ITT: Post books that are incredibly underrated in your opinion

ITT: Post books that are incredibly underrated in your opinion.

Pic related:

Other urls found in this thread:

archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSociety
archive.org/details/Propaganda_201512
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

Andrei Bely's Petersburg

I have that book on my shelf, op. Yet to read it though, what can I expect?

A more elaborate version of Industrial Society and its Future, I think.

A thorough evaluation and criticism of technology and how it influences our society, and how those who claim to wield it are actually being wielded by technology itself.

It's what ultimately turned the Unabomber into a green anarchist, but it's not green anarchist itself, and "technique" doesn't just refer to machines (although the machine is the incarnation of technique). Technique is the modern tendency to maximize effectiveness in every area of society and to see everything exclusively from the lens of rationalism and empiricism. Ellul himself explains it more thoroughly in the first chapter of the book, because he doesn't want people to think that technique is the same as the machine.

I found out about Veeky Forums a few months ago, and I gotta say I've discovered many authors I had no idea existed, like Ellul. I'm an avid reader, with many friends in top lit/philosophy programs, none of us had heard of Ellul (we're all french). Pretty incredible when you read him. He definitely is one of the most profound thinker of the 20th.

The great thing about him is that unlike most French thinkers, he doesn't cover his thoughts in meaningless jargon and walls of word salad.

Would like to read him but I can't find any epub downloads for his books

Yeah Ted drew heavily from Ellul.

if you like ellul then you should probably have a look at harry braverman. labour & monopoly capital is also a book that should be read more

Theodore Veblen Theory of the Leisure Class
Robert Shiller Irrational Exuberance
David Cay Johnston
Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

You should learn to use google

archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSociety

Shit I just started reading this, only about 50 pgs in and I think Ellul is *still* defining "technique". I love it so far though, his prose/the translation don't seem that bad.

ellul makes me depressed since I'm a stem fag.

Though after reading him I started playing instruments again.

Im also a STEM fag. But STEM isn't really the issue, because technique is now also found in other areas. Think of analytic philosophy or even experimental philosophy.

>and "technique" doesn't just refer to machines
There's an hour-long documentary/interview with Ellul on youtube but it drives me nuts because they repeatedly translated "la technique" as "technology" which is going to cause a total misunderstanding for anyone who hasn't actually read him.

Anyway, I was also fascinated with The Technological Society and Propaganda. As another user mentioned, it's refreshing to read a French philosopher who is lucid in his thinking, as well as someone who is critical of progress without going full anarcho prim.

I'll toss this one in since it's both incredibly underrated (there's little to no discussion around it on the internet) and relevant to thinkers like Ellul (who is cited in it as well): Post-Intellectualism and the Decline of Democracy by Donald N Wood. Wood defines a condition he calls "post-intellectualism" as a movement away from the Enlightenment ideal of an informed, responsible citizenship being required to run a democratic state, facilitated by an inability for the average person to cope with an onslaught of decontextualized information that is only understood across a fragmented array of specialists, a decline in analytical thinking and reasoned debate, and deeply-rooted beliefs in ideas like unrestrained linear progress.

It also has this funny little passage near the end (written in 1996).

OP here, i'll be sure to check that out. Once i get over the rest of my backlog...

I thought it was really weak and lazy. I was constantly drawing up obvious objections to the examples and reasoning he uses throughout the book. I can understand why such a book would be like here and by college pseuds

Care to elaborate on your objections?

>tfw you've been posting ellul since 14 and it's finally taking root

not really because it requires drawing up those examples, but one I can remember off the top of my head is about the people vacationing in Mediterranean. He assumes that the French people just mindless vacation in the Mediterranean because of the invention of the car and their entire choice has been determined by technology. That is some really weak reasoning that leaves all sorts of reasons why people would want to spend their vacation there outside of roads have been laid in that direction. This pattern of excluding such obvious things that would contradict his argument is throughout the book.

I don't recall him writing about holidays in The Technological Society.

I'm pretty sure he doesn't and the user is confusing it with a statement that Ellul makes in the aforementioned documentary/interview.

>Care to elaborate on your objections?
>not really
was about all you needed out of a discussion with someone complaining about "college pseuds" but apparently continuing to post among them.

men of wealth by john t. flynn sketches history of capitalism since renaissance via profiles of a salient oligarch of each epoch. never seen it mentioned on lit although he's a top writer.

Was talking about his book Propaganda, faggot

thinking back, that is true it is from a documentary but that same pattern is present in his writings as well

>someone complaining about "college pseuds" but apparently continuing to post among them.
I stand by that. Way back when we I did those readings and watched that documentary in cass the subsection of the students that bought into his arguments could easily be filtered into such a category and perhaps the category of flakes

Not him, but archive.org/details/Propaganda_201512

What is it really about?