The contributors to The Anomie of the Earth explore the convergences and resonances between Autonomist Marxism and decolonial thinking. In discussing and rejecting Carl Schmitt's formulation of the nomos—a conceptualization of world order based on the Western tenets of law and property—the authors question the assumption of universal political subjects and look towards politics of the commons divorced from European notions of sovereignty. They contrast European Autonomism with North and South American decolonial and indigenous conceptions of autonomy, discuss the legacies of each, and examine social movements in the Americas and Europe. Beyond orthodox Marxism, their transatlantic exchanges point to the emerging categories disclosed by the collapse of the colonial and capitalist frameworks of Western modernity.

Contributors. Joost de Bloois, Jodi A. Byrd, Gustavo Esteva, Silvia Federici, Wilson Kaiser, Mara Kaufman, Frans-Willem Korsten, Federico Luisetti, Sandro Mezzadra, Walter D. Mignolo, Benjamin Noys, John Pickles, Alvaro Reyes, Catherine Walsh, Gareth Williams, Zac Zimmer

Few ideas are as important and pervasive in the discourse of the twentieth century as the idea of culture. Yet culture, Christopher Herbert contends, is an idea laden from its inception with ambiguity and contradiction. In Culture and Anomie, Christopher Herbert conducts an inquiry into the historical emergence of the modern idea of culture that is at the same time an extended critical analysis of the perplexities and suppressed associations underlying our own exploitation of this term.

Making wide reference to twentieth-century anthropologists from Malinowski and Benedict to Evans-Pritchard, Geertz, and Lévi-Strauss as well as to nineteenth-century social theorists like Tylor, Spencer, Mill, and Arnold, Herbert stresses the philosophically dubious, unstable character that has clung to the "culture" idea and embarrassed its exponents even as it was developing into a central principle of interpretation.

In a series of detailed studies ranging from political economy to missionary ethnography, Mayhew, and Trollope's fiction, Herbert then focuses on the intellectual and historical circumstances that gave to "culture" the appearance of a secure category of scientific analysis despite its apparent logical incoherence. What he describes is an intimate relationship between the idea of culture and its antithesis, the myth or fantasy of a state of boundless human desire—a conception that binds into a single tradition of thought such seemingly incompatible writers as John Wesley, who called this state original sin, and Durkheim, who gave it its technical name in sociology: anomie.

Methodologically provocative and rich in unorthodox conclusions, Culture and Anomie will be of interest not only to specialists in nineteenth-century literature and intellectual history, but also to readers across the wide range of fields in which the concept of culture plays a determining role.