The driving cultural force of that form of life we call ‘modern’ is the desire to make the world controllable. Yet it is only in encountering the uncontrollable that we really experience the world – only then do we feel touched, moved and alive. A world that is fully known, in which everything has been planned and mastered, would be a dead world. Our lives are played out on the border between what we can control and that which lies outside our control. But because we late-modern human beings seek to make the world controllable, we tend to encounter the world as a series of objects that we have to conquer, master or exploit. And precisely because of this, ‘life,’ the experience of feeling alive and truly encountering the world, always seems to elude us. This in turn leads to frustration, anger and even despair, which then manifest themselves in, among other things, acts of impotent political aggression. For Rosa, to encounter the world and achieve resonance with it requires us to be open to that which extends beyond our control. The outcome of this process cannot be predicted, and this is why moments of resonance are always concomitant with moments of uncontrollability. This short book – the sequel to Rosa’s path-breaking work on social acceleration and resonance – will be of great interest students and scholars in sociology and the social sciences and to anyone concerned with the nature of modern social life.

Hartmut Rosa advances an account of the temporal structure of society from the perspective of critical theory. He identifies in particular three categories of change in the tempo of modern social life: technological acceleration, evident in transportation, communication, and production; the acceleration of social change, reflected in cultural knowledge, social institutions, and personal relationships; and acceleration in the pace of life, which happens despite the expectation that technological change should increase an individual's free time. According to Rosa, both the structural and cultural aspects of our institutions and practices are marked by the "shrinking of the present," a decreasing time period during which expectations based on past experience reliably match future results and events. When this phenomenon combines with technological acceleration and the increasing pace of life, time seems to flow ever faster, making our relationships to each other and the world fluid and problematic. It is as if we are standing on "slipping slopes," a steep social terrain that is itself in motion and in turn demands faster lives and technology. As Rosa deftly shows, this self-reinforcing feedback loop fundamentally determines the character of modern life.

The pace of modern life is undoubtedly speeding up, yet this acceleration does not seem to have made us any happier or more content. If acceleration is the problem, then the solution, argues Hartmut Rosa in this major new work, lies in “resonance.” The quality of a human life cannot be measured simply in terms of resources, options, and moments of happiness; instead, we must consider our relationship to, or resonance with, the world. Applying his theory of resonance to many domains of human activity, Rosa describes the full spectrum of ways in which we establish our relationship to the world, from the act of breathing to the adoption of culturally distinct worldviews. He then turns to the realms of concrete experience and action – family and politics, work and sports, religion and art – in which we as late modern subjects seek out resonance. This task is proving ever more difficult as modernity’s logic of escalation is both cause and consequence of a distorted relationship to the world, at individual and collective levels. As Rosa shows, all the great crises of modern society – the environmental crisis, the crisis of democracy, the psychological crisis – can also be understood and analyzed in terms of resonance and our broken relationship to the world around us. Building on his now classic work on acceleration, Rosa’s new book is a major new contribution to the theory of modernity, showing how our problematic relation to the world is at the crux of some of the most pressing issues we face today. This bold renewal of critical theory for our times will be of great interest to students and scholars across the social sciences and humanities.

Coping with Lack of Control in a Social World offers an integrated view of cutting-edge research on the effects of control deprivation on social cognition. The book integrates multi-method research demonstrating how various types of control deprivation, related not only to experimental settings but also to real life situations of helplessness, can lead to variety of cognitive and emotional coping strategies at the social cognitive level. The comprehensive analyses in this book tackle issues such as: Cognitive, emotional and socio-behavioral reactions to threats to personal control How social factors aid in coping with a sense of lost or threatened control Relating uncontrollability to powerlessness and intergroup processes How lack of control experiences can influence basic and complex cognitive processes This book integrates various strands of research that have not yet been presented together in an innovative volume that addresses the issue of reactions to control loss in a socio-psychological context. Its focus on coping as an active way of confronting a sense of uncontrollability makes this a unique, and highly original, contribution to the field. Practicing psychologists and students of psychology will be particularly interested readers.

The award-winning author of The Net Delusion shows how the radical transparency we've become accustomed to online may threaten the spirit of real-life democracy

In this important book, Niklas Luhmann uses his powers as an analyst of the social system to examine two of the most important concepts which hold that system together and allow it to evolve: trust and power. He criticises those theoretical accounts whose roots lie in what he refers to as ideologies – accounts which use implicit beliefs in particular conceptions of human nature to explain and predict social action in a one-dimensional way. Theories of rational choice and moralistic explanations are taken to task, as are the theories of both Marx and Habermas. Luhmann's unique scientific sociology underpins every page and enables him to highlight the potential shortcomings of these narrative approaches. Underlying this approach is the idea that ideologically-based social theory, whether critical or conservative, is unable to do justice to the complexities existing within the parameters of social systems, individuals, and the interactions between them. He aims to show instead how only a painstaking systems analysis can capture these intricacies. Although written over 40 years ago, Luhmann's complex vision of the operations of trust and power provides a wealth of insights of considerable value to scholars and students grappling with contemporary social and economic problems. The editors' introduction to this new edition and the significant revisions they have made to the translation will help to reveal the richness and clarity of this vision and its relevance to the ways that trust and power operate in today's society.

WINNER OF THE BARBARA JEFFERIS AWARD 2020 'Atmospheric...evocative...important.' Tom Keneally Kitty Hawke, the last inhabitant of a dying island sinking into the wind-lashed Chesapeake Bay, has resigned herself to annihilation... Until one night her granddaughter blows ashore in the midst of a storm, desperate, begging for sanctuary. For years, Kitty has kept herself to herself - with only the company of her wolfdog, Girl - unconcerned by the world outside, or perhaps avoiding its worst excesses. But blood cannot be turned away in times like these. And when trouble comes following her granddaughter, no one is more surprised than Kitty to find she will fight to save her as fiercely as her name suggests... A richly imagined and mythic parable of home and kin that cements Lucy Treloar's place as one of our most acclaimed novelists. SHORTLISTED FOR THE PRIME MINISTER'S LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTION 2020 SHORTLISTED FOR NSW PREMIER'S LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTION 2020 SHORTLISTED FOR ABIA LITERARY FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020 LONGLISTED FOR THE VOSS LITERARY AWARD 2020 PRAISE FOR LUCY TRELOAR 'A capacious talent' The Australian 'Deeply moving' The Age 'This lovely, atmospheric book sings of the inherent human drama, rising fragility of home-country and the recurrent need to flee and to protect. The journey told in this book is so evocative it will stay with the reader as an important literary fable of our period of history, in which a fraught world threatens all of us with flight, exile and bewilderment.' Tom Keneally, bestselling author of Schindler's Ark 'A work that is more than powerful: it's transformative.' Australian Book Review 'Disturbing but beautiful' Susan Wyndham