thought that will enhance your freedom. The core idea is that you don't need anyone's permission to do the things you want to do in life, or learn what you want to learn or feel how you want to feel. An entire intellectual edifice has been constructed to convince you of the opposite, and most of us start out seeing only though its windows. We want to help you tear it down or at least break a few panes so you can see beyond it and begin to form your own ideas about what your life can be. We wish to shatter some paradigms so you can begin to build your own process of learning and living. We begin with lessons that can be learned from history regarding our own freedom. We then look at politics, then education and move into career and entrepreneurship, finally, we end with practices for personal freedom. We span the process of growing up and moving from learning to living, creating the process as you go. This process requires knowledge (starting with self-knowledge), skill, experience, confidence, and relationships, but it doesn't necessarily require schooling, grades, credentials, or submission to a system or plan created by anyone else. The resources you need are already within you. We peel back some myths and help you see freedom as your own, not something you need permission to enjoy.

As the 2011 uprisings in North Africa reverberated across the Middle East, a diverse cross section of women and girls publicly disputed gender and sexual norms in novel, unauthorized, and often shocking ways. In a series of case studies ranging from Tunisia's 14 January Revolution to the Taksim Gezi Park protests in Istanbul, the contributors to Freedom without Permission reveal the centrality of the intersections between body, gender, sexuality, and space to these groundbreaking events. Essays include discussions of the blogs written by young women in Egypt, the Women2Drive campaign in Saudi Arabia, the reintegration of women into the public sphere in Yemen, the sexualization of female protesters encamped at Bahrain's Pearl Roundabout, and the embodied, performative, and artistic spaces of Morocco's 20 February Movement. Conceiving of revolution as affective, embodied, spatialized, and aesthetic forms of upheaval and transgression, the contributors show how women activists imagined, inhabited, and deployed new spatial arrangements that undermined the public-private divisions of spaces, bodies, and social relations, continuously transforming them through symbolic and embodied transgressions. Contributors. Lamia Benyoussef, Susanne Dahlgren, Karina Eileraas, Susana Galan, Banu Gökariksel, Frances S. Hasso, Sonali Pahwa, Zakia Salime

A WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER As Alexis Ohanian learned when he helped to co-found the immensely popular reddit.com, the internet is the most powerful and democratic tool for disseminating information in human history. And when that power is harnessed to create new communities, technologies, businesses or charities, the results can be absolutely stunning. In this book, Alexis will share his ideas, tips and even his own doodles about harnessing the power of the web for good, and along the way, he will share his philosophy with young entrepreneurs all over the globe. At 29, Ohanian has come to personify the dorm-room tech entrepreneur, changing the world without asking permission. Within a couple of years of graduating from the University of Virginia, Ohanian did just that, selling reddit for millions of dollars. He's gone on to start many other companies, like hipmunk and breadpig, all while representing Y Combinator and investing in over sixty other tech startups. WITHOUT THEIR PERMISSION is his personal guidebook as to how other aspiring entrepreneurs can follow in his footsteps.

Seeking a way out of today's bewildering rush of rights claims, Tara Smith's Moral Rights and Political Freedom offers a systematic account of the nature and foundations of rights. The book carefully elucidates what political freedom is and demonstrates why it should be protected by rights. Smith's thesis is that rights are teleological: respect for freedom is necessary for individuals' flourishing or eudaimonia. Smith illustrates how many alleged rights would actually undermine that objective. Her decisive refutation of the assumption that conflicts between rights are inevitable—demonstrating how such conflicts are theoretically incoherent and practically self-defeating—should go a long way toward resolving many contemporary disputes about rights.

Throughout history, kings and emperors have promised “freedoms” to their people. Yet these freedoms were really only permissions handed down from on high. The American Revolution inaugurated a new vision: people have basic rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and government must ask permission from them. Sadly, today’s increasingly bureaucratic society is beginning to turn back the clock and to transform America into a nation where our freedoms—the right to speak freely, to earn a living, to own a gun, to use private property, even the right to take medicine to save one’s own life—are again treated as privileges the government may grant or withhold at will. Timothy Sandefur examines the history of the distinction between rights and privileges that played such an important role in the American experiment, and how we can fight to retain our freedoms against the growing power of government. Illustrated with dozens of real-life examples—including many cases he litigated himself—Sandefur shows how treating freedoms as government-created privileges undermines our Constitution and betrays the basic principles of human dignity.

“At a time when policing in America is at a crossroads, Barry Friedman provides much-needed insight, analysis, and direction in his thoughtful new book. Unwarranted illuminates many of the often ignored issues surrounding how we police in America and highlights why reform is so urgently needed. This revealing book comes at a critically important time and has much to offer all who care about fair treatment and public safety.” —Bryan Stevenson, founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative and author of Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption In June 2013, documents leaked by Edward Snowden sparked widespread debate about secret government surveillance of Americans. Just over a year later, the shooting of Michael Brown, a black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, set off protests and triggered concern about militarization of law enforcement and discriminatory policing. In Unwarranted, Barry Friedman argues that these two seemingly disparate events are connected—and that the problem is not so much the policing agencies as it is the rest of us. We allow these agencies to operate in secret and to decide how to police us, rather than calling the shots ourselves. And the courts, which we depended upon to supervise policing, have let us down entirely. Unwarranted tells the stories of ordinary people whose lives were torn apart by policing—by the methods of cops on the beat and those of the FBI and NSA. Driven by technology, policing has changed dramatically. Once, cops sought out bad guys; today, increasingly militarized forces conduct wide surveillance of all of us. Friedman captures the eerie new environment in which CCTV, location tracking, and predictive policing have made suspects of us all, while proliferating SWAT teams and increased use of force have put everyone’s property and lives at risk. Policing falls particularly heavily on minority communities and the poor, but as Unwarranted makes clear, the effects of policing are much broader still. Policing is everyone’s problem. Police play an indispensable role in our society. But our failure to supervise them has left us all in peril. Unwarranted is a critical, timely intervention into debates about policing, a call to take responsibility for governing those who govern us.

The freedom to take part in civic life--whether in the exercise of one's right to vote or congregate and protest--has become increasingly less important to Americans than individual rights and liberties. In Public Freedom, renowned political theorist Dana Villa argues that political freedom is essential to both the preservation of constitutional government and the very substance of American democracy itself. Through intense close readings of theorists such as Hegel, Tocqueville, Mill, Adorno, Arendt, and Foucault, Villa diagnoses the key causes of our democratic discontent and offers solutions to preserve at least some of our democratic hopes. He demonstrates how Americans' preoccupation with a market-based conception of freedom--that is, the personal freedom to choose among different material, moral, and vocational goods--has led to the gradual erosion of meaningful public participation in politics as well as diminished interest in the health of the public realm itself. Villa critically examines, among other topics, the promise and limits of civil society and associational life as sources of democratic renewal; the effects of mass media on the public arena; and the problematic but still necessary ideas of civic competence and democratic maturity. Public Freedom is a passionate and insightful defense of political liberties at a moment in America's history when such freedoms are very much at risk.