The capacity to comply with abusive authority is humanity’s fatal flaw. Fortunately, within the human family there are anti-authoritarians—people comfortable questioning the legitimacy of authority and challenging and resisting its illegitimate forms. However, asResisting Illegitimate Authority reveals, authoritarians attempt to marginalize anti-authoritarians, who are scorned, shunned, financially punished, psychopathologized, criminalized, and even assassinated. Profiling a diverse group of U.S. anti-authoritarians—including Thomas Paine, Ralph Nader, Malcolm X, and Lenny Bruce—in order to glean useful lessons from their lives, No Badges is the first self-help manual for anti-authoritarians. Discussing anti-authoritarian approaches to depression, relationships, and parenting, it provides political, spiritual, philosophical, and psychological tools to help those suffering violence and marginalization in a society whose most ardent cheerleaders for “freedom” are often its most obedient and docile citizens. Resisting Illegitimate Authority is about bigotry, but not bigotry directed at race, religion, gender, or sexual preference. It is about bigotry directed at rebellious personalities and temperaments.

There is today a crisis in psychiatry. Even the former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, Thomas Insel, has said: “Whatever we’ve been doing for five decades, it ain’t working.” The field requires a completely fresh look, and clinical psychologist Bruce Levine—a man often at odds with his profession—enlists the early Enlightenment philosopher Baruch de Spinoza to help work through the problem. Readers unfamiliar with Spinoza will be intrigued by the modern relevance of his radical philosophical, psychological, and political ideas. Levine compares the radical/moderate divide among Enlightenment thinkers to a similar divergence between contemporary critics of psychiatry, siding historically with Spinoza in order to bring an equivalent intellectual force to bear upon our modern crisis and calling for new forms of free and enlightened thinking.

In recent years the mental health industry has been attacked for the invalidity of its illnesses, the unreliability of its diagnoses, the dangers of its treatments, and its corruption by drug companies. Commonsense Rebellion integrates those critiques and goes further.Nearly 1 in 4 American adults take psychiatric drugs, and Ritalin production has increased 800 percent since 1990. Yet the mental health industry laments the fact that two-thirds of us with diagnosable mental disorders do not seek treatment. This book argues that "institutional mental health's" ever-increasing diseases, disorders, and drugs have diverted us from examining an important rebellion against an increasingly impersonal and coercive "institutional society" which worships speed, power, and technology. This has created fantastic wealth - at least for some - but its disregard for human autonomy, community, and diversity has come with a cost. Depression has reportedly increased tenfold since 1900, and suicide levels for teenage boys have tripled since 1960. Have human genetics and serotonin levels changed that much, or has society?>

Originally published in 1870, this essay by the American anarchist and political philosopher Lysander Spooner is here reproduced. Described by Murray Rothbard as "the greatest case for anarchist political philosophy ever written", Spooner's lengthy essay is still referenced by anarchists and philosophers today. In it, he argues that the American Civil War violated the US Constitution, thus rendering it null and void. An indispensable read for political historians both amateur and professional alike. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

How insurgencies—enabled by digital devices and a vast information sphere—have mobilized millions of ordinary people around the world. In the words of economist and scholar Arnold Kling, Martin Gurri saw it coming. Technology has categorically reversed the information balance of power between the public and the elites who manage the great hierarchical institutions of the industrial age: government, political parties, the media. The Revolt of the Public tells the story of how insurgencies, enabled by digital devices and a vast information sphere, have mobilized millions of ordinary people around the world. Originally published in 2014, The Revolt of the Public is now available in an updated edition, which includes an extensive analysis of Donald Trump’s improbable rise to the presidency and the electoral triumphs of Brexit. The book concludes with a speculative look forward, pondering whether the current elite class can bring about a reformation of the democratic process and whether new organizing principles, adapted to a digital world, can arise out of the present political turbulence.

Exploring both historical cases of civil resistance and more contemporary examples such as the Arab Awakenings and various ongoing movements in the United States, Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know® provides a comprehensive and engaging review of the current field of knowledge.

Chosen by Library Journal as one of the best reference texts of 2016. Occupy. Indignados. The Tea Party. The Arab Spring. Anonymous. These and other terms have become part of an emerging lexicon in recent years, signalling an important development that has gripped many parts of the world: millions of people are increasingly involved, whether directly or indirectly, in movements of resistance and protestation. However, resistance and its conceptual "companions", protest, contestation, opposition, disobedience and mobilization, all seem to be still mostly seen in public and private discourses as illegitimate and problematic forms of action. The time is, therefore, ripe to delve into the concerns, themes and legitimacy. The SAGE Handbook of Resistance offers theoretical essays enabling readers to forge their own perspectives of what "is" resistance and emphasizes the empirical and experiential dimension of resistance - making strong choices in terms of how contemporary topics related to resistance help to rethink our societies as "protest societies". The coverage is divided into six key sub-sections: Foundations Sites of Resistance Technologies of Resistance Languages of Resistance Geographies of Resistance Consequences of Resistance