Josef Chytry is Senior Adjunct Professor in Critical Studies at California College of the Arts in Oakland/San Francisco, and is Managing Editor of the journal Industrial and Corporate Change at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Unis vers Cythère: Aesthetic-Political Investigations in Polis Thought and the Artful Firm (Peter Lang, 2009), Cytherica: Aesthetic-Political Essays in an Aphrodisian Key (Peter Lang, 2005) and The Aesthetic State: A Quest in Modern German Thought (1989), and a co-editor of Understanding Industrial and Corporate Change (2005) and Technology, Organization, and Competitiveness (1998). He was Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Tübingen and received his Dr. Phil. in politics and the history of ideas from the University of Oxford.

Mountain of Paradise challenges conventional taxonomies of world civilizations by introducing a new and formidable candidate: the civilization of Greater California presently incubating as the evolution of California into a veritable «nation-state» or «world commonwealth» according to contemporary commentators and scholars. Through a series of reflective essays it clarifies the momentous implications of this claim by a thorough account of the genealogical origins of «California», permutation into its speculative moment of self-identity thanks to prolonged creative interchange with European thought and philosophy, advancement to status of a socio-economic powerhouse by the 1950s and 1960s, invention of distinctly Californian variants of political economy by the 1970s and 1980s, and present domination over regions formerly classified as «Greater California». In its range and originality Mountain of Paradise constitutes a robust contribution to current political, social, economic and global thematics.