Originally published in 1983 and named one of the Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, this bestselling history is now revised and updated and includes a new final chapter. A far-reaching and masterful work, it explores the events, ideas, and personalities of the seven decades since the First World War.

Modern Times was Charlie Chaplin's last full-length silent film. The author situates 'Modern Times' within the context of Chaplin's life work, exploring its history and influences. She explores how the film's themes of oppression, industrialization and dehumanization are embodied in the little tramp's struggle to survive in the modern world.

In Marking Modern Times, Alexis McCrossen relates how the American preoccupation with time led people from across social classes to acquire watches and clocks, and expands our understanding of the ways we have standardized time and have made timekeepers serve as political, social, and cultural tools in a society that not merely values time, but regards access to it as a natural-born right.

The critique of modernist ideology from France's leading radical theorist In this book Jacques Rancière radicalises his critique of modernism and its postmodern appendix. He contrasts their unilinear and exclusive time with the interweaving of temporalities at play in modern processes of emancipation and artistic revolutions, showing how this plurality itself refers to the double dimension of time. Time is more than a line drawn from the past to the future. It is a form of life, marked by the ancient hierarchy between those who have time and those who do not. This hierarchy, continued in the Marxist notion of the vanguard and nakedly exhibited in Clement Greenberg’s modernism, still governs a present which clings to the fable of historical necessity and its experts. In opposition to this, Rancière shows how the break with the hierarchical conception of time, formulated by Emerson in his vision of the new poet, implies a completely different idea of the modern. He sees the fulfilment of this in the two arts of movement, cinema and dance, which at the beginning of the twentieth century abolished the opposition between free and mechanical people, at the price of exposing the rift between the revolution of artists and that of strategists.

A compelling examination of the art museum from a renowned director, this sweeping book explores how architecture, vision, and funding have transformed art museums around the world over the past eighty years. How have art museums changed in the past century? Where are they headed in the future? Charles Saumarez Smith is uniquely qualified to answer these questions, having been at the helm of three major institutions over the course of his distinguished career. For The Art Museum in Modern Times, Saumarez Smith has undertaken an odyssey, visiting art museums across the globe and examining how the experience of art is shaped by the buildings that house it. His story starts with the Museum of Modern Art in New York, one of the first museums to focus squarely on the art of the present rather than the past. When it opened in 1939, MoMA’s boldly modernist building represented a stark riposte to the neoclassicism of most earlier art museums. From there, Saumarez Smith investigates dozens of other museums, including the Tate Modern in London, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, the West Bund Museum in Shanghai, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. He explores our shifting reasons for visiting museums, changes to the way exhibits are organized and displayed, and the spectacular new architectural landmarks that have become destinations in their own right. Global in scope yet full of personal insight, this fully illustrated celebration of the modern art museum will appeal to art lovers, museum professionals, and museum goers alike.

The West suffers from intense work pressure, longer and less well paid hours. This text is a sociological analysis of the relationship between overwork and unemployment. The only possible response, the author claims, is a renewal of the working class struggle.

This major work by Laurence Lampert provides a new interpretation of modern philosophy by developing Nietzsche's view that genuine philosophers set out to determine the direction of culture through their ideas and that they conceal the radical nature of their thought by their esoteric style. From this Nietzschean perspective, Francis Bacon and René Descartes can be considered the founders of modernity. Lampert argues that Bacon's positive claims for science aimed to destroy the dominance of Christianity. Descartes continued Bacon's radical program while providing it with the mathematical physics required for its success. Far from being solely an epistemological and metaphysical thinker, says Lampert, Descartes was a master writer whose comic ridicule helped bring down the Church to which he paid lip service. Both Bacon and Descartes used the Platonic art of dissimulation to achieve their ends by making their revolutionary aims appear compatible with Christianity. Once we recognize Bacon and Descartes as legislators of modern times in a specifically Nietzschean sense, we can also see Nietzsche in a new way--as the first thinker to have understood modern times and transcended it in a postmodern worldview. According to Lampert, Nietzsche provides a new foundation for culture, a joyous science that reveals the grandeur and purposeless play of the cosmic whole and yet avoids enervating despair or destructive, dogmatic belief.