Lost in the raging debate over the validity of social construction is the question of what, precisely, is being constructed. Facts, gender, quarks, reality? Is it a person? An object? An idea? A theory? Each entails a different notion of social cons…
This lively collection of essays examines in witty detail the history of some of the concepts involved in bringing statistical argument "to the table," and some of the pitfalls that have been encountered. The topics range from seventeenth-century me…
“You might think that dancing doesn’t have a lot to do with social research, and doing social research is probably why you picked this book up in the first place. But trust me. Salsa dancing is a practice as well as a metaphor for a kind…
From one of the world’s leading economists and his coauthors, a cutting-edge analysis of what drives economic growth and a blueprint for prosperity under capitalism. Crisis seems to follow crisis. Inequality is rising, growth is stagnant, the…
Plotinus (204/5-270 CE) was the first and greatest of Neoplatonic philosophers. His writings were edited by his disciple Porphyry, who published them many years after his master's death in six sets of nine treatises each (the Enneads). Plotinus rega…
Plotinus (204/5–270 CE) was the first and greatest of Neoplatonic philosophers. His writings were edited by his disciple Porphyry, who published them many years after his master's death in six sets of nine treatises each (the Enneads). Plotinu…
“Outstanding, original, and revolutionary. Favereau subjects the Mongols to a much-needed re-evaluation, showing how they were able not only to conquer but to control a vast empire. A remarkable book.” —Peter Frankopan, author of T…
The definitive new translation of Max Weber’s classic work of social theory—arguably the most important book by the foremost social theorist of the twentieth century. Max Weber’s Economy and Society is the foundational text for the…
The financial and economic crisis that began in 2008 is the most alarming of our lifetime because of the warp-speed at which it is occurring. How could it have happened, especially after all that we’ve learned from the Great Depression? Why wa…
An innovator in contemporary thought on economic and political development looks here at decline rather than growth. Albert O. Hirschman makes a basic distinction between alternative ways of reacting to deterioration in business firms and, in genera…
Every child knows what it means to play, but the rest of us can merely speculate. Is it a kind of adaptation, teaching us skills, inducting us into certain communities? Is it power, pursued in games of prowess? Fate, deployed in games of chance? Day…
“Leaps straight onto the roster of essential reading for anyone even vaguely interested in Grant and the Civil War.” —Ron Chernow, author of Grant “Provides leadership lessons that can be obtained nowhere else… Ulysses…
In 2001 an international panel of distinguished climate scientists announced that the world was warming at a rate without precedent during at least the last ten millennia, and that warming was caused by the buildup of greenhouse gases from human act…
In 1907 the U.S. Congress created a joint commission to investigate what many Americans saw as a national crisis: an unprecedented number of immigrants flowing into the United States. Experts—women and men trained in the new field of social sc…
Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Vladimir Nabokov transformed the art of the novel in order to convey the experience of time. Nevertheless, their works have been read as expressions of a desire to transcend time—whether through an epiphany o…
This is a welcome reissue, with a new Preface, of John S. Rigden’s stellar biography of I. I. Rabi, one of the most influential physicists of the twentieth century. Rabi’s discovery of the magnetic resonance method won him the Nobel Priz…
The little-known story of the sophisticated and vibrant Arabic book culture that flourished during the Middle Ages. During the thirteenth century, Europe’s largest library owned fewer than 2,000 volumes. Libraries in the Arab world at the time…
When a loved one dies we mourn our loss. We take comfort in the rituals that mark the passing, and we turn to those around us for support. But what happens when there is no closure, when a family member or a friend who may be still alive is lost to…
Profiles the surprising number of otherwise "normal" people who practice magic and witchcraft in England today, detailing how they became involved in witchcraft, the history and tradition of magic, and other fascinating details
Everywhere we hear talk of decline, of a world that was better once, maybe fifty years ago, maybe centuries ago, but certainly before modernity drew us along its dubious path. While some lament the slide of Western culture into relativism and nihili…
An Economist Best Book of the Year A Financial Times Best Economics Book of the Year A Fast Company “7 Books Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Says You Need to Lead Smarter” Between 1820 and 1990, the share of world income going to today’…
A Wall Street Journal Favorite Read of the Year A Guardian Top Science Book of the Year Tool-making or culture, language or religious belief: ever since Darwin, thinkers have struggled to identify what fundamentally differentiates human beings from…
Tool-making or culture, language or religious belief: ever since Darwin, thinkers have struggled to identify what fundamentally differentiates human beings from other animals. In this much-anticipated book, Michael Tomasello weaves his twenty years…
A rigorous and scientific analysis of the myriad possibilities of life beyond our planet. “Are we alone in the universe?” This tantalizing question has captivated humanity over millennia, but seldom has it been approached rigorously. Tod…
What sort of thing is a lyric poem? An intense expression of subjective experience? The fictive speech of a specifiable persona? Theory of the Lyric reveals the limitations of these two conceptions of the lyric—the older Romantic model and the…
An essential guide to the intractable public debates about the virtues and vices of economic globalization, cutting through the complexity to reveal the fault lines that divide us and the points of agreement that might bring us together. Globalizati…
The great Russian psychologist L. S. Vygotsky has long been recognized as a pioneer in developmental psychology. But somewhat ironically, his theory of development has never been well understood in the West. Mind in Society should correct much of th…
Elegant data and ideas deserve elegant expression, argues Helen Sword in this lively guide to academic writing. For scholars frustrated with disciplinary conventions, and for specialists who want to write for a larger audience but are unsure where t…
During the seventeenth century, sea raiders known as buccaneers controlled the Caribbean. Buccaneers were not pirates but privateers, licensed to attack the Spanish by the governments of England, France, and Holland. Jon Latimer charts the exploits…
The U.S. Army has always regarded preparing for war as its peacetime role, but how it fulfilled that duty has changed dramatically over time. J. P. Clark traces the evolution of the Army between the War of 1812 and World War I, showing how differing…
"The goal of my teaching has always been, and remains, to train analysts." --Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI, 209 Arguably the most profound psychoanalytic thinker since Freud, and deeply influential in many fields, Jacques Lacan often seems opaque to tho…
John L. Austin was one of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century. The William James Lectures presented Austin's conclusions in the field to which he directed his main efforts on a wide variety of philosophical problems. These talks became…
Biophilia is Edward O. Wilson's most personal book, an evocation of his own response to nature and an eloquent statement of the conservation ethic. Wilson argues that our natural affinity for life—biophilia—is the very essence of our hum…
A discerning analysis of the future effects of climate change on Russia, the major power most dependent on the fossil fuel economy. Russia will be one of the countries most affected by climate change. No major power is more economically dependent on…
Science and technology have immense authority and influence in our society, yet their working remains little understood. The conventional perception of science in Western societies has been modified in recent years by the work of philosophers, socio…
A sweeping history of southeastern Europe from antiquity to the present that reveals it to be a vibrant crossroads of trade, ideas, and religions. We often think of the Balkans as a region beset by turmoil and backwardness, but from late antiquity t…
“These notes are about the process of design: the process of inventing things which display new physical order, organization, form, in response to function.” This book, opening with these words, presents an entirely new theory of the pro…
George Louis Beer Prize Winner Wallace K. Ferguson Prize Finalist A Marginal Revolution Book of the Year “A groundbreaking contribution…Intellectual history at its best.” —Stephen Wertheim, Foreign Affairs Neoliberals hate t…
Chosen by Pankaj Mishra as one of the Best Books of the Summer Neoliberals hate the state. Or do they? In the first intellectual history of neoliberal globalism, Quinn Slobodian follows a group of thinkers from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire to th…
Stephen Kern writes about the sweeping changes in technology and culture between 1880 and World War I that created new modes of understanding and experiencing time and space. To mark the book’s twentieth anniversary, Kern provides an illuminat…
Stories pervade our daily lives, from human interest news items, to a business strategy described to a colleague, to daydreams between chores. Stories are what we use to make sense of the world. But how does this work? In Making Stories, the eminent…
Today, war is considered a last resort for resolving disagreements. But a day of staged slaughter on the battlefield was once seen as a legitimate means of settling political disputes. James Whitman argues that pitched battle was essentially a trial…
America’s foremost novelist reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics: race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, the desire for belonging. What is race and why does it matter?…
From the author of Stylish Academic Writing comes an essential new guide for writers aspiring to become more productive and take greater pleasure in their craft. Helen Sword interviewed one hundred academics worldwide about their writing background…
The clever peasant Arnaud du Tilh had almost persuaded the learned judges at the Parlement of Toulouse when, on a summer’s day in 1560, a man swaggered into the court on a wooden leg, denounced Arnaud, and reestablished his claim to the identi…
Must the sins of America's past poison its hope for the future? Lately the American Left, withdrawing into the ivied halls of academe to rue the nation's shame, has answered yes in both word and deed. In Achieving Our Country, one of America's forem…
Shocked by the fall of France in 1940, panicked US leaders rushed to back the Vichy government—a fateful decision that nearly destroyed the Anglo–American alliance. According to US Secretary of War Henry Stimson, the “most shocking…
How does science create knowledge? Epistemic cultures, shaped by affinity, necessity, and historical coincidence, determine how we know what we know. In this book, Karin Knorr Cetina compares two of the most important and intriguing epistemic cultur…
A daily glass of wine prolongs life—yet alcohol can cause life-threatening cancer. Some say raising the minimum wage will decrease inequality while others say it increases unemployment. Scientists once confidently claimed that hormone replacem…
In the daily news and the scientific literature, we are faced with conflicting claims about the effects caused by some treatments, behaviors, and policies. A daily glass of wine prolongs life, or so we are told. Yet we are also told that alcohol can…
Tracing the leading role of emotions in the evolution of the mind, a philosopher and a psychologist pair up to reveal how thought and culture owe less to our faculty for reason than to our capacity to feel. Many accounts of the human mind concentrat…
Philosophers have long suspected that thought and discourse about what we ought to do differ in some fundamental way from statements about what is. But the difference has proved elusive, in part because the two kinds of statement look alike. Focusin…
In Ecology without Nature, Timothy Morton argues that the chief stumbling block to environmental thinking is the image of nature itself. Ecological writers propose a new worldview, but their very zeal to preserve the natural world leads them away fr…
A pioneering book that takes us beyond economic debate to show how inequality is returning us to a past dominated by empires, dynastic elites, and ethnic divisions. The economic facts of inequality are clear. The rich have been pulling away from the…
