Search results for ""university of chicago press""

In this work James Tobin discusses two major issues of macroeconomics: the strength of automatic market forces in maintaining full employment equilibrium and the efficacy of government fiscal and monetary policies in stabilizing the economy.

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Public division is not new; in fact, it is the lifeblood of politics, and political representatives have constructed divisions throughout history to mobilize constituencies. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the idea of a divided United States has become commonplace. In the wake of the 2020 election, some commentators warned that the American public was the most divided it has been since the Civil War. Political scientists, political theorists, and public intellectuals have suggested that uninformed, misinformed, and disinformed voters are at the root of this division. Some are simply unwilling to accept facts or science, which makes them easy targets for elite manipulation. It also creates a grass-roots political culture that discourages cross-partisan collaboration in Washington. Yet, manipulation of voters is not as grave a threat to democracy in America as many scholars and pundits make it out to be. The greater threat comes from a picture that partisans use to rally their supporters: that of an America sorted into opposing camps so deeply rooted that they cannot be shaken loose and remade. Making Constituencies proposes a new theory of representation as mobilization to argue that divisions like these are not inherent in society, but created, and political representatives of all kinds forge and deploy them to cultivate constituencies.

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What was absolutism, and how did it work? What was the function of the ostentatious display surrounding Louis XIV at Versailles? What is gained-and what is lost-by approaching such expressions of absolutism as propaganda, as present-day scholars tend to do? In this sweeping reconsideration of absolutist culture, Hall Bjornstad argues that the exuberance of Louis XIV's reign was not top-down propaganda in any modern sense, but rather a dream dreamt collectively, by king, court, image-makers, and nation alike. Bjornstad explores this dream through a sustained close analysis of a corpus of absolutist artifacts, ranging from Charles Le Brun's famous paintings in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles via the king's secret Memoires to two little-known particularly extravagant verbal and textual celebrations of the king. The dream of absolutism, Bjornstad concludes, lives at the intersection of politics and aesthetics. It is the carrier of a force that emerges as a glorious image; a participatory emotional reality that requires reality to conform to it. It is a dream, finally, that still shapes our collective political imaginary today.

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Dr. Tillich shows here that in spite of the contrast between philosophical and biblical language, it is neither necessary nor possible to separate them from each other. On the contrary, all the symbols used in biblical religion drive inescapably toward the philosophical quest for being. An important statement of a great theologian's position, this book presents an eloquent plea for the essential function of philosophy in religious thought.

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This volume presents six new papers on environmental and energy economics and related policy issues. Robert Pindyck provides a systematic overview of what is known, and remains unknown, about climate change, along with the implications of uncertainty for climate policy. Shaikh Eskander, Sam Fankhauser, and Joana Setzer offer insights from a comprehensive data set on climate change legislation and litigation across all countries of the world over the past thirty years. Adele Morris, Noah Kaufman, and Siddhi Doshi shine a light on how expected trends in the coal industry will create significant challenges for the local public finance of coal-reliant communities. Joseph Aldy and his collaborators analyze the treatment of co-benefits in benefit-cost analyses of federal clean air regulations. Tatyana Deryugina and her co-authors report on the geographic and socioeconomic heterogeneity in the benefits of reducing particulate matter air pollution. Finally, Oliver Browne, Ludovica Gazze, and Michael Greenstone use detailed data on residential water consumption to evaluate the relative impacts of conservation policies based on prices, restrictions, and public persuasion.

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An incisive look at how America’s continued demographic explosion has spurred the development of a new identity as people of color. For decades now, pundits and political scientists have been pointing to a major demographic change that’s underway in the United States. Demographers project that whites will become a minority of the US population and that minority groups will jointly comprise a majority before 2050. Diversity’s Child appraises the political ramifications of this change. Efrén O. Pérez deftly argues that America’s changing demographics are forging a new identity for many as people of color—that unifies the political outlook of assorted minority groups. Drawing on opinion surveys of multiple minority groups, social science experiments with minority adults, content analyses of newspapers and congressional archives, and in-depth interviews with minority individuals, Pérez makes two key points. First, a person of color's identity does exist, and we can reliably measure it, as well as distinguish it from other identities that minorities hold. Second, across a wide swath of circumstances, identifying as a person of color profoundly shapes how minorities view themselves and their political system. Diversity’s Child is a vital and engaging look at America’s identity politics as well as at how people of color think about racial disparities and how politics can best solve them.

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An essential history of India's economic growth since 1947, including the legal reforms that have shaped the country in the shadow of colonial rule. Economists have long lamented how the inefficiency of India's legal system undermines the country’s economic capacity. How has this come to be? The prevailing explanation is that the postcolonial legal system is understaffed and under-resourced, making adjudication and contract enforcement slow and costly. Taking this as given, Law and the Economy in a Young Democracy examines the contents and historical antecedents of these laws, including how they have stifled economic development. Economists Roy and Swamy argue that legal evolution in independent India has been shaped by three factors: the desire to reduce inequality and poverty; the suspicion that market activity, both domestic and international, can be detrimental to these goals; and the strengthening of Indian democracy over time, giving voice to a growing fraction of society, including the poor. Weaving the story of India's heralded economic transformation with its social and political history, Roy and Swamy show how inadequate legal infrastructure has been a key impediment to the country's economic growth during the last century. A stirring and authoritative history of a nation rife with contradictions, Law and the Economy in a Young Democracy is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand India's current crossroads—and the factors that may keep its dreams unrealized.

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When is literary production more menial than inspired, more like housework than heroics of the mind? In this revisionist study, Katie Kadue shows that some of the authors we credit with groundbreaking literary feats—including Michel de Montaigne and John Milton—conceived of their writing in surprisingly modest and domestic terms. In contrast to the monumental ambitions associated with the literature of the age, and picking up an undercurrent of Virgil’s Georgics, poetic labor of the Renaissance emerges here as often aligned with so-called women’s work. Kadue reveals how male authors’ engagements with a feminized georgic mode became central to their conceptions of what literature is and could be. This other georgic strain in literature shared the same primary concern as housekeeping: the necessity of constant, almost invisible labor to keep the things of the world intact. Domestic Georgic brings into focus a conception of literary—as well as scholarly and critical—labor not as a striving for originality and fame but as a form of maintenance work that aims at preserving individual and collective life.

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Through the eventful life of a Himalayan Buddhist teacher, Khunu Lama, this study reimagines cultural continuity beyond the binary of traditional and modern. In the early twentieth century, Khunu Lama journeyed across Tibet and India, meeting Buddhist masters while sometimes living, so his students say, on cold porridge and water. Yet this elusive wandering renunciant became a revered teacher of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. At Khunu Lama’s death in 1977, he was mourned by Himalayan nuns, Tibetan lamas, and American meditators alike. The many surviving stories about him reveal significant dimensions of Tibetan Buddhism, shedding new light on questions of religious affect and memory that reimagines cultural continuity beyond the binary of traditional and modern. In Renunciation and Longing, Annabella Pitkin explores devotion, renunciation, and the teacher-student lineage relationship as resources for understanding Tibetan Buddhist approaches to modernity. By examining narrative accounts of the life of a remarkable twentieth-century Himalayan Buddhist and focusing on his remembered identity as a renunciant bodhisattva, Pitkin illuminates Tibetan and Himalayan practices of memory, affective connection, and mourning. Refuting long-standing caricatures of Tibetan Buddhist communities as unable to be modern because of their religious commitments, Pitkin shows instead how twentieth- and twenty-first-century Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist narrators have used themes of renunciation, devotion, and lineage as touchstones for negotiating loss and vitalizing continuity.

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By the end of the 1920s, more than 45,000 native Puerto Ricans had left their homes and entered the United States, citizenship papers in hand, forming one of New York City's most complex and unique migrant communities. This work unravels the many tensions that defined the experience of this group of American citizens before and after World War II.

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Although bats and dolphins live in very different environments, are vastly different in size, and hunt different kinds of prey, both groups have evolved similar sonar systems, known as echolocation, to locate food and navigate the skies and seas. While much research has been conducted over the past 30 years on echolocation in bats and dolphins, this volume is the first to compare what is known about echolocation in each group, to point out what information is missing and to identity future areas of research. "Echolocation in Bats and Dolphins" consists of six sections: mechanisms of echolocation signal production; the anatomy and physiology of signal reception and interpretation; performance and cognition; ecological and evolutionary aspects of echolocation mammals; theoretical and methodological topics; and possible echolocation capability in other mammals, including shrews, seals and baleen whales. Animal behaviourists, ecologists, physiologists and both scientists and engineers who work in the field of bioacoustics should benefit from this book.

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The history of Christianity in America has been marked by recurring periods of religious revivals or awakenings. In this book, the author addresses the economic and political context of evangelical revivalism and its historical linkages with economic expansion and Republicanism in the 19th century. He argues that large-scale change results in social movements that articulate new organizations and definitions of individual, society, authority, and cosmos. Drawing on religious newspapers, party policies and agendas, and quantitative analyses of voting patterns and census data, Thomas claims that revivalism in this period framed the rules and identities of the expanding market economy and the national policy.

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For more than four decades, readers and critics have found Lloyd Schwartz’s poems unlike anyone else’s—a rare combination of the heartbreaking and the hilarious. With his ear for the poetry of the vernacular, Schwartz offers us a memorable cast of characters—both real and imagined, foolish and oracular. Readers experience his mother’s piercing flashes of memory, the perverse comic wisdom of Gracie Allen, the uninhibited yet loving exhibitionists of antique pornography, and eager travelers crossing America in a club-car or waiting in a Brazilian airport. Schwartz listens to these people without judging—understanding that they are all trying to live their lives, whenever possible, with tenderness, humor, and grace. Who’s on First? brings together a selection of poems from all of Schwartz’s previous collections along with eagerly awaited new poems, highlighting his formal inventiveness in tangling and untangling the yarn of comedy and pathos. Underlying all of these poems is the question of what it takes and what it costs to make art.

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The Balinese "gamelan", with its shimmering tones, breathless pace and compelling musical language, has long captivated musicians, composers, artists and travellers. Here, Michael Tenzer offers a comprehensive and durable study of this sophisticated musical tradition, focusing on the preeminent 20th-century genre, gamelan gong kebyar. Combining the tools of the anthropologist, composer, music theorist and performer, Tenzer moves fluidly between ethnography and technical discussions of musical composition and structure. In an approach as intricate as one might expect in studies of Western classical music, Tenzer's rigorous application of music theory and analysis to a non-Western orchestral genre is wholly original. Illustrated throughout, the book also includes nearly 100 pages of musical transcription (in Western notation) that correlate with 55 separate tracks compiled on two accompanying compact discs. The most ambitious work on gamelan since Colin McPhee's classic "Music in Bali", this book should interest musicians of all kinds and anyone interested in the art and culture of Southeast Asia, Indonesia and Bali.

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A history of the evolving field of African art. This book examines the invention and development of African art as an art historical category. It starts with a simple question: What do we mean when we talk about African art? By confronting the historically shifting answers to this question, Peter Probst identifies “African art” as a conceptual vessel that manifests wider societal transformations. What Is African Art? covers three key stages in the field’s history. Starting with the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, the book first discusses the colonial formation of the field by focusing on the role of museums, collectors, and photography in disseminating visual cultures as relations of power. It then explores the remaking of the field at the dawn of African independence with the shift toward contemporary art and the rise of Black Atlantic studies in the 1970s and 1980s. Finally, it examines the post- and decolonial reconfiguration of the field driven by questions of representation, repair, and restitution.

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Alaska pollock is everywhere. If you’re eating fish but you don’t know what kind it is, it’s almost certainly pollock. Prized for its generic fish taste, pollock masquerades as crab meat in california rolls and seafood salads, and it feeds millions as fish sticks in school cafeterias and Filet-O-Fish sandwiches at McDonald’s. That ubiquity has made pollock the most lucrative fish harvest in America—the fishery in the United States alone has an annual value of over one billion dollars. But even as the money rolls in, pollock is in trouble: in the last few years, the pollock population has declined by more than half, and some scientists are predicting the fishery’s eventual collapse. In Billion-Dollar Fish, Kevin M. Bailey combines his years of firsthand pollock research with a remarkable talent for storytelling to offer the first natural history of Alaska pollock. Crucial to understanding the pollock fishery, he shows, is recognizing what aspects of its natural history make pollock so very desirable to fish, while at the same time making it resilient, yet highly vulnerable to overfishing. Bailey delves into the science, politics, and economics surrounding Alaska pollock in the Bering Sea, detailing the development of the fishery, the various political machinations that have led to its current management, and, perhaps most important, its impending demise. He approaches his subject from multiple angles, bringing in the perspectives of fishermen, politicians, environmentalists, and biologists, and drawing on revealing interviews with players who range from Greenpeace activists to fishing industry lawyers. Seamlessly weaving the biology and ecology of pollock with the history and politics of the fishery, as well as Bailey’s own often raucous tales about life at sea, Billion-Dollar Fish is a book for every person interested in the troubled relationship between fish and humans, from the depths of the sea to the dinner plate.

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Nots is a virtuoso exploration of negation and negativity in theology, philosophy, art, architecture, postmodern culture, and medicine. In nine essays that range from nihility in Buddhism to the embodiment of negativity in disease, Mark C. Taylor looks at the surprising ways in which contrasting concepts of negativity intersect. In the first section of this book, Taylor discusses the question of the "not" in the religious thought of Anselm, Hegel, Derrida, and Nishitani. In the second part, he analyzes artistic efforts "to figure not" in the work of artists Arakawa and Madeline Gins, architect Daniel Libeskind, pop artist David Sallee, and pop icon Madonna. The final section consists of a deeply personal and scientifically informed chapter that discusses the workings of negativity in immunology and illness. Taylor's essays work toward a sense of the not as unnameable as it is irrepressible—an "unthinkable third" that falls between being and nonbeing. Bringing together concerns that span Taylor's early investigations of Hegel and Kierkegaard and recent studies of art and architecture, Nots is an important contribution by one of the most original and distinctive voices now writing on the American scene. Religion and Postmodernism series

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We live in a moment of unprecedented complexity, an era in which change occurs faster than our ability to comprehend it. With "The Moment of Complexity", Mark C. Taylor offers a map for the unfamiliar terrain opening in our midst, unfolding an original philosophy of our time through a remarkable synthesis of science and culture. According to Taylor, complexity is not just a breakthrough scientific concept but the defining quality of the post-Cold War era. The flux of digital currents swirling around us, he argues, has created a new network culture with its own distinctive logic and dynamic. Drawing on resources from information theory and evolutionary biology, Taylor explains the operation of complex adaptive systems in natural, social and cultural processes. To appreciate the significance of emerging network culture, he claims, it is necessary not only to understand contemporary scientific and technological transformations, but also to explore the subtle influences of art, architecture, philosophy, religion and education. "The Moment of Complexity" is a remarkable work of cultural analysis on a scale rarely seen today. To follow its trajectory is to learn how we arrived at this critical moment in our culture, and to know where we might head in the 21st century.

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A modern nation in a state of total disorder, Colombia is an international flash-point - wracked by more than half a century of civil war, political conflict, and drug-trade related violence - despite a multibillion dollar American commitment that makes it the third-largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid. "Law in a Lawless Land" offers a rare and penetrating insight into the nature of Colombia's present peril. In a nuanced account of the human consequences of a disintegrating state, anthropologist Michael Taussig chronicles two weeks in a small town in Colombia's Cauca Valley taken over by paramilitaries that brazenly assassinate adolescent gang members. Armed with automatic weapons and computer-generated lists of names and photographs, the paramilitaries have the tacit support of the police and even many of the desperate townspeople, who are seeking any solution to the crushing uncertainty of violence in their lives. Concentrating on everyday experience, Taussig forces readers to confront a kind of terror to which they have become numb and complacent.

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Over the past thirty years, visionary anthropologist Michael Taussig has crafted a highly distinctive body of work. Playful, enthralling, and whip-smart, his writing makes ingenious connections between ideas, thinkers, and things. An extended meditation on the mysteries of color and the fascination they provoke, "What Color Is the Sacred?" is the next step on Taussig's remarkable intellectual path. Following his interest in magic and surrealism, his earlier work on mimesis, and his recent discussion of heat, gold, and cocaine in "My Cocaine Museum", this book uses color to explore further dimensions of what Taussig calls 'the bodily unconscious' in an age of global warming. Drawing on classic ethnography as well as the work of Benjamin, Burroughs, and Proust, he takes up the notion that color invites the viewer into images and into the world. Yet, as Taussig makes clear, color has a history - a manifestly colonial history rooted in the West's discomfort with color, especially bright color, and its associations with the so-called primitive. He begins by noting Goethe's belief that Europeans are physically averse to vivid color while the uncivilized revel in it, which prompts Taussig to reconsider colonialism as a tension between chromophobes and chromophiliacs. And he ends with the strange story of coal, which, he argues, displaced colonial color by giving birth to synthetic colors, organic chemistry, and IG Farben, the giant chemical corporation behind the Third Reich. Nietzsche once wrote, 'So far, all that has given colour to existence still lacks a history'. With "What Color Is the Sacred?", Taussig has taken up that challenge with all the radiant intelligence and inspiration we've come to expect from him.

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Sharp-witted and sharp-tongued, Arcangela Tarabotti (1604-52) yearned to be formally educated and enjoy an independent life in Venetian literary circles. But instead, at sixteen, her father forced her into a Benedictine convent. To protest her confinement, Tarabotti composed polemical works exposing the many injustices perpetrated against women of her day.Paternal Tyranny, the first of these works, is a fiery but carefully argued manifesto against the oppression of women by the Venetian patriarchy. Denouncing key misogynist texts of the era, Tarabotti shows how despicable it was for Venice, a republic that prided itself on its political liberties, to deprive its women of rights accorded even to foreigners. She accuses parents of treating convents as dumping grounds for disabled, illegitimate, or otherwise unwanted daughters. Finally, through compelling feminist readings of the Bible and other religious works, Tarabotti demonstrates that women are clearly men's equals in God's eyes.An avenging angel who dared to speak out for the rights of women nearly four centuries ago, Arcangela Tarabotti can now finally be heard.

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An exploration of the statistical foundations of scientific inference, The Nature of Scientific Evidence asks what constitutes scientific evidence and whether scientific evidence can be quantified statistically. Mark Taper, Subhash Lele, and an esteemed group of contributors explore the relationships among hypotheses, models, data, and inference on which scientific progress rests in an attempt to develop a new quantitative framework for evidence. Informed by interdisciplinary discussions among scientists, philosophers, and statisticians, they propose a new "evidential" approach, which may be more in keeping with the scientific method. The Nature of Scientific Evidence persuasively argues that all scientists should care more about the fine points of statistical philosophy because therein lies the connection between theory and data.Though the book uses ecology as an exemplary science, the interdisciplinary evaluation of the use of statistics in empirical research will be of interest to any reader engaged in the quantification and evaluation of data.

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This volume seeks to answer the question of how the Buddhist monks in today's Sri Lanka—given Buddhism's traditionally nonviolent philosophy—are able to participate in the fierce political violence of the Sinhalese against the Tamils.

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Vulgar Genres examines gay pornographic writing, showing how literary fiction was both informed by pornography and amounts to a commentary on the genre’s relation to queer male erotic life. Long fixated on visual forms, the field of porn studies is overdue for a book-length study of gay pornographic writing. Steven Ruszczycky delivers with an impressively researched work on the ways gay pornographic writing emerged as a distinct genre in the 1960s and went on to shape queer male subjectivity well into the new millennium. ​Ranging over four decades, Ruszczycky draws on a large archive of pulp novels and short fiction, lifestyle magazines and journals, reviews, editorial statements, and correspondence. He puts these materials in conversation with works by a number of contemporary writers, including William Carney, Dennis Cooper, Samuel Delany, John Rechy, and Matthew Stadler. While focused on the years 1966 to 2005, Vulgar Genres reveals that the history of gay pornographic writing during this period informs much of what has happened online over the past twenty years, from cruising to the production of digital pornographic texts. The result is a milestone in porn studies and an important contribution to the history of gay life.

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Artful Truths offers a concise guide to the fundamental philosophical questions that arise when writing a literary work about your own life. Bringing a philosopher’s perspective to a general audience, Helena de Bres addresses what a memoir is, how the genre relates to fiction, memoirists’ responsibilities to their readers and subjects, and the question of why to write a memoir at all. Along the way, she delves into a wide range of philosophical issues, including the nature of the self, the limits of knowledge, the idea of truth, the obligations of friendship, the relationship between morality and art, and the question of what makes a life meaningful. Written in a clear and conversational style, it offers a resource for those who write, teach, and study memoirs, as well as those who love to read them. With a combination of literary and philosophical knowledge, de Bres takes the many challenges directed at memoirists seriously, while ultimately standing in defense of a genre that, for all its perplexities—and maybe partly because of them—continually proves to be both beloved and valuable.

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The identity of contemporary Jews is multifaceted, no longer necessarily defined by an observance of the Torah and God’s commandments. Indeed, the Jews of modernity are no longer exclusively Jewish. They are affiliated with a host of complementary and sometimes clashing communities—vocational, professional, political, and cultural—whose interests may not coincide with that of the community of their birth and inherited culture. In Cultural Disjunctions, Paul Mendes-Flohr explores the possibility of a spiritually and intellectually engaged cosmopolitan Jewish identity for our time. Reflecting on the need to participate in the spiritual life of Judaism so that it enables multiple relations beyond its borders and allows one to balance Jewish commitment with a genuine obligation to the universal, Mendes-Flohr lays out what this delicate balance can look like for contemporary Jews, both in Israel and in diasporic communities worldwide. Cultural Disjunctions walks us through the labyrinth of twentieth-century Jewish cultural identities and commitments. Ultimately, Mendes-Flohr calls for Jews to remain “discontent,” not just with themselves but also and especially with the reigning social and political order, and to fight for its betterment.

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“Engineering” has firmly taken root in the entangled bank of biology even as proposals to remake the living world have sent tendrils in every direction, and at every scale. Nature Remade explores these complex prospects from a resolutely historical approach, tracing cases across the decades of the long twentieth century. These essays span the many levels at which life has been engineered: molecule, cell, organism, population, ecosystem, and planet. From the cloning of agricultural crops and the artificial feeding of silkworms to biomimicry, genetic engineering, and terraforming, Nature Remade affirms the centrality of engineering in its various forms for understanding and imagining modern life. Organized around three themes—control and reproduction, knowing as making, and envisioning—the chapters in Nature Remade chart different means, scales, and consequences of intervening and reimagining nature.

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Over the past two decades, the United States has seen a dramatic increase in the number and magnitude of punitive damages verdicts rendered by juries in civil trials. Probably the most extraordinary example is the July 2000 award of $144.8 billion in the Florida class action lawsuit brought against the cigarette manufacturers. More puzzling were two recent verdicts against the auto manufacturer BMW in Alabama. In identical cases, argued in the same court before the same judge, one jury awarded $4 million in punitive damages, while the other awarded no punitive damages at all. In cases involving accidents, civil rights and the environment, multimillion dollar punitive awards have been a subject of intense controversy. But how do juries actually make decisions about punitive damages? To find out, the authors - specialists in psychology, economics and the law - present the results of controlled experiments with over 600 mock juries involving the responses of more than 8,000 jury-eligible citizens. They find that although juries tended to agree in their moral judgements about the defendant's conduct, they rendered erratic and unpredictable dollar awards. Jurors also tended to ignore instructions from the judges; showed "hindsight bias", believing that what happened should have been foreseen; and penalized corporations that had based their decisions on careful cost-benefit analyses. While judges made many of the same errors, they performed better in some areas, suggesting that judges (or other specialists) may be better equipped than juries to decide punitive damages. With a wealth of new data and a host of provocative findings, this book documents a wide range of systematic bias in jury behaviour and should be valuable for anyone interested in punitive damages, jury behaviour, human psychology and the theory of punishment.

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Tracing a genealogy of colonial discourse, Suleri focuses on paradigmatic moments in the multiple stories generated by the British colonization of the Indian subcontinent. Both the literature of imperialism and its postcolonial aftermath emerge here as a series of guilty transactions between two cultures that are equally evasive and uncertain of their own authority.

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Means-tested government assistance in the United States requires recipients to meet certain criteria and continue to maintain their eligibility so that benefits are paid to the “truly needy.” Welfare is regarded with such suspicion in this country that considerable resources are spent policing the boundaries of eligibility, which are delineated by an often confusing and baroque set of rules and regulations. Even minor infractions of the many rules can cause people to be dropped from these programs, and possibly face criminal prosecution. In this book, Spencer Headworth offers the first study of the structure of fraud control in the welfare system by examining the relations between different levels of governmental agencies, from federal to local, and their enforcement practices. Policing Welfare shows how the enforcement regime of welfare has been constructed to further stigmatize those already living in poverty and deepens disparities of class, race, and gender in our society. 

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From 1940 to 1945, forty thousand patients died in French psychiatric hospitals. The Vichy regime’s “soft extermination” let patients die of cold, starvation, or lack of care. But in Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole, a small village in central France, one psychiatric hospital attempted to resist. Hoarding food with the help of the local population, the staff not only worked to keep patients alive but began to rethink the practical and theoretical bases of psychiatric care. The movement that began at Saint-Alban came to be known as institutional psychotherapy and would go on to have a profound influence on postwar French thought. In Disalienation, Camille Robcis grapples with the historical, intellectual, and psychiatric meaning of the ethics articulated at Saint-Alban by exploring the movement’s key thinkers, including François Tosquelles, Frantz Fanon, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault. Anchored in the history of one hospital, Robcis's study draws on a wide geographic context—revolutionary Spain, occupied France, colonial Algeria, and beyond—and charts the movement's place within a broad political-economic landscape, from fascism to Stalinism to postwar capitalism.

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The United States boasts scores of organizations that offer crucial representation for groups that are marginalized in national politics, from women to racial minorities to the poor. Here, in the first systematic study of these organizations, Dara Z. Strolovitch explores the challenges and opportunities they face in the new millennium, as waning legal discrimination coincides with increasing political and economic inequalities within the populations they represent. Drawing on rich new data from a survey of 286 organizations and interviews with forty officials, Strolovitch finds that groups too often prioritize the interests of their most advantaged members: male rather than female racial minorities, for example, or affluent rather than poor women. But Strolovitch also finds that many organizations try to remedy this inequity, and she concludes by distilling their best practices into a set of principles that she calls affirmative advocacy - a form of representation that aims to over-come the entrenched but often subtle biases against people at the intersection of more than one marginalized group. Intelligently combining political theory with rigorous empirical methods, "Affirmative Advocacy" will be required reading for students and scholars of American politics.

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This concise and accessible introduction to Strauss's thought provides, for wider audience, a bridge to his more complex theoretical work. Editor Pangle has gathered five of Strauss's previously unpublished lectures and five hard-to-find published writings and has arranged them so as to demonstrate the systematic progression of the major themes that underlay Strauss's mature work. "[These essays] display the incomparable insight and remarkable range of knowledge that set Strauss's works apart from any other twentieth-century philosopher's."--Charles R. Kesler, National Review

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In this text Leo Strauss articulates the conflict between reason and revelation as he explores Spinoza's scientific, comparative, and textual treatment of the Bible. He compares Spinoza's "Theologico-political Treatise" and the Epistles, showing their relation to critical controversy on religion from Epicurus and Lucretius through Uriel da Costa and Isaac Peyrere to Thomas Hobbes. An autobiographical preface to this book traces Strauss' dilemmas as a young liberal intellectual in Germany during the Weimar Republic, as a scholar in exile, and as a leader of American philosophical thought.

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The first major piece of unpublished work by Leo Strauss to appear in more than 30 years, this volume offers the public the unprecedented experience of encountering this renowned scholar as his students did. Given as a course in autumn 1959 under the title "Plato's Political Philosophy" these provocative lectures - until now, never published, but instead passed down from one generation of students to the next - show Strauss at his subtle and insightful best.

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In Sorting Sexualities, Stefan Vogler deftly unpacks the politics of the techno-legal classification of sexuality in the United States. His study focuses specifically on state classification practices around LGBTQ people seeking asylum in the United States and sexual offenders being evaluated for carceral placement—two situations where state actors must determine individuals’ sexualities. Though these legal settings are diametrically opposed—one a punitive assessment, the other a protective one—they present the same question: how do we know someone’s sexuality? In this rich ethnographic study, Vogler reveals how different legal arenas take dramatically different approaches to classifying sexuality and use those classifications to legitimate different forms of social control. By delving into the histories behind these diverging classification practices and analyzing their contemporary reverberations, Vogler shows how the science of sexuality is far more central to state power than we realize.

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Leo Strauss is widely recognized as one of the foremost interpreters of Maimonides. His studies of the medieval Jewish philosopher led to his rediscovery of esotericism and deepened his sense that the tension between reason and revelation was central to modern political thought. His writings throughout the twentieth century were chiefly responsible for restoring Maimonides as a philosophical thinker of the first rank. Yet, to appreciate the extent of Strauss' contribution to the scholarship on Maimonides, one has traditionally had to seek out essays he published separately spanning almost fifty years. With "Leo Strauss on Maimonides", Kenneth Hart Green presents for the first time a comprehensive, annotated collection of Strauss' writings on Maimonides, comprising sixteen essays, three of which appear in English for the first time. Green has also provided careful translations of materials originally quoted in Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, German, and French; written an informative introduction highlighting the contributions found in each essay; and brought references to out-of-print editions fully up to date. The result will become the standard edition of Strauss' writings on Maimonides.

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The tale of Paul Stoller's sojourn among sorcerors in the Republic of Niger is a story of growth and change, of mutual respect and understanding that will challenge all who read it to plunge deeply into an alien world.

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"We have, at long last, a real historian with real historical skills and no intra-professional ax to grind. . . . All these pieces show the virtues one finds missing in . . . nearly all of anthropological history work but [Stocking's]: extensive and critical use of archival sources, tracing of real rather than merely plausible intellectual connections, and contextualization of ideas and movements in terms of broader social and cultural currents. Stocking writes very clearly; attacks important topics—race and evolution, the influence of scientism, the interaction between anthropology and other disciplines; and is methodologically very sophisticated. Though his main theme is the development of racialism and of opposition to it, his book bears on a range of issues very much alive in anthropology. . . . I would think no apprentice anthropologist ought to be pronounced a journeyman until he or she has absorbed what Stocking has to say."—Clifford Geertz, The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

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Poets often have responded vitally to the art of their time, and ever since Susan Stewart began writing about art in the early 1980s, her work has resonated with practicing artists, curators, art historians, and art critics. Rooted in a broad and learned range of references, Stewart's fresh and independent essays bridge the fields of literature, aesthetics, and contemporary art.Gathering most of Stewart's writing on contemporary art—long and short pieces first published in small magazines, museum and gallery publications, and edited collections—The Open Studio illuminates work ranging from the installation art of Ann Hamilton to the sculptures and watercolors of Thomas Schütte, the prints and animations of William Kentridge to the films of Tacita Dean. Stewart's essays are often the record of studio conversations with living artists and curators, and of the afterlife of those experiences in the solitude of her own study. Considering a wide variety of art forms, Stewart finds pathbreaking ways to explore them. Whether she is following central traditions of painting, drawing, sculpture, film, photography, and printmaking or exploring the less well-known realms of portrait miniatures, collecting practices, doll-making, music boxes, and gardening, Stewart speaks to the creative process in general and to the relation between art and ethics.The Open Studio will be read eagerly by scholars of art, poetry, and visual theory; by historians interested in the links between contemporary and classic literature and art; and by teachers, students, and practitioners of the visual arts.

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Foraging is fundamental to animal survival and reproduction, yet it is much more than a simple matter of finding food; it is a biological imperative. Animals must find and consume resources to succeed, and they make extraordinary efforts to do so. For instance, pythons rarely eat, but when they do, their meals are large - as much as 60 percent larger than their own bodies. The snake's digestive system is normally dormant, but during digestion metabolic rates can increase fortyfold. A python digesting quietly on the forest floor has the metabolic rate of a thoroughbred in a dead heat. This and related foraging processes have broad applications in ecology, cognitive science, anthropology, and conservation biology - and they can be further extrapolated in economics, neurobiology, and computer science. "Foraging" is the first comprehensive review of the topic in more than twenty years. A monumental undertaking, this volume brings together twenty-two experts from throughout the field to offer the latest on the mechanics of foraging, modern foraging theory, and foraging ecology. The fourteen essays cover all the relevant issues, including cognition, individual behavior, caching behavior, parental behavior, anti-predator behavior, social behavior, population and community ecology, herbivory, and conservation. Considering a wide range of taxa, from birds to mammals to amphibians, "Foraging" will be the definitive guide to the field.

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With great energy and clarity, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen (1829-1894), author of History of the Criminal Law of England, and judge of the High Court from 1879-91, challenges John Stuart Mill's On Liberty and On Utilitarianism, arguing that Mill's view of humanity is sentimental and utopian. "His writing is strong meat--full of the threat of hellfrire, the virtue of government by the lash and a fervent belief that the state cannot remain neutral but has a duty to espouse a moral code."--Roderick Munday, Cambridge Law Journal

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Big cats—tigers, leopards, and lions—that make prey of humans are commonly known as “man-eaters.” Anthropologist Nayanika Mathur reconceptualizes them as cats that have gone off the straight path to become “crooked.” Building upon fifteen years of research in India, this groundbreaking work moves beyond both colonial and conservationist accounts to place crooked cats at the center of the question of how we are to comprehend a planet in crisis. There are many theories on why and how a big cat comes to prey on humans, with the ecological collapse emerging as a central explanatory factor. Yet, uncertainty over the precise cause of crookedness persists. Crooked Cats explores in vivid detail the many lived complexities that arise from this absence of certain knowledge to offer startling new insights into both the governance of nonhuman animals and their intimate entanglements with humans. Through creative ethnographic storytelling, Crooked Cats illuminates the Anthropocene in three critical ways: as method, as a way of reframing human-nonhuman relations on the planet, and as a political tool indicating the urgency of academic engagement. Weaving together “beastly tales” spun from encounters with big cats, Mathur deepens our understanding of the causes, consequences, and conceptualization of the climate crisis.

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Sprinkled across the tropical Pacific, the innumerable islands of Oceania are home to some of the most unique bird communities on the planet, and they sustain species found nowhere else on earth. Many of the birds that live in this region are endangered, however; many more have become extinct as a result of human activity, in both recent and prehistoric times. Reconstructing the avian world in the same way archeologists re-create ancient human societies, David W. Steadman - a leading authority on tropical Pacific avian paleontology - has spent the past two decades in the field, digging through layers of soil in search of the bones that serve as clues to the ancient past of island bird communities. His years of indefatigable research and analysis are the foundation for "Extinction and Biogeography of Tropical Pacific Birds," a monumental study of the landbirds of tropical Pacific islands - especially those from Fiji eastward to Easter Island - and an intricate history of the patterns and processes of island biology over time. Using information gleaned from prehistoric specimens, Steadman reconstructs the birdlife of tropical Pacific islands as it existed before the arrival of humans and in so doing corrects the assumption that small, remote islands were unable to support rich assemblages of plants and animals. Easter Island, for example, though devoid of wildlife today, was the world's richest seabird habitat before Polynesians arrived more than a millennium ago. Grounded in geology, paleontology, and archeology, but biological at its core, "Extinction and Biogeography of Tropical Pacific Birds" is an exceptional work of unparalleled scholarship that will stimulate creative discussions of terrestrial life on oceanic islands for years to come.

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These original essays comprise a fascinating investigation into women's strategies for writing the self—constructing the female subject through autobiography, memoirs, letters, and diaries. The collection contains theoretical essays by Donna Stanton, Sandra Gilbert, and Susan Gilbert, and Susan Gubar; chapters on specific issues raised by women's autographs, such as Richard Bowring's study of tenth-century Japanese diaries or Janel Mueller's on The Book of Margery Kempe; and annotated autobiographical fragments, including texts by Julia Kristeva, by a woman who became a czarist cavalry officer, and by a contemporary Palestinian poet. There are also chapters on the seventeenth-century painter Artemisia Gentileschi; Mme de. Sévigné; Mendelssohn's sister, Fanny Hensel; the black minister Jarena Lee; Virginia Woolf; and Eva Peron. The result is a "conversation" between writers and critics across cultural and temporal boundaries. Stanton's essay plays off Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. Kristeva begins with a reading of de Beauvoir, while a self-published French woman writes to defend the joys of family life against the author of Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter.

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"Eating the Enlightenment" offers a new perspective on the history of food, looking at writings about cuisine, diet, and food chemistry as a key to larger debates over the state of the nation in Old Regime France. Embracing a wide range of authors and scientific or medical practitioners - from physicians and poets to philosophers and playwrights - E. C. Spary demonstrates how public discussions of eating and drinking were used to articulate concerns about the state of civilization versus that of nature, about the effects of consumption upon the identities of individuals and nations, and about the proper form and practice of scholarship. En route, Spary devotes extensive attention to the manufacture, trade, and eating of foods, focusing upon coffee and liqueurs in particular, and also considers controversies over specific issues such as the chemistry of digestion and the nature of alcohol. Familiar figures such as Fontenelle, Diderot, and Rousseau appear alongside little-known individuals from the margins of the world of letters: the chess-playing cafe owner Charles Manoury, the "Turkish envoy" Soliman Aga, and the natural philosopher Jacques Gautier d'Agoty. Equally entertaining and enlightening, "Eating the Enlightenment" will be an original contribution to discussions of the dissemination of knowledge and the nature of scientific authority.

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The royal Parisian botanical garden, the Jardin du Roi, was a jewel in the crown of the French Old Regime, praised by both rulers and scientific practitioners. Yet unlike many such institutions, the Jardin not only survived the French Revolution but by 1800 had become the world's leading public establishment of natural history: the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle.E. C. Spary traces the scientific, administrative, and political strategies that enabled the foundation of the Muséum, arguing that agriculture and animal breeding rank alongside classification and collections in explaining why natural history was important for French rulers. But the Muséum's success was also a consequence of its employees' Revolutionary rhetoric: by displaying the natural order, they suggested, the institution could assist in fashioning a self-educating, self-policing Republican people. Natural history was presented as an indispensable source of national prosperity and individual virtue.Spary's fascinating account opens a new chapter in the history of France, science, and the Enlightenment.

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Allan Spear explores here the history of a major Negro community during a crucial thirty-year period when a relatively fluid patter of race relations gave way to a rigid system of segregation and discrimination. This is the first historical study of the ghetto made famous by the sociological classics of St. Clair Drake, E. Franklin Frazier, and others—by the novels of Richard Wright, and by countless blues songs. It was this ghetto that Martin Luther King, Jr., chose to focus on when he turned attention to the racial injustices of the North. Spear, by his objective treatment of the results of white racism, gives an effective, timely reminder of the serious urban problems that are the legacy of prejudice.

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