Was the NATO bombing of Serbia and Kosovo guided by humanitarian concern "in the name of principles and values," as Vaclav Havel argued? Was it one in which historical precedent is irrelevant because we are now in a new era where, as Prime Minister Tony Blair put it, the United States and its allies fight "for a world where those responsible for [ethnic cleansing] have nowhere to hide"? Or was it something more crass and familiar? Crass and very familiar is what Noam Chomsky reveals in The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo, says PLC

With the Dow pushing 8,000, all eyes have been on the stock market. In fact, more Americans have been playing around on Wall Street than at any time in the last 30 years - maybe ever. That popular interest has helped drive the daily volume on the New York bank wire, which captures most of the global activity denominated in US dollars, to over $1 trillion a day. What does it all mean? Unfortunately, with the Dow pushing 8,000, most people are disinclined to pose that question. But this is precisely the time when we should be doing just that, says PLC

In the Enlightenment tradition, rationality is considered well-defined, independent of context; we know what rationality is, and its meaning is constant across time and space. Bent Flyvbjerg shows that rationality is context-dependent and that the crucial context is determined by decision-makers' power. Power blurs the dividing line between rationality and rationalisation. The result is a rationality that is often as imaginary as the time in Little Town, yet with very real social and environmental consequences. Book description

Jurgen Osterhammel presents a new approach to colonialism. Concise but sweeping, it encompasses the processes of colonisation and decolonisation from the early modern period to the twentieth century. The subject is vast, but Osterhammel is brief as he says that "the task of this book is to construct a theoretical and historical overview of colonialism with a minimum of value judgements." That he does, as he promises to "probe questions that have rarely been addressed in scholarly studies." Osterhammel says that "colonialism" is multifaceted, uneven, and "a phenomenon of colossal vagueness," but argues that it must be perceived from all possible angles, "with a central focus on both perpetrators and victims, writes Gene Evans

Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis is increasingly challenged these days. Neither are his theories scientifically respectable nor are they therapeutically efficacious. The man concerned now being no more to refute the challenges made by critics and detractors, it is Martin Wain who provides the repartee in Freud's Answer. Psychoanalysis, Wain says, is essentially a defence of modern liberal democracy in disguise, a symbolical, deflective tale about the mysterious workings of the mind (which was really the quite puzzling and often irrational social order), told with a seeming reason and logic that many found believable, writes Gene Evans