UNIVERSITY PRESSES
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Conservatism ; The Fight for a Tradition
Edmund Fawcett
- Princeton university press
- 20 Octobre 2020
- 9780691174105
A fresh and sharp-eyed history of political conservatism from its nineteenth-century origins to today's hard Right
For two hundred years, conservatism has defied its reputation as a backward-looking creed by confronting and adapting to liberal modernity. By doing so, the Right has won long periods of power and effectively become the dominant tradition in politics. Yet, despite their success, conservatives have continued to fight with each other about how far to compromise with liberalism and democracy-or which values to defend and how. In Conservatism, Edmund Fawcett provides a gripping account of this conflicted history, clarifies key ideas, and illuminates quarrels within the Right today.
Focusing on the United States, Britain, France, and Germany, Fawcett's vivid narrative covers thinkers and politicians. They include the forerunners James Madison, Edmund Burke, and Joseph de Maistre; early friends and foes of capitalism; defenders of religion; and builders of modern parties, such as William McKinley and Lord Salisbury. The book chronicles the cultural critics and radical disruptors of the 1920s and 1930s, recounts how advocates of laissez-faire economics broke the post 1945 consensus, and describes how Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, and their European counterparts are pushing conservatism toward a nation-first, hard Right.
An absorbing, original history of the Right, Conservatism portrays a tradition as much at war with itself as with its opponents. -
The Emperor's New Road ; China and the Project of the Century
Jonathan E Hillman
- Yale university press
- 27 Octobre 2020
- 9780300244588
A prominent authority on China's Belt and Road Initiative reveals the global risks lurking within Beijing's project of the century
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The spread of Christianity is arguably humanity's most consequential historical epic. Christianity tells the tale through more than a hundred beautiful color maps and illustrations depicting the journey of Jesus Christ's followers from Judea to Constantine's Rome, wider Europe, and today's world of two billion Christians practicing in every land.
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An original, authoritative guide to the impact of grief on the brain, the heart, and the body of the bereaved
"Dorothy Holinger's exploration of the contours of grief is wise, moving, thought-provoking, and, best of all, extraordinarily helpful. Beautifully written and humane, it is a balm for the bereaved."-Barry Bearak, Pulitzer Prize winner for international reporting
"What's central for Holinger is that turning feeling into words, and giving voice to buried emotions, acts to release tension. She is a passionate advocate for language as healer."-Clair Wills, New York Review of Books
Grief happens to everyone. Universal and enveloping, grief cannot be ignored or denied.
This original new book by psychologist Dorothy P. Holinger uses humanistic and physiological approaches to describe grief's impact on the bereaved. Taking examples from literature, music, poetry, paleoarchaeology, personal experience, memoirs, and patient narratives, Holinger describes what happens in the brain, the heart, and the body of the bereaved.
Readers will learn what grief is like after a loved one dies: how language and clarity of thought become elusive, why life feels empty, why grief surges and ebbs so persistently, and why the bereaved cry. Resting on a scientific foundation, this literary book shows the bereaved how to move through the grieving process and how understanding grief in deeper, more multidimensional ways can help quell this sorrow and allow life to be lived again with joy.
Visit the author's companion website for The Anatomy of Grief: dorothypholinger.com -
Statelessness ; A Modern History
Mira L. Siegelberg
- Harvard university press
- 6 Octobre 2020
- 9780674976313
The post-WWI crisis of statelessness induced creative legal thinking, as officials and jurists debated cosmopolitan citizenship beyond the borders of sovereigns. But by midcentury the state won out as the lone site of citizenship. Mira Siegelberg uncovers the ideological roots of this transformation and its impact on the international order.
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A Passion for Ignorance ; What We Choose Not to Know and Why
Renata Salecl
- Princeton university press
- 29 Septembre 2020
- 9780691195605
An original and provocative exploration of our capacity to ignore what is inconvenient or traumatic
Ignorance, whether passive or active, conscious or unconscious, has always been a part of the human condition, Renata Salecl argues. What has changed in our post-truth, postindustrial world is that we often feel overwhelmed by the constant flood of information and misinformation. It sometimes seems impossible to differentiate between truth and falsehood and, as a result, there has been a backlash against the idea of expertise, and a rise in the number of people actively choosing not to know. The dangers of this are obvious, but Salecl challenges our assumptions, arguing that there may also be a positive side to ignorance, and that by addressing the role of ignorance in society, we may also be able to reclaim the role of knowledge.
Drawing on philosophy, social and psychoanalytic theory, popular culture, and her own experience, Salecl explores how the passion for ignorance plays out in many different aspects of life today, from love, illness, trauma, and the fear of failure to genetics, forensic science, big data, and the incel movement-and she concludes that ignorance is a complex phenomenon that can, on occasion, benefit individuals and society as a whole.
The result is a fascinating investigation of how the knowledge economy became an ignorance economy, what it means for us, and what it tells us about the world today. -
The Coolie's Great War ; Indian Labour in a Global Conflict, 1914-1921
Radhika Singha
- C hurst & co publishers ltd
- 3 Septembre 2020
- 9781787382152
Though largely invisible in histories of the First World War, over 550,000 men in the ranks of the Indian army were non-combatants. From the porters, stevedores and construction workers in the Coolie Corps to those who maintained supply lines and removed the wounded from the battlefield, Radhika Singha recovers the story of this unacknowledged service. The labour regimes built on the backs of these 'coolies' sustained the military infrastructure of empire; their deployment in interregional arenas bent to the demands of global war. Viewed as racially subordinate and subject to 'non-martial' caste designations, they fought back against their status, using the warring powers' need for manpower as leverage to challenge traditional service hierarchies and wage differentials. 'The Coolie's Great War' views that global conflict through the lens of Indian labour, constructing a distinct geography of the war--from tribal settlements and colonial jails, beyond India's frontiers, to the battlefronts of France and Mesopotamia.
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Universality and Identity Politics
Todd McGowan
- Columbia university press
- 21 Juillet 2020
- 9780231197700
This book develops a new conception of universality that helps us rethink political thought and action. Through a wide range of examples in contemporary politics, film, and history, Universality and Identity Politics offers an antidote to the impasses of identity and an inspiring vision of twenty-first-century collective struggle.
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Nathalie Sarraute ; A Life Between
Ann Jefferson
- Princeton university press
- 11 Août 2020
- 9780691197876
The definitive biography of a leading twentieth-century French writer
A leading exponent of the nouveau roman, Nathalie Sarraute (1900-1999) was also one of France's most cosmopolitan literary figures, and her life was bound up with the intellectual and political ferment of twentieth-century Europe. Ann Jefferson's Nathalie Sarraute: A Life Between is the authoritative biography of this major writer.
Sarraute's life spanned a century and a continent. Born in tsarist Russia to Jewish parents, she was soon uprooted and brought to the city that became her lifelong home, Paris. This dislocation presaged a life marked by ambiguity and ambivalence. A stepchild in two families, a Russian emigre in Paris, a Jew in bourgeois French society, and a woman in a man's literary world, Sarraute was educated at Oxford, Berlin, and the Sorbonne. She embarked on a career in law that was ended by the Nazi occupation of France, and she spent much of the war in hiding, under constant threat of exposure. Rising to literary eminence after the Liberation, she was initially associated with the existentialist circle of Beauvoir and Sartre, before becoming the principal theorist and practitioner of the avant-garde French novel of the 1950s and 1960s. Her tireless exploration of the deepest parts of our inner psychological life produced an oeuvre that remains daringly modern and resolutely unclassifiable.
Nathalie Sarraute: A Life Between explores Sarraute's work and the intellectual, social, and political context from which it emerged. Drawing on newly available archival material and Sarraute's letters, this deeply researched biography is the definitive account of a life lived between countries, families, languages, literary movements, and more. -
Bernard E. Harcourt calls for moving beyond the complacency of decades of philosophical detours and to harness critical thought to the need for action. Critique and Praxis advocates for a new path forward that constantly challenges each one of us to ask what more we can do to realize a society based on equality and justice.
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Crime and Forgiveness ; Christianizing Execution in Medieval Europe
Adriano Prosperi
- Harvard university press
- 14 Juillet 2020
- 9780674659841
The public execution of criminals has been a common practice since ancient times. Adriano Prosperi identifies a crucial period when concepts of vengeance and justice merged with Christian beliefs in repentance and forgiveness, to eventually give political authorities a moral rationale for encoding the death penalty into law.
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Degenerative Realism ; Novel and Nation in Twenty-First-Century France
Christy Wampole
- Columbia university press
- 23 Juin 2020
- 9780231185172
Examining key novels by Michel Houellebecq, Frederic Beigbeder, Aurelien Bellanger, Yann Moix, and other French writers, Christy Wampole identifies and critiques an emergent tendency toward "degenerative realism."
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Counterpoint ; A Memoir of Bach and Mourning
Philip Kennicott
- Ww norton & co
- 14 Juillet 2020
- 9780393635362
As his mother was dying, Philip Kennicott began to listen to the music of Bach obsessively. It was the only music that didn't seem trivial or irrelevant, and it enabled him to both experience her death and remove himself from it. For him, Bach's music held the elements of both joy and despair, life and its inevitable end. He spent the next five years trying to learn one of the composer's greatest keyboard masterpieces, the Goldberg Variations. In Counterpoint, he recounts his efforts to rise to the challenge, and to fight through his grief by coming to terms with his memories of a difficult, complicated childhood. He describes the joys of mastering some of the piano pieces, the frustrations that plague his understanding of others, the technical challenges they pose, and the surpassing beauty of the melodies, harmonies, and counterpoint that distinguish them. While exploring Bach's compositions he sketches a cultural history of playing the piano in the twentieth century. And he raises two questions that become increasingly interrelated, not unlike a contrapuntal passage in one of the variations itself: What does it mean to know a piece of music? What does it mean to know another human being?
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Splinters in Your Eye ; Frankfurt School Provocations
Martin Jay
- Verso books
- 14 Juillet 2020
- 9781788736015
Assessing the legacy of the Frankfurt School in the twenty-first century
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The Planter of Modern Life ; Louis Bromfield and the Seeds of a Food Revolution
Stephen Heyman
- Ww norton & co
- 3 Juillet 2020
- 9781324001898
Winner of the 2021 IACP Award for Literary or Historical Food Writing
Longlisted for the 2021 Plutarch Award
How a leading writer of the Lost Generation became America's most famous farmer and inspired the organic food movement. -
Smellosophy ; What the Nose Tells the Mind
A. S. Barwich
- Harvard university press
- 14 Juillet 2020
- 9780674983694
For decades neuroscientists understood sensory perception as a matter of external stimuli "sparking" regions of the brain. But this view has a key flaw: odors don't line up consistently with the neural map. A. S. Barwich explores the new science of smell and urges us to rethink theories of mind and brain inspired by the mapping model.
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Longlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize
A major new collection of stories by one of the most exciting and creative voices in contemporary Chinese literature
Can Xue's stories observe no obvious conventions of plot or characterization. That is the only rule they follow. Instead, they tend to limn a disordered and poetic state given structure by philosophical wonder and emotional rigor.
Combining elements of both Chinese materiality-the love of physical things-and Western abstract thinking, Can Xue invites her readers into an immersive landscape that blends empirical fact and illusion, mixes the physical and spiritual, and probes the space between consciousness and oblivion. She brings us to a place that is both readily familiar yet unmappable and can make us hyperaware of the inherent unreliability in our relationship to the world around us. Delightful, enchanting, and filled with secrets, Can Xue's newest collection shines a light on the forces that give contours to the visible terrain we acknowledge as reality. -
Anger ; The Conflicted History of an Emotion
Barbara H. Rosenwein
- Yale university press
- 14 Juillet 2020
- 9780300221428
Tracing the story of anger from the Buddha to Twitter, Rosenwein provides a much-needed account of our changing and contradictory understandings of this emotion
All of us think we know when we are angry, and we are sure we can recognize anger in others as well. But this is only superficially true. We see anger through lenses colored by what we know, experience, and learn.
Barbara H. Rosenwein traces our many conflicting ideas about and expressions of anger, taking the story from the Buddha to our own time, from anger's complete rejection to its warm reception. Rosenwein explores how anger has been characterized by gender and race, why it has been tied to violence and how that is often a false connection, how it has figured among the seven deadly sins and yet is considered a virtue, and how its interpretation, once largely the preserve of philosophers and theologians, has been gradually handed over to scientists-with very mixed results. Rosenwein shows that the history of anger can help us grapple with it today. -
Mapping the Afterlife ; From Homer to Dante
Emma Gee
- Oxford university press inc
- 22 Juin 2020
- 9780190670481
This book studies the afterlife from Homer to Dante. It posits that there is a dominant spatial idiom in afterlife landscapes, the 'Journey-Vision paradigm:' i.e. the journey through the underworld, and the Vision of the universe. This spatial duality functions to harmonise the underworld with the 'scientific' universe.
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Rousseau's Reader ; Strategies of Persuasion and Education
John T. Scott
- The university of chicago press
- 6 Mai 2020
- 9780226689142
On his famous walk to Vincennes to visit the imprisoned Diderot, Rousseau had what he called an "illumination"-the realization that man was naturally good but becomes corrupted by the influence of society-a fundamental change in Rousseau's perspective that would animate all of his subsequent works. At that moment, Rousseau "saw" something he had hitherto not seen, and he made it his mission to help his readers share that vision through an array of rhetorical and literary techniques.
In Rousseau's Reader, John T. Scott looks at the different strategies Rousseau used to engage and persuade the readers of his major philosophical works, including the Social Contract, Discourse on Inequality, and Emile. Considering choice of genre; textual structure; frontispieces and illustrations; shifting authorial and narrative voice; addresses to readers that alternately invite and challenge; apostrophe, metaphor, and other literary devices; and, of course, paradox, Scott explores how the form of Rousseau's writing relates to the content of his thought and vice versa. Through this skillful interplay of form and content, Rousseau engages in a profoundly transformative dialogue with his readers.
While most political philosophers have focused, understandably, on Rousseau's ideas, Scott shows convincingly that the way he conveyed them is also of vital importance, especially given Rousseau's enduring interest in education. Giving readers the key to Rousseau's style, Scott offers fresh and original insights into the relationship between the substance of his thought and his literary and rhetorical techniques, which enhance our understanding of Rousseau's project and the audiences he intended to reach.
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Asian Place, Filipino Nation ; A Global Intellectual History of the Philippine Revolution, 1887-1912
Nicole Cuunjieng Aboitiz
- Columbia university press
- 16 Juin 2020
- 9780231192156
Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz reconnects the Philippine Revolution to the histories of Southeast and East Asia through an innovative consideration of its transnational political setting and regional intellectual foundations. She charts turn-of-the-twentieth-century Filipino thinkers' and revolutionaries' political organizing and proto-national thought.
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Epidemics and Society ; From the Black Death to the Present
Frank M. Snowden
- Yale university press
- 1 Mai 2020
- 9780300256390
A "brilliant and sobering" (Paul Kennedy, Wall Street Journal) look at the history and human costs of pandemic outbreaks
As seen on "60 Minutes"
The World Economic Forum #1 book to read for context on the coronavirus outbreak
This sweeping exploration of the impact of epidemic diseases looks at how mass infectious outbreaks have shaped society, from the Black Death to today, and in a new preface addresses the global threat of COVID-19. In a clear and accessible style, Frank M. Snowden reveals the ways that diseases have not only influenced medical science and public health, but also transformed the arts, religion, intellectual history, and warfare.
A multidisciplinary and comparative investigation of the medical and social history of the major epidemics, this volume touches on themes such as the evolution of medical therapy, plague literature, poverty, the environment, and mass hysteria. In addition to providing historical perspective on diseases such as smallpox, cholera, and tuberculosis, Snowden examines the fallout from recent epidemics such as HIV/AIDS, SARS, and Ebola and the question of the world's preparedness for the next generation of diseases. -
France before 1789 ; The Unraveling of an Absolutist Regime
Jon Elster
- Princeton university press
- 16 Juin 2020
- 9780691149813
A masterful new account of old regime France by one of the world's most prominent political philosophers
France before 1789 traces the historical origins of France's National Constituent Assembly of 1789, providing a vivid portrait of the ancien regime and its complex social system in the decades before the French Revolution. Jon Elster writes in the spirit of Alexis de Tocqueville, who described this tumultuous era with an eye toward individual and group psychology and the functioning of institutions. Whereas Tocqueville saw the old regime as a breeding ground for revolution, Elster, more specifically, identifies the rural and urban conflicts that fueled the constitution-making process from 1789 to 1791. He presents a new approach to history writing, one that supplements the historian's craft with the tools and insights of modern social science. Elster draws on important French and Anglo-American scholarship as well as a treasure trove of historical evidence from the period, such as the Memoirs of Saint-Simon, the letters of Madame de Sevigne, the journals of the lawyer Barbier and the bookseller Hardy, the Remonstrances of Malesherbes, and La Bruyere's maxims.
Masterfully written and unparalleled in scope, France before 1789 is the first volume of a trilogy that promises to transform our understanding of constitution making in the eighteenth century. Volume 2 will look at revolutionary America in the years leading up to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 while the third volume will examine all facets of the French and American assemblies, from how they elected their delegates and organized their proceedings to how they addressed issues of separation of powers and representation. -
In this deeply original consideration of Foucault's erotic ethics, Lynne Huffer provocatively rewrites Foucault as a Sapphic poet. She uncovers eros as a mode of thought that erodes the interiority of the thinking subject.
