The Amateur: The Pleasures of Doing What You Love

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Modern life is being destroyed by experts and professionals. We have lost our amateur spirit and need to rediscover the radical and liberating pleasure of doing things we love. In The Amateur, thinker Andy Merrifield shows us how the many spheres of our liveswork, knowledge, cities, politicshave fallen into the hands of box tickers, bean counters and rule followers. In response, he corrals a team of independent thinkers, wayward poets, dabblers and square pegs who challenge the accepted wisdom. Such figures as Charles Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, Edward Said, Guy Debord, Hannah Arendt and Jane Jacobs show us the way. As we will see the amateur takes risks, thinks the unthinkable and seeks independenceand changes the world.

Reviews

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. Its 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 *

Author Bio

Andy Merrifield is the author of nine books. His many articles, essays and reviews have appeared in the Nation, Harpers, Adbusters, New Left Review, Dissent, the Brooklyn Rail, and Radical Philosophy. He has more than twenty-years experience teaching and writing about urbanism and social theory. He has also published three intellectual biographies on Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord and John Berger, as well as a popular existential travelogue, The Wisdom of Donkeys. Merrifield is a contributing editor of Adbusters, an associate editor of CITY, and a regular speaker at scholarly, literary and political events on and off campus.