The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

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Description

From the writer of the international bestseller Debt: The First 5,000 Years comes a revelatory account of the way bureaucracy rules our lives  

Where does the desire for endless rules, regulations, and bureaucracy come from? How did we come to spend a lot of our time filling out forms? And is it in reality a cipher for state violence?
 
To respond to these questions, the anthropologist David Graeber—one of our most important and provocative thinkers—traces the strange and unexpected ways we relate to bureaucracy today, and reveals how it shapes our lives in ways we won’t even notice…though he also suggests that there is also something perversely appealing—even romantic—about bureaucracy.
 
Leaping from the ascendance of right-wing economics to the hidden meanings at the back of Sherlock Holmes and Batman, The Utopia of Rules is at once a powerful work of social theory in the tradition of Foucault and Marx, and an entertaining reckoning with popular culture that calls to mind Slavoj Zizek at his most accessible.
 
An essential book for our times, The Utopia of Rules is sure to start a million conversations about the institutions that rule over us—and the better, freer world we must, perhaps, begin to believe for ourselves.

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