Andy Merrifield Libri

A lucid and vibrant contribution to the field of urban studies, tracing the connections between radical urban theory and political activism.

Karl Marx saw the ruling class as a sorcerer, no longer able to control the ominous powers it has summoned from the netherworld. Today, in an age spawning the likes of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, our society has never before been governed by so many conjuring tricks, with collusions and conspiracies, fake news and endless sleights

In John Berger, a concise yet detailed study of Berger's life and work, Andy Merrifield sheds light on Berger the man, the artist, and the concerned citizen. Merrifield creates a reader-friendly, freewheeling narrative, which gives fascinating insight into one of the most influential thinkers of our times.

This book is the story of Andy Merrifield's slow and thoughtful pilgramage across the Auvergne with only a donkey for company, after he turns his back on New York and city life.

The Politics of the Encounter is a spirited interrogation of the city as a site of both theoretical inquiry and global social struggle, expanding upon the ideas of Henri Lefebvre that undergird much of our thinking about urbanization and urban society.

Following his hugely popular book, The Wisdom of Donkeys, Andy Merrifield breathes new life into the Marxist tradition. Magical Marxism demands something more of traditional Marxism -- something more interesting and liberating. It asks that we imagine a Marxism that moves beyond debates about class, the role of the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat. In escaping the formalist straitjacket of orthodox Marxist critique, Merrifield argues for a reconsideration of Marxism and its potential, applying previously unexplored approaches to Marxist thinking that will reveal vital new modes of political activism and debate. This book will provoke and inspire in equal measure. It gives us a Marxism for the 21st century, which offers dramatic new possibilities for political engagement.

A radical manifesto about doing what you love Andy Merrifield offers a passionate tribute to the revolutionary spirit of the amateur—a figure who thinks outside the box, takes risks, dreams the impossible dream, seeks independence, and carves out a new world. Merrifield celebrates such square pegs as Charles Baudelaire, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Edward Said, Guy Debord, Hannah Arendt, and Jane Jacobs, each of whom shows us a path of unconventional wisdom and freedom. The Amateur advocates urgently for the liberated life, one that creates the space to question authority.

A satisfying celebration of the 'great romantic dream ... a society that breaks free of the vicious circle of undefined productivity.' - Publishers Weekly Rather than thinking of amateurs as dabblers, weekend gardeners, busying themselves with unimportant tasks, Merrifield defends the creative and political potential of doing things we love for pleasure. Amateurs take risks, seek independence, innovate by choosing a less obvious direction. By exploring the work of figures like Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, and Hannah Arendt, and their impact on his own professional life, Merrifield succeeds in highlighting the revolutionary spirit of the amateur. - The Idler Erudite and engagingly written ... refreshing. - Financial Times Here amateurs (a word derived from the Latin 'to love') are non-alienated citizens; enthusiasts, who counter the mechanical expertise and technical formalism of modern society; passionate obsessives standing up for values that need defending. Merrifield, an urban theorist who writes with a brio and wit often missing in professional academics, offers an idiosyncratic canon (Dostoevsky, Jane Jacobs, Edward Said) in which he holds up amateurs as outside-the-box thinkers, inter- and post-disciplinary radicals. It's a stirring book whose critique of contemporary work culture will be instantly recognisable. It also doubles as a moving memoir of a working-class intellectual. -Sukdev Sandhu, Observer

Our cities have been plagued by economic injustices and inequalities long before COVID-19 upended urban life everywhere. Beyond Plague Urbanism delves into this zone of urban pathology and asks what successive lockdowns and exoduses, remote work and small-business collapse, redundant office space and unaffordable living space portend for our society in cities? Andy Merrifield journeys intercontinentally as he reflects on these questions, in a narrative that moves imaginatively between plague and populist politics, the U.S. Main Street and the British High Street, overcrowding and undercrowding, the right to the city today and eco-cities of tomorrow. Blending jazz with French Surrealism, Thomas Pynchon’s rocket science with the odyssey of James Joyce, Henri Lefebvre’s Marxism with the street ballets of Jane Jacobs, this challenging book appears at a timely moment in our fraught political history and opens up an urgent humanist conversation about the future of city life.