Diy: The Search for Control and Self-Reliance in the 21st Century

<p>From the driveway mechanic to the backyard gardener many diverse people are doing it themselves by building or repairing the stuff of their daily lives without the aid of experts. <em>Do It Yourself</em> uses Habermas's colonization of the lifeworld as a frame and mobilizes Marx's concepts of alienation and mystification to examine how social behaviors can be a conscious reply to a complex and fast-moving world a nostalgia for simpler times past or a just an economic impulse. Each main chapter is anchored by an extended empirical example: back-to-the-land home-schooling and self-government. </p>