The festival of the Panathenaia, held in Athens every summer to celebrate the birthday of the city's goddess, Athena, was the setting for performances of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey by professional reciters or "rhapsodes." The works of Plato are our main surviving source of information about these performances. Through his references, a crucial phase in the history of the Homeric tradition can be reconstructed. Through Plato's eyes, the "staging" of Homer in classical Athens can once again become a virtual reality.

This book examines the overall testimony of Plato as an expert about the cultural legacy of these Homeric performances. Plato's fine ear for language—in this case the technical language of high-class artisans like rhapsodes—picks up on a variety of authentic expressions that echo the talk of rhapsodes as they once practiced their art.

Highlighted among the works of Plato are the Ion, the Timaeus, and the Critias. Some experts who study the Timaeus have suggested that Plato must have intended this masterpiece, described by his characters as a humnos, to be a tribute to Athena. The metaphor of weaving, implicit in humnos and explicit in the peplos or robe that was offered to the goddess at the Panathenaia, applies also to Homeric poetry: it too was pictured as a humnos, destined for eternal re-weaving on the festive occasion of Athena's eternally self-renewing birthday.

Since Friedrich Schleiermacher’s work in the 1800s, scholars interested in the literary dimension of Plato’s writings have sought to reconcile the dialogue form with the expository imperative of philosophical argument. It is now common for mainstream classicists and philosophers to attribute vital importance to literary form in Plato, which they often explain in terms of rhetorical devices serving didactic goals. This study brings the disciplines of literary and classical studies into methodological debate, questioning modern views of Plato’s dialogue form.

In the first part of this book, David Schur argues that the literary features of Plato’s dialogues—when treated as literary—cannot be limited to a single argumentative agenda. In the second part, he demonstrates the validity of this point by considering a rhetorical pattern of self-reflection that is prominent in the Republic. He emphasizes that Plato’s book consistently undermines the goal-driven conversation that it portrays. Offering a thought-provoking blend of methodological investigation and methodical close reading, Schur suggests that the Republic qualifies the authority of its conclusions by displaying a strong countercurrent of ongoing movement.

"Cats is 'dogs,' and rabbits is 'dogs,' and so's parrots; but this `ere 'tortis' is a insect," a porter explains to an astonished traveler in a nineteenth-century Punch cartoon. Railways were not the only British institution to schematize the world. This enormously entertaining book captures the fervor of the Victorian age for classifying and categorizing every new specimen, plant or animal, that British explorers and soldiers and sailors brought home. As she depicts a whole complex of competing groups deploying rival schemes and nomenclatures, Harriet Ritvo shows us a society drawing and redrawing its own boundaries and ultimately identifying itself.

The experts (whether calling themselves naturalists, zoologists, or comparative anatomists) agreed on their superior authority if nothing else, but the laymen had their say--and Ritvo shows us a world in which butchers and artists, farmers and showmen vied to impose order on the wild profusion of nature. Sometimes assumptions or preoccupations overlapped; sometimes open disagreement or hostility emerged, exposing fissures in the social fabric or contested cultural territory. Of the greatest interest were creatures that confounded or crossed established categories; in the discussions provoked by these mishaps, monstrosities, and hybrids we can see ideas about human society--about the sexual proclivities of women, for instance, or the imagined hierarchy of nations and races.

A thoroughly absorbing account of taxonomy--as zoological classification and as anthropological study--The Platypus and the Mermaid offers a new perspective on the constantly shifting, ever suggestive interactions of scientific lore, cultural ideas, and the popular imagination.

Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Toni Morrison brings the genius of a master writer to this personal inquiry into the significance of African-Americans in the American literary imagination. Her goal, she states at the outset, is to “put forth an argument for extending the study of American literature…draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography and use that map to open as much space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration as did the original charting of the New World—without the mandate for conquest.”

Author of Beloved, The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and other vivid portrayals of black American experience, Morrison ponders the effect that living in a historically racialized society has had on American writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She argues that race has become a metaphor, a way of referring to forces, events, and forms of social decay, economic division, and human panic. Her compelling point is that the central characteristics of American literature individualism, masculinity, the insistence upon innocence coupled to an obsession with figurations of death and hell—are responses to a dark and abiding Africanist presence.

Through her investigation of black characters, narrative strategies, and idiom in the fiction of white American writers, Morrison provides a daring perspective that is sure to alter conventional notions about American literature. She considers Willa Cather and the impact of race on concept and plot; turns to Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville to examine the black force that figures so significantly in the literature of early America; and discusses the implications of the Africanist presence at the heart of Huckleberry Finn. A final chapter on Ernest Hemingway is a brilliant exposition of the racial subtext that glimmers beneath the surface plots of his fiction.

Written with the artistic vision that has earned her a preeminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark will be avidly read by Morrison admirers as well as by students, critics, and scholars of American literature.

The phrase “Harlem in the 1920s” evokes images of the Harlem Renaissance, or of Marcus Garvey and soapbox orators haranguing crowds about politics and race. Yet the most ubiquitous feature of Harlem life between the world wars was the game of “numbers.” Thousands of wagers, usually of a dime or less, would be placed on a daily number derived from U.S. bank statistics. The rewards of “hitting the number,” a 600-to-1 payoff, tempted the ordinary men and women of the Black Metropolis with the chimera of the good life. Playing the Numbers tells the story of this illegal form of gambling and the central role it played in the lives of African Americans who flooded into Harlem in the wake of World War I.

For a dozen years the “numbers game” was one of America’s rare black-owned businesses, turning over tens of millions of dollars every year. The most successful “bankers” were known as Black Kings and Queens, and they lived royally. Yet the very success of “bankers” like Stephanie St. Clair and Casper Holstein attracted Dutch Schultz, Lucky Luciano, and organized crime to the game. By the late 1930s, most of the profits were being siphoned out of Harlem.

Playing the Numbers reveals a unique dimension of African American culture that made not only Harlem but New York City itself the vibrant and energizing metropolis it was. An interactive website allows readers to locate actors and events on Harlem’s streets.

The spectacle of modern sport displays all the latest commercial and technological innovations, yet age-old religious concerns still thrive at the stadium. Coaches lead pre-game and post-game prayers, athletes give God the credit for home runs and touchdowns, and fans wave signs with biblical quotations and allusions. Like no other nation on earth, Americans eagerly blend their religion and sports. Playing with God traces this dynamic relationship from the Puritan condemnation of games as sinful in the seventeenth century to the near deification of athletic contests in our own day.

Early religious opposition to competitive sport focused on the immoderate enthusiasm of players and spectators, the betting on scores, and the preference for playing field over church on Sunday. Disapproval gradually gave way to acceptance when "wholesome recreation" for young men in crowded cities and soldiers in faraway fields became a national priority. Protestants led in the readjustment of attitudes toward sport; Catholics, Jews, Mormons, and Muslims followed. The Irish at Notre Dame, outstanding Jews in baseball, Black Muslims in the boxing ring, and born-again athletes at Liberty University represent the numerous negotiations and compromises producing the unique American mixture of religion and sport.

In May 1908 William James, a gifted and popular lecturer, delivered a series of eight Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College, Oxford, on “The Present Situation in Philosophy.” These were published a year later as A Pluralistic Universe.

During the preceding decade James, as he struggled with deep conflicts within his own philosophic development, had become increasingly preoccupied with epistemological and metaphysical issues. He saw serious inadequacies in the forms of absolute and monistic idealism dominant in England and the United States, and he used the lectures to attack the specific form that “vicious intellectualism” had taken. In A Pluralistic Universe James captures a new philosophic vision, at once intimate and realistic. He shares with his readers a view of the universe that is fresh, active, and novel. The message conveyed is as relevant today as it was in his time.

This is the fourth volume of The Works of William James in an authoritative edition sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies. Prepared according to modern standards of textual scholarship, this series utilizes all available published and unpublished materials; its texts have been awarded the seal of approval of the Center for Editions of American Authors. Frederick Burkhardt is General Editor; Fredson Bowers, Textual Editor; Ignas K. Skrupskelis, Associate Editor.

Contemporary American poetry has plenty to offer new readers, and plenty more for those who already follow it. Yet its difficulty—and sheer variety—leaves many readers puzzled or overwhelmed. The critic, scholar, and poet Stephanie Burt sets out to help. Beginning in the early 1980s, where critical consensus ends, Burt canvasses American poetry of the past four decades, from the headline-making urgency of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen to the stark pathos of Louise Glück, the limitless energy of Juan Felipe Herrera, and the erotic provocations of D. A. Powell.

The Poem Is You: Sixty Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them is a guide to the diverse magnificences of American poetry today. It presents a wide range of poems selected by Burt for this volume, each accompanied by an original essay explaining how a given poem works, why it matters, and how the poem speaks to other parts of art and culture. Included here are some classroom classics (by Ashbery, Komunyakaa, Hass), less famous poems by very famous poets (Glück, Kay Ryan), and poems by prizewinning poets near the start of their careers (such as Brandon Som), and by others who are not—or not yet—well known.

The Poem Is You will appeal to poets, teachers, and students, but it is intended especially for readers who want to learn more about contemporary American poetry but who have not known where or how to start. It describes what American poets have fashioned for one another, and what they can give us today.

The eleven books of poetry by Venantius Fortunatus include well-loved hymns, figure poems, epigrams on miracles, and elegies in the voices of abandoned or exiled women. The sixth-century poet began his career in northern Italy before moving to Gaul, where he wrote for the remainder of his life—praising kings and elites of the Merovingian dynasty and describing the natural scenery and society of his adopted homeland during the transition from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages. In his lively and inventive style, Fortunatus also addressed verses to religious figures such as his patron Gregory of Tours and to holy women such as Radegund, founder of the Convent of the Holy Cross in Poitiers, and Agnes, the convent’s first abbess.

Fortunatus’s imaginative metaphors and wry, self-mocking humor ensure his place in the canon of Christian Latin poets. This volume presents for the first time in English translation all of his poetry, apart from a single long saint’s life in verse.

Michael Marullus (c. 1453/4–1500), born in Greece, began life as a mercenary soldier but became a prominent Neo-Latin poet and scholar who worked in Florence and Naples. He married the beautiful and learned Alessandra Scala, daughter of the humanist Bartolomeo Scala, chancellor of Florence, and his Epigrams bring alive the circle of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’Medici. Among Marullus’ influences were ancient Greek texts such as the Homeric and Orphic hymns, the Corpus Hermeticum, the hymns of Proclus, Cleanthes, and Callimachus, and Julian the Apostate’s Hymn to the Sun. Marullus was particularly important, however, as one of the first Renaissance poets to imitate the works of Lucretius, and one witness reported that, after his death by drowning, a copy of the Roman poet’s works was found in his saddlebag. Later poets imitated him in vernacular love poetry, especially Ronsard; he even appears as a shadowy figure in the pages of George Eliot’s Romola, where he is depicted as a confirmed pagan.

This edition contains Marullus’ complete Latin poetry. All of these works appear in English translation for the first time.

An exquisite new translation of Guru Nanak's verses, illuminating the sacred tenets cherished by millions of Sikhs worldwide.

Guru Nanak (1469–1539), a native of Panjab, founded the Sikh religion. His vast corpus of nearly a thousand hymns forms the core of the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikhs’ sacred book of ethics, philosophy, and theology. The scripture was expanded and enriched by his nine successors, and Sikhs continue to revere it today as the embodiment of their tradition.

Poems from the Guru Granth Sahib offers a compilation of spiritual lyrics showcasing the range and depth of Guru Nanak’s literary style while conveying his pluralistic vision of the singular divine and his central values of equality, inclusivity, and civic action. This new English translation includes celebrated long hymns such as “Alphabet on the Board” and “Ballad of Hope” alongside innovative shorter poems like “The Hours.” It is presented here alongside the original text in Gurmukhi, the script developed by the Guru himself.

The seventeenth-century Hindi classic treasured for its subtle and beautiful portrayal of divine and erotic love’s pleasures and sorrows.

In his Satsai, or Seven Hundred Poems, the seventeenth-century poet Biharilal draws on a rich vernacular tradition, blending amorous narratives about the god Krishna and the goddess Radha with archetypal hero and heroine motifs from older Sanskrit and Prakrit conventions. While little is known of Biharilal’s life beyond his role as court poet to King Jai Singh of Amber (1611–1667), his verses reflect deep knowledge of local north Indian culture and geography, especially the bucolic landscapes of Krishna’s youth in the Braj region (in today’s Uttar Pradesh). With ingenuity and virtuosity, Biharilal weaves together worldly experience and divine immanence, and adapts the tropes of stylized courtly poetry, such as romantic rivalries, clandestine trysts, and the bittersweet sorrow of separated lovers.

Poems from the Satsai comprises a selection of four hundred couplets from this enduring work. The Hindi text—composed in Braj Bhasha, the literary language of early-modern north India—is presented here in the Devanagari script and accompanies a new English verse translation.

“A landmark volume, filled with beautiful renderings of writings from the Guru Granth Sahib.”
—Simran Jeet Singh, author of The Light We Give: How Sikh Wisdom Can Transform Your Life

An exquisite new translation of Guru Nanak’s verses, illuminating the sacred tenets cherished by millions of Sikhs worldwide.

Guru Nanak (1469–1539), a native of Panjab, founded the Sikh religion. His vast corpus of nearly a thousand hymns forms the core of the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikhs’ sacred book of ethics, philosophy, and theology. The scripture was expanded and enriched by his nine successors, and Sikhs continue to revere it today as the embodiment of their tradition.

This beautiful new translation by Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh, a foremost authority on Sikhism, offers a selection of spiritual lyrics composed by Guru Nanak. Here the reader will find the range and depth of his pluralistic vision of the singular divine and discover his central values of equality, inclusivity, and civic action—values that continue to shape the lives of Sikhs worldwide.

Belles lettres.

Sidonius Apollinaris, a Gallo-Roman, was born at Lugdunum (Lyon) about AD 430. He married Papianilla, daughter of the Emperor Avitus in whose honor he recited at Rome on 1 January 456 a panegyric in verse. Sidonius later joined a rebellion, it seems, but was finally reconciled to the emperor Majorian and delivered at Lyon in 458 a panegyric on him. After some years in his native land, in 467 he led a Gallo-Roman deputation to the Emperor Anthemius, and on 1 January 468 recited at Rome his third panegyric. He returned to Gaul in 469 and became Bishop of Auvergne with seat at Clermont-Ferrand. He upheld his people in resisting the Visigoths. After Auvergne was ceded to them in 475, he was imprisoned but soon resumed his bishopric. He was canonized after his death.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Sidonius is in two volumes. The first contains his poetry: the three long panegyrics, and poems addressed to or concerned with friends, apparently written in his youth. Volume I also contains Books 1–2 of his Letters (all dating from before his episcopate); Books 3–9 are in Volume II. Sidonius’ writings shed valued light on Roman culture in the fifth century.

Interest in Emily Dickinson has grown throughout the years until, now, in this three-volume edition Thomas Johnson presents the entire body of poems she is known to have written, 1775 in all. Here are the familiar “I never saw a Moor” and “Because I could not stop for Death,” along with other less well-known poems, including forty-three never before published. Casual notes to friends and relatives which frequently accompany scraps of verse help to reveal the poet's enigmatic character. After keen analysis of the manuscripts, Johnson has arranged the poems in what is believed to be their chronological order, with variations and rejected versions of each poem following.

In his introduction, the editor discusses the stylistic and historical development of the poetic art of Emily Dickinson, and he considers the manuscripts and the history of the editing of the poems. A careful study of the poet's handwriting is illustrated with several facsimiles. The appendix contains valuable material on the recipients of the poems as well as a subject index and an index of first lines.

Emily Dickinson, poet of the interior life, imagined words/swords, hurling barbed syllables/piercing. Nothing about her adult appearance or habitation revealed such a militant soul. Only poems, written quietly in a room of her own, often hand-stitched in small volumes, then hidden in a drawer, revealed her true self. She did not live in time but in universals—an acute, sensitive nature reaching out boldly from self-referral to a wider, imagined world.

Dickinson died without fame; only a few poems were published in her lifetime. Her legacy was later rescued from her desk—an astonishing body of work, much of which has since appeared in piecemeal editions, sometimes with words altered by editors or publishers according to the fashion of the day.

Now Ralph Franklin, the foremost scholar of Dickinson's manuscripts, has prepared an authoritative one-volume edition of all extant poems by Emily Dickinson—1,789 poems in all, the largest number ever assembled. This reading edition derives from his three-volume work, The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition (1998), which contains approximately 2,500 sources for the poems. In this one-volume edition, Franklin offers a single reading of each poem—usually the latest version of the entire poem—rendered with Dickinson's spelling, punctuation, and capitalization intact. The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition is a milestone in American literary scholarship and an indispensable addition to the personal library of poetry lovers everywhere.

Emily Dickinson, poet of the interior life, imagined words/swords, hurling barbed syllables/piercing. Nothing about her adult appearance or habitation revealed such a militant soul. Only poems, written quietly in a room of her own, often hand-stitched in small volumes, then hidden in a desk drawer, revealed her true self. She did not live in time, as did that other great poet of the day, Walt Whitman, but in universals. As she knowingly put it: “There is one thing to be grateful for—that one is one’s self and not somebody else.”

Dickinson lived and died without fame: she saw only a few poems published. Her great legacy was later rescued from her desk drawer—an astonishing body of work revealing her acute, sensitive nature reaching out boldly from self-referral to a wider, imagined world. Her family sought publication of Dickinson’s poetry over the years, selecting verses, often altering her words or her punctuation, until, in 1955, the first important attempt was made to collect and publish Dickinson’s work, edited by Thomas H. Johnson for the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Now, after many years of preparation by Ralph W. Franklin, the foremost scholar of Dickinson’s manuscripts, a new comprehensive edition is available. This three-volume work contains 1,789 poems, the largest number ever assembled. The poems, arranged chronologically, based on new dating, are drawn from a range of archives, most frequently from holographs, but also from various secondary sources representing lost manuscripts. The text of each manuscript is rendered individually, including, within the capacity of standard type, Dickinson’s spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. Franklin gives Dickinson’s alternative readings for the poems, her revisions, and the line and page, or column, divisions in the source. Each entry identifies Franklin’s editorial emendations and records the publication history, including variants. Fourteen appendices of tables and lists give additional information, including poems attributed to Emily Dickinson. The poems are indexed by numbers from the Johnson edition, as well as by first lines.

Franklin has provided an introduction that serves as a guide to this edition and surveys the history of the editing of Dickinson’s poems. His account of how Dickinson conducted her workshop is a reconstruction of a remarkable poetic life.

Here at last is the definitive Keats—an edition of John Keats’s poems that embodies the readings the poet himself most probably intended. The culmination of a tradition of literary and textual scholarship, it is the work of the one scholar best qualified to do the job.

Largely because of the wealth and complexity of the manuscript materials and the frequency with which first printings were based on inferior sources, there has never been a thoroughly reliable edition of Keats. Indeed, in The Texts of Keats’s Poems Jack Stillinger demonstrated that fully one third of the poems as printed in current standard editions contain substantive errors. This edition is the first in the history of Keats scholarship to be based on a systematic investigation of the transmission of the texts. The readings given here represent in each case, as exactly as can be determined, the version that Keats preferred. The chronological arrangement of the poems and the full record of variants and manuscript alterations (presented in a style that will be clear to the general reader as well as useful to the scholar) display the development of Keats’s poetic artistry. Notes at the back provide dates of composition, relate extant manuscripts and early printings, and explain the choices of texts.

The London Times said of Stillinger’s earlier study of the texts: “Thanks to Mr. Stillinger a revolution in Keats studies is at hand.” Here is the crucial step in that revolution.

A stunning modern translation of a Buddhist classic that is also one of the oldest literary texts in the world written by women.

The Therīgāthā is one of the oldest surviving literatures by women, composed more than two millennia ago and originally collected as part of the Pali canon of Buddhist scripture. These poems were written by some of the first Buddhist women—therīs—honored for their religious achievements. Through imaginative verses about truth and freedom, the women recount their lives before ordination and their joy at attaining liberation from samsara. Poems of the First Buddhist Women offers startling insights into the experiences of women in ancient times that continue to resonate with modern readers. With a spare and elegant style, this powerful translation introduces us to a classic of world literature.

C. P. Cavafy (Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis) is one of the most important Greek poets since antiquity. He was born, lived, and died in Alexandria (1863–1933), with brief periods spent in England, Constantinople, and Athens. Cavafy set in motion the most powerful modernism in early twentieth-century European poetry, exhibiting simple truths about eroticism, history, and philosophy—an inscrutable triumvirate that informs the Greek language and culture in all their diachrony. The Cavafy Canon plays with the complexities of ironic Socratic thought, suffused with the honesty of unadorned iambic verse.

Based on a fifty-year continuous scholarly and literary interaction with Cavafy’s poetry and its Greek and western European intertexts, John Chioles has produced an authoritative and exceptionally nuanced translation of the complex linguistic registers of Cavafy’s Canon into English.

Taras Ševčenko (1814–1861) is the central figure in modern Ukrainian literature, but despite the enormous attention that has been devoted to his person, his work, and his role in Ukrainian history and the Ukrainian national renascence, the core of the Ševčenko phenomenon—the symbolic nature of his poetry—has received little systematic analysis.

As this book argues, myth serves as the underlying code and model of Ševčenko’s poetic universe. Examining the structures and paradigms of Ševčenko’s mythical thought provides answers for various crucial and heretofore intractable questions, such as those concerning the relation of his Ukrainian poetry to his Russian prose, his sense of a transcendent “curse” and “guilt” in the Ukrainian past and present, the interrelation of his revolutionist fervor with his apparent providentialism, or of the tension between the nativism and the universalism of his poetry.

Moreover, it is through the structures of his mythical thought that we can understand Ševčenko’s “prophecy,” in effect, his millenarian vision. In this framework, too, the author focuses on the religious tenor of Ševčenko’s poetry, in which he is both expiator and carrier of the Word, and, finally, on the reception—indeed the cult of Ševčenko among generations of Ukrainians.

The poetry of Edgar Allan Poe has had a rough ride in America, as Emerson’s sneering quip about “The Jingle Man” testifies. That these poems have never lacked a popular audience has been a persistent annoyance in academic and literary circles; that they attracted the admiration of innovative poetic masters in Europe and especially France—notably Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Valéry—has been further cause for embarrassment. Jerome McGann offers a bold reassessment of Poe’s achievement, arguing that he belongs with Whitman and Dickinson as a foundational American poet and cultural presence.

Not all American commentators have agreed with Emerson’s dim view of Poe’s verse. For McGann, a notable exception is William Carlos Williams, who said that the American poetic imagination made its first appearance in Poe’s work. The Poet Edgar Allan Poe explains what Williams and European admirers saw in Poe, how they understood his poetics, and why his poetry had such a decisive influence on Modern and Post-Modern art and writing. McGann contends that Poe was the first poet to demonstrate how the creative imagination could escape its inheritance of Romantic attitudes and conventions, and why an escape was desirable. The ethical and political significance of Poe’s work follows from what the poet takes as his great subject: the reader.

The Poet Edgar Allan Poe takes its own readers on a spirited tour through a wide range of Poe’s verse as well as the critical and theoretical writings in which he laid out his arresting ideas about poetry and poetics.

The period between 1920 and 1950 saw an epochal shift in the American cultural economy. The shocks of the 1929 market crash and the Second World War decimated much of the support for high modernist literature, and writers who had relied on wealthy benefactors were forced to find new protectors from the depredations of the free market. Private foundations, universities, and government organizations began to fund the arts, and in this environment writers were increasingly obliged to become critics, elucidating and justifying their work to an audience of elite administrators.

In Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture, Evan Kindley recognizes the major role modernist poet-critics played in the transition from aristocratic patronage to technocratic cultural administration. Poet-critics developed extensive ties to a network of bureaucratic institutions and established dual artistic and intellectual identities to appeal to the kind of audiences and entities that might support their work. Kindley focuses on Anglo-American poet-critics including T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, Archibald MacLeish, Sterling A. Brown, and R. P. Blackmur. These artists grappled with the task of being “village explainers” (as Gertrude Stein described Ezra Pound) and legitimizing literature for public funding and consumption.

Modernism, Kindley shows, created a different form of labor for writers to perform and gave them an unprecedented say over the administration of contemporary culture. The consequences for our understanding of poetry and its place in our culture are still felt widely today.

Bernardus Silvestris exemplifies the scholastic culture of his time. Having studied with pioneers in philosophy and science, he became a renowned teacher of literary and poetic composition. His versatility as scholar, philosopher, and scientist is apparent in his masterpiece, the Cosmographia. In alternating verse and prose, this foundational text for later Latin and vernacular literature synthesizes important intellectual movements of the early twelfth century. It owes its deepest debt to the tradition of philosophical allegory, including Plato’s Timaeus, Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, and the prosimetra of Martianus Capella and Boethius. Bernardus also displays a masterly awareness of classical Latin poetry. Though less widely influential than his great disciple, Alan of Lille, Bernardus is the most subtle of the twelfth-century Latin poets; the Cosmographia has been aptly compared to the poetry of Lucretius and Giordano Bruno, and a copy survives written in the hand of Boccaccio.

In Mathematicus (“The Astrologer”), a Roman hero, faced with an astrologer’s prediction that he will kill his father, resolves to defy fate by committing suicide. This text is the most substantial of the surviving twelfth-century poems based on the ancient exercises in rhetoric known as controversiae, and it illustrates the twelfth century’s concern with astral determinism.

This rich collection is far more than an important work of criticism by an extraordinary poet; it is a poetic intervention into criticism. "Artifice of Absorption," a key essay, is written in verse, and its structures and rhythms initiate the reader into the strength and complexity of the argument. In a wild variety of topics, polemic, and styles, Bernstein surveys the current poetry scene and addresses many of the hot issues of poststructuralist literary theory. "Poetics is the continuation of poetry by other means," he writes. What role should poetics play in contemporary culture? Bernstein finds the answer in dissent, not merely in argument but in form--a poetic language that resists being easily absorbed into the conventions of our culture.

Insisting on the vital need for radical innovation, Bernstein traces the traditions of modern poetry back to Stein and Wilde, taking issue with those critics who see in the "postmodern" a loss of political and aesthetic relevance. Sometimes playful, often hortatory, always intense, he joins in the debate on cultural diversity and the definition of modernism. We encounter Swinburne and Morris as surprising precursors, along with considerations of Wittgenstein, Khlebnikov, Adorno, Jameson, and Pac-Man. A Poetics is both criticism and poetry, both tract and song, with no dull moments.

Classic criticism.

This volume brings together the three most influential ancient Greek treatises on literature.

Aristotle’s Poetics contains his treatment of Greek tragedy: its history, nature, and conventions, with details on poetic diction. Stephen Halliwell makes this seminal work newly accessible with a reliable text and a translation that is both accurate and readable. His authoritative introduction traces the work’s debt to earlier theorists (especially Plato), its distinctive argument, and the reasons behind its enduring relevance.

The essay On the Sublime, usually attributed to “Longinus” (identity uncertain), was probably composed in the first century AD; its subject is the appreciation of greatness (“the sublime”) in writing, with analysis of illustrative passages ranging from Homer and Sappho to Plato and Genesis. In this edition, Donald A. Russell has judiciously revised and newly annotated the text and translation by W. Hamilton Fyfe and provides a new introduction.

The treatise On Style, ascribed to an (again unidentifiable) Demetrius, was perhaps composed during the secod century BC. It is notable particularly for its theory and analysis of four distinct styles (grand, elegant, plain, and forceful). Doreen Innes’ fresh rendering of the work is based on the earlier Loeb translation by W. Rhys Roberts. Her new introduction and notes represent the latest scholarship.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Aristotle is in twenty-three volumes.

Iblīs, the character in the Qur’an who refuses God’s command to bow to Adam and is punished by eviction from heaven, is commonly depicted as a fiendish character no different from Satan. However, some Sufi stories describe Iblīs as the ultimate monotheist, a lover of God, but tragically rejected. This volume seeks the origins of this alternative Iblīs within the Qur’an itself, by looking at each of the seven Qur’anic versions of the Iblīs story as a unique rendering of the basic narrative. Whitney Bodman finds that the likely earliest version of the Iblīs story presents him as a tragic figure, an elder sibling of Adam unjustly displaced from God’s favor. Subsequent renderings present an Iblīs more hostile to humanity, and in the last two abbreviated versions Iblīs becomes an incidental figure in the extended story of Adam.

In modern Arab literature the character of Iblīs is deployed to reveal tragic dimensions of modern life. Although it is often said that there is no place for tragedy in Islam, Bodman’s careful examination of the Iblīs story shows that the tragic exists even in the Qur’an and forms part of the vision of medieval Sufi mystics and modern social critics alike.

T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound dominated English poetry and criticism in the first half of the twentieth century. At the center of their practice is what Maud Ellmann calls the poetics of impersonality. Her examination yields a set of superb readings of the major poems of the modernist canon. Eliot and Pound mounted attack after attack on nineteenth-century poetry from Wordsworth to Swinburne, poetry they believed nurtured an unhealthy cult of the self. They wanted poetry to be a transparent medium that gives its readers access to reality and meaning. Poetry, they argued, should efface itself, because writing that calls attention to itself calls attention to the distinctive personality of the writer. Ellmann convincingly shows that their arguments are self-contradictory and that their efforts to eliminate personality merely reinstate it in a different guise.

After an initial section on Eliot’s relation to Bergson, Ellmann goes on to analyze Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and the later After Strange Gods, the early poems, The Waste Land, and Four Quartets; she then turns to Pound’s Personae, particularly “Mauberley,” and the Cantos. Ellmann looks for the contradictions inherent in modernist literary ideology and deftly teases out their implications. Her writing is stylish in the best sense and, in terms of its theoretical vocabulary and assumptions, impeccable. This book marks the debut of a major literary critic.

Emperor Taizong (r. 626–49) of the Tang is remembered as an exemplary ruler. This study addresses that aura of virtuous sovereignty and Taizong’s construction of a reputation for moral rulership through his own literary writings—with particular attention to his poetry. The author highlights the relationship between historiography and the literary and rhetorical strategies of sovereignty, contending that, for Taizong, and for the concept of sovereignty in general, politics is inextricable from cultural production.

The work focuses on Taizong’s literary writings that speak directly to the relationship between cultural form and sovereign power, as well as on the question of how the Tang negotiated dynastic identity through literary stylistics. The author maintains that Taizong’s writings may have been self-serving at times, representing strategic attempts to control his self-image in the eyes of his court and empire, but that they also become the ideal image to which his self was normatively bound. This is the paradox at the heart of imperial authorship: Taizong was simultaneously the author of his representation and was authored by his representation; he was both subject and object of his writings.

Throughout the history of imperial China, the educated elite used various means to criticize government policies and actions. During the Song dynasty (960-1278), some members of this elite found an elegant and subtle means of dissent: landscape painting.

By examining literary archetypes, the titles of paintings, contemporary inscriptions, and the historical context, Alfreda Murck shows that certain paintings expressed strong political opinions—some transparent, others deliberately concealed. She argues that the coding of messages in seemingly innocuous paintings was an important factor in the growing respect for painting among the educated elite and that the capacity of painting's systems of reference to allow scholars to express dissent with impunity contributed to the art's vitality and longevity.

Richard Poirier, one of America's most eminent critics, reveals in this book the creative but mostly hidden alliance between American pragmatism and American poetry. He brilliantly traces pragmatism as a philosophical and literary practice grounded in a linguistic skepticism that runs from Emerson and William James to the work of Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, and Wallace Stevens, and on to the cultural debates of today.

More powerfully than ever before, Poirier shows that pragmatism had its start in Emerson, the great example to all his successors of how it is possible to redeem even as you set out to change the literature of the past. Poirier demonstrates that Emerson—and later William James—were essentially philosophers of language, and that it is language that embodies our cultural past, an inheritance to be struggled with, and transformed, before being handed on to future generations. He maintains that in Emersonian pragmatist writing, any loss—personal or cultural—gives way to a quest for what he calls “superfluousness,” a kind of rhetorical excess by which powerfully creative individuals try to elude deprivation and stasis. In a wide-ranging meditation on what James called “the vague,” Poirier extols the authentic voice of individualism, which, he argues, is tentative and casual rather than aggressive and dogmatic.

The concluding chapters describe the possibilities for criticism created by this radically different understanding of reading and writing, which are nothing less than a reinvention of literary tradition itself. Poirier's discovery of this tradition illuminates the work of many of the most important figures in American philosophy and poetry. His reanimation of pragmatism also calls for a redirection of contemporary criticism, so that readers inside as well as outside the academy can begin to respond to poetic language as the source of meaning, not to meaning as the source of language.

Listen to "An Electronic Cabaret: Paris Street Songs, 1748–50" for songs from Poetry and the PoliceAudio recording copyright © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.

In spring 1749, François Bonis, a medical student in Paris, found himself unexpectedly hauled off to the Bastille for distributing an “abominable poem about the king.” So began the Affair of the Fourteen, a police crackdown on ordinary citizens for unauthorized poetry recitals. Why was the official response to these poems so intense?

In this captivating book, Robert Darnton follows the poems as they passed through several media: copied on scraps of paper, dictated from one person to another, memorized and declaimed to an audience. But the most effective dispersal occurred through music, when poems were sung to familiar tunes. Lyrics often referred to current events or revealed popular attitudes toward the royal court. The songs provided a running commentary on public affairs, and Darnton brilliantly traces how the lyrics fit into song cycles that carried messages through the streets of Paris during a period of rising discontent. He uncovers a complex communication network, illuminating the way information circulated in a semi-literate society.

This lucid and entertaining book reminds us of both the importance of oral exchanges in the history of communication and the power of “viral” networks long before our internet age.

Most critics agree that Euripidean tragedy addresses a wealth of political questions, and that it successfully incorporates and engages with a variety of ancient Greek poetic traditions. Nevertheless, these topics and questions have generally been treated separately. In this book, Jonah Radding contends that the political issues addressed in Euripides’ tragedies are inextricably related to his employment of choral lyric genres such as paean and epinician, and to his engagement with canonical poetic texts such as the Iliad and Aeschylus’ Agamemnon.

We see that Euripides consistently recasts traditional poetic genres and texts in order to dramatize and illuminate political questions that are central to his tragedies. At the same time, Radding suggests that the dramatic politicization of the poetic tradition also serves to question the manner in which ancient Athenians understood and utilized these various poetic forms in their own polis. Ultimately, we see that the relationship between poetry and politics in Euripidean tragedy is truly reciprocal, for both aspects illuminate—and are illuminated by—the other, each becoming a more powerful force in the process.

The Derveni Papyrus is the oldest known European "book." It was meant to accompany the cremated body in Derveni Tomb A but, by a stroke of luck, did not burn completely. Considered the most important discovery for Greek philology in the twentieth century, the papyrus was found accidentally in 1962 during a public works project in an uninhabited place about 10 km from Thessaloniki, and it is now preserved in the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki.

The papers in Poetry as Initiation discuss a number of open questions: Who was the author of the papyrus? What is the date of the text? What is the significance of burying a book with a corpse? What was the context of the peculiar chthonic ritual described in the text? Who were its performers? What is the relationship of the author and the ritual to the so-called Orphic texts?

The transparent beauty and effortless grace of George Herbert's poetry have made it seem almost devoid of art. In this comprehensive reading of Herbert, Helen Vendler reveals the complexity inherent in the apparent simplicity of his lyrics. Herbert appears here, both in introspective and in devotional verse, as a poet of universal feeling whose work can be given a human interpretation independent of any religious conviction.

Very nearly all of Herbert's poems are treated in this finely written, forcefully argued study. By looking at the poet's less successful attempts as well as at his best work, Vendler is able to trace his surest line of development in the various modes and forms in which he worked. Comparisons with the work of his adapters and imitators make apparent the perfection and finish of his lines, their interior intellectual and psychological harmony.

John Milton is regarded as the greatest English poet after Shakespeare. Yet for sublimity and philosophical grandeur, Milton stands almost alone in world literature. His peers are Homer, Virgil, Dante, Wordsworth, and Goethe: poets who achieve a total ethical and spiritual vision of the world. In this panoramic interpretation, the distinguished Milton scholar Gordon Teskey shows how the poet’s changing commitments are subordinated to an aesthetic that joins beauty to truth and value to ethics. The art of poetry is rediscovered by Milton as a way of thinking in the world as it is, and for the world as it can be.

Milton’s early poems include the heroic Nativity Ode; the seductive paired poems “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso”; the mythological pageant Comus, with its comically diabolical enchanter and its serious debate on the human use of nature; and “Lycidas,” perhaps the greatest short poem in English and a prophecy of vast human displacements in the modern world. Teskey follows Milton’s creative development in three phases, from the idealistic transcendence of the poems written in his twenties to the political engagement of the gritty, hard-hitting poems of his middle years. The third phase is that of “transcendental engagement,” in the heaven-storming epic Paradise Lost, and the great works that followed it: the intense intellectual debate Paradise Regained, and the tragedy Samson Agonistes.

“I undertook the greatest departure from myself: creation, wanting to illuminate words.” So wrote Chilean poet Pablo Neruda in 1924 at the start of a long and brilliant career that was to bring him international renown—and, in 1971, two years before his death, the Nobel Prize in Literature. This work, intended for the general reader as well as the specialist, explores the sensitive complexities of the varied, sometimes contradictory, and always exciting writings produced during fifty years. Neruda’s output throughout his long literary life was phenomenal, and certain volumes have already become modern-day classics; it is these that René de Costa concentrates on. After describing the reception of each book at the time of publication, he evaluates its importance among Neruda’s oeuvre and, through the use of carefully selected Spanish verses, all translated into English, makes the reader aware of the range and aesthetic significance of the poet’s work.

Midway through his career as poet-diplomat, Neruda joined the Communist Party and became a poet-politician, a fact that far too often has colored the reception of his literary efforts. Here, for perhaps the first time, is a book that rises above such tendentious criticism to give an impartial view of the poet’s political and nonpolitical writings. The discerning reader is left with a heightened respect for and appreciation of the man who believed that “Poetry is like bread, and it must be shared…by everyone in our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of man.”

Although many books deal individually with each of the major writers treated in Poets of Reality, none attempts through analyses of these particular men and their works, to identify the new directions taken by twentieth-century literature. J. Hillis Miller, challenging the assumption that modern poetry is merely the extension of an earlier romanticism, presents critical studies of the six central figures—Joseph Conrad, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams—who played key roles in evolving a poetry in which “reality comes to be present to the senses, and present in the words of the poem which ratify this possession.”

A new kind of poetry has appeared in the twentieth century, the author claims, a poetry which, growing out of romanticism and symbolism, goes far beyond it. The old generalizations about the nature and use of poetry are no longer applicable, and it is the gradual emergence of new forms, culminating in the work of Williams, that Miller traces and defines.

Poetry has often been considered an irrational genre, more expressive than logical, more meditative than given to coherent argument. And yet, in each of the four very different poets she considers here, Helen Vendler reveals a style of thinking in operation; although they may prefer different means, she argues, all poets of any value are thinkers.

The four poets taken up in this volume—Alexander Pope, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and William Butler Yeats—come from three centuries and three nations, and their styles of thinking are characteristically idiosyncratic. Vendler shows us Pope performing as a satiric miniaturizer, remaking in verse the form of the essay, Whitman writing as a poet of repetitive insistence for whom thinking must be followed by rethinking, Dickinson experimenting with plot to characterize life’s unfolding, and Yeats thinking in images, using montage in lieu of argument.

With customary lucidity and spirit, Vendler traces through these poets’ lines to find evidence of thought in lyric, the silent stylistic measures representing changes of mind, the condensed power of poetic thinking. Her work argues against the reduction of poetry to its (frequently well-worn) themes and demonstrates, instead, that there is always in admirable poetry a strenuous process of thinking, evident in an evolving style—however ancient the theme—that is powerful and original.

Born eighty years ago in Lithuania, Czeslaw Milosz has been acclaimed “one of the greatest poets of our time, perhaps the greatest” (Joseph Brodsky). This self-described “connoisseur of heavens and abysses” has produced a corpus of poems, essays, memoirs, and fiction of such depth and range that the reader's imagination is moved far beyond ordinary limits of consciousness. In The Poet's Work Leonard Nathan and Arthur Quinn follow Milosz's wanderings in exile from Poland to Paris to Berkeley as they chart the singular development of his art. Relating his life and his works to the unfolding of his thought, they have crafted a lucid reading of Milosz that far surpasses anything yet written on this often enigmatic poet.

The Poet's Work is not only a solid introduction to Milosz; it is also a unique record of the poet's own interpretations of his work. As colleagues of Milosz at Berkeley, Nathan and Quinn had long, detailed discussions with the poet. It is this spirit of collaboration that brings a sense of immediacy and authority to their seamless study. Nathan and Quinn reveal as never before why Milosz is a true visionary, a poet of ideas in history. And they show how the influence of Blake, Simone Weil, Dostoevsky, Lev Shestov, and Swedenborg, together with Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg, and Robinson Jeffers, has enriched his vision. Milosz's lifelong experience of totalitarian regimes that exalt science and technology over individual needs and aspirations, his acute sense of alienation as an émigré, and his humanistic zeal and belief in the primacy of living have brought a prismatic quality to his poetry.

At seventy, Milosz spoke of himself as an “ecstatic pessimist.” In their sensitive mapping of his art, Nathan and Quinn skillfully demonstrate that Milosz's global influence has been achieved by the ever-shifting balance he strikes between ecstasy and pessimism. Irony and humor are never far from this book, which not only communicates Milosz's polyphonic message but also evokes his uniquely humane sensibility. The Poet's Work is an illuminating introduction to Milosz that will inform and engage scholars and general readers for years to come.

A small child looks at a dripping faucet and says that it is drooling." Another calls a centipede a "comb." An older child notices the mess in his younger brother's room and says, "Wow, it sure is neat in here." Children's spontaneous speech is rich in such creative, nonliteral discourse. How do children's abilities to use and interpret figurative language change as they grow older? What does such language show us about the changing features of children's minds?

In this absorbing book, psychologist Ellen Winner examines the development of the child's ability to use and understand metaphor and irony. These, she argues, are the two major forms of figurative language and are, moreover, complementary. Metaphor, which describes and sometimes explains, highlights attributes of a topic. As such, it serves primarily a cognitive function. Irony highlights the speaker's attitude toward the subject arid presupposes an appreciation of that attitude by the listener. In contrast to metaphor, irony serves primarily a social function. Winner looks in detail at the ways these forms of language differ structurally and at the cognitive and social capacities required for each.

The book not only draws on the author's own empirical studies but also offers a valuable synthesis of research in the area: it is the first account that spans the realm of figurative language. Winner writes clearly and engagingly and enlivens her account with many vivid examples from children's speech. The book will appeal to developmental psychologists, educators, psychologists of language, early-language specialists, students of literature, indeed, anyone who is delighted by the fanciful utterances of young children.

As president of Harvard University, Neil Rudenstine has enjoyed a unique perspective on the state of higher learning, while exerting a significant influence on its recent and future course. Published to commemorate his decade-long tenure, this selection of Rudenstine’s talks and writings illuminates many of the ideas and issues that animate higher education today.

In a collection of more than fifty speeches and writings, Rudenstine eloquently explores topics both timely and timeless, from the educational importance of diversity to the enduring value of the humanities; from the teaching potential of new technologies to the profound benefits of basic research; from developments in the professions and public service to the singular power of education to transform lives.

Specially designed and printed in a limited edition, Pointing Our Thoughts features a foreword by Hanna Holborn Gray, President Emeritus of the University of Chicago and a member of the Harvard Corporation. As Gray remarks, “To read [Rudenstine’s] thoughtful and beautifully crafted speeches is to hear the voice of a teacher deeply committed to the vocation of opening minds to reflection and insight, listening intensely to his colleagues and entering with them into a continuing process of intellectual dialogue, sharing the convictions and perplexities of the search for understanding.” This volume is testament to that commitment. It represents an invaluable addition to the literature on higher education in America and around the world.

To many the goal of the Polaris program seemed unachievable when first proposed: to produce a ballistic missile with a range of over a thousand miles that would be capable of being launched from a submerged submarine. Today a fleet of Polaris-carrying submarines constantly patrols beneath the seas as a key element in a national strategy of deterrence. Harvey Sapolsky examines the Polaris missile program, one of the most costly and successful ever undertaken by the federal government, and describes the bureaucratic strategies the Polaris proponents employed to control the threatening environment.

Sapolsky points out that the Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT), which gained the program a worldwide reputation for managerial innovativeness, was as much a device to protect the program from external interference as an effective management tool. The book should be valuable to those concerned with bureaucratic politics, management techniques, weapons procurement, and arms control problems as well as to those who seek to understand the operations of American government.

"Read him his rights." We all recognize this line from cop dramas. But what happens afterward? In this book, Richard Leo sheds light on a little-known corner of our criminal justice system--the police interrogation.

Incriminating statements are necessary to solve crimes, but suspects almost never have reason to provide them. Therefore, as Leo shows, crime units have developed sophisticated interrogation methods that rely on persuasion, manipulation, and deception to move a subject from denial to admission, serving to shore up the case against him. Ostensibly aimed at uncovering truth, the structure of interrogation requires that officers act as an arm of the prosecution.

Skillful and fair interrogation allows authorities to capture criminals and deter future crime. But Leo draws on extensive research to argue that confessions are inherently suspect and that coercive interrogation has led to false confession and wrongful conviction. He looks at police evidence in the court, the nature and disappearance of the brutal "third degree," the reforms of the mid-twentieth century, and how police can persuade suspects to waive their Miranda rights.

An important study of the criminal justice system, Police Interrogation and American Justice raises unsettling questions. How should police be permitted to interrogate when society needs both crime control and due process? How can order be maintained yet justice served?

America’s first anti–sex trafficking law, the 1910 Mann Act, made it illegal to transport women over state lines for prostitution “or any other immoral purpose.” It was meant to protect women and girls from being seduced or sold into sexual slavery. But, as Jessica Pliley illustrates, its enforcement resulted more often in the policing of women’s sexual behavior, reflecting conservative attitudes toward women’s roles at home and their movements in public. By citing its mandate to halt illicit sexuality, the fledgling Bureau of Investigation gained entry not only into brothels but also into private bedrooms and justified its own expansion.

Policing Sexuality links the crusade against sex trafficking to the rapid growth of the Bureau from a few dozen agents at the time of the Mann Act into a formidable law enforcement organization that cooperated with state and municipal authorities across the nation. In pursuit of offenders, the Bureau often intervened in domestic squabbles on behalf of men intent on monitoring their wives and daughters. Working prostitutes were imprisoned at dramatically increased rates, while their male clients were seldom prosecuted.

In upholding the Mann Act, the FBI reinforced sexually conservative views of the chaste woman and the respectable husband and father. It built its national power and prestige by expanding its legal authority to police Americans’ sexuality and by marginalizing the very women it was charged to protect.

A Smithsonian Best History Book of the Year
Winner of the Littleton-Griswold Prize
Winner of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award
Winner of the Order of the Coif Award
Winner of the Sidney M. Edelstein Prize
Winner of the David J. Langum Sr. Prize in American Legal History
Winner of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize

“From traffic stops to parking tickets, Seo traces the history of cars alongside the history of crime and discovers that the two are inextricably linked.”
—Smithsonian

When Americans think of freedom, they often picture the open road. Yet nowhere are we more likely to encounter the long arm of the law than in our cars. Sarah Seo reveals how the rise of the automobile led us to accept—and expect—pervasive police power, a radical transformation with far-reaching consequences.

Before the twentieth century, most Americans rarely came into contact with police officers. But in a society dependent on cars, everyone—law-breaking and law-abiding alike—is subject to discretionary policing. Seo challenges prevailing interpretations of the Warren Court’s due process revolution and argues that the Supreme Court’s efforts to protect Americans did more to accommodate than limit police intervention. Policing the Open Road shows how the new procedures sanctioned discrimination by officers, and ultimately undermined the nation’s commitment to equal protection before the law.

“With insights ranging from the joy of the open road to the indignities—and worse—of ‘driving while black,’ Sarah Seo makes the case that the ‘law of the car’ has eroded our rights to privacy and equal justice…Absorbing and so essential.”
—Paul Butler, author of Chokehold

“A fascinating examination of how the automobile reconfigured American life, not just in terms of suburbanization and infrastructure but with regard to deeply ingrained notions of freedom and personal identity.”
—Hua Hsu, New Yorker

World War II was over, Western Europe was rebuilding, and laborers were in short supply. The masses of foreign workers recruited to fill the gap presented, or so it seemed to their host countries, a temporary solution—but then the guests opted to stay. How have these permanent visitors fitted into Western European societies, where xenophobia and liberalism coexist in an uneasy balance? Have such marginalized groups developed any recognizable forms of political participation?

This book, a rare account of political activity among these immigrants, reveals the extent of their impact on and interaction with the policies and politics of their adopted countries. Comparing France and Switzerland, and focusing on four cities, Patrick Ireland tests various existing explanations of how and why immigrant political participation has taken certain forms: homeland-oriented, geared toward the country of origin; institutional, conducted through regularly accorded channels in the host society; or confrontational, developed outside legal and favored channels.

Through extensive research and interviews, Ireland finds that national and local institutional frameworks, rather than the immigrants' ethnic origins or class status, determine the form their political mobilization takes. He shows how indigenous trade unions, political parties, and other institutions have acted as gatekeepers, controlling access to avenues of political participation, and describes the ways in which immigrants have availed themselves of the different opportunities in each institutional context. Documenting changes from one generation to the next, his account identifies distinctive forms of political activity that have evolved in recent years.

The steady accretion of public policies over the decades has fundamentally changed how America is governed. The formulation and delivery of policy have emerged as the government’s entire raison d’être, redefining rights and reconfiguring institutional structures. The Policy State looks closely at this massive unnoticed fact of modern politics and addresses the controversies swirling around it. Government has become more responsive and inclusive, but the shift has also polarized politics and sowed a deep distrust of institutions. These developments demand a thorough reconsideration of historical governance.

“A sterling example of political science at its best: analytically rigorous, historically informed, and targeted at questions of undeniable contemporary significance… Orren and Skowronek uncover a transformation that revolutionized American politics and now threatens to tear it apart.”
—Timothy Shenk, New Republic

“Wherever you start out in our politics, this book will turn your sense of things sideways and make you rethink deeply held assumptions. It’s a model of what political science could be, but so rarely is.”
—Yuval Levin, National Review

“A gripping narrative…opening up new avenues for reflection along methodological, conceptual, and normative lines.”
—Bernardo Zacka, Contemporary Political Theory

It was not long ago that scientists proclaimed victory over polio, the dread disease of the 1950s. More recently polio resurfaced, not conquered at all, spreading across the countries of Africa. As we once again face the specter of this disease, along with other killers like AIDS and SARS, this powerful book reminds us of the personal cost, the cultural implications, and the historical significance of one of modern humanity's deadliest biological enemies. In Polio and Its Aftermath Marc Shell, himself a victim of polio, offers an inspired analysis of the disease. Part memoir, part cultural criticism and history, part meditation on the meaning of disease, Shell's work combines the understanding of a medical researcher with the sensitivity of a literary critic. He deftly draws a detailed yet broad picture of the lived experience of a crippling disease as it makes it way into every facet of human existence.

Polio and Its Aftermath conveys the widespread panic that struck as the disease swept the world in the mid-fifties. It captures an atmosphere in which polio vied with the Cold War as the greatest cause of unrest in North America--and in which a strange and often debilitating uncertainty was one of the disease's salient but least treatable symptoms. Polio particularly afflicted the young, and Shell explores what this meant to families and communities. And he reveals why, in spite of the worldwide relief that greeted Jonas Salk's vaccine as a miracle of modern science, we have much more to fear from polio now than we know.

The empirical starting point for anyone who wants to understand political cleavages in the democratic world, based on a unique dataset covering fifty countries since World War II.

Who votes for whom and why? Why has growing inequality in many parts of the world not led to renewed class-based conflicts, seeming instead to have come with the emergence of new divides over identity and integration? News analysts, scholars, and citizens interested in exploring those questions inevitably lack relevant data, in particular the kinds of data that establish historical and international context. Political Cleavages and Social Inequalities provides the missing empirical background, collecting and examining a treasure trove of information on the dynamics of polarization in modern democracies.

The chapters draw on a unique set of surveys conducted between 1948 and 2020 in fifty countries on five continents, analyzing the links between voters’ political preferences and socioeconomic characteristics, such as income, education, wealth, occupation, religion, ethnicity, age, and gender. This analysis sheds new light on how political movements succeed in coalescing multiple interests and identities in contemporary democracies. It also helps us understand the conditions under which conflicts over inequality become politically salient, as well as the similarities and constraints of voters supporting ethnonationalist politicians like Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, Marine Le Pen, and Donald Trump.

Bringing together cutting-edge data and historical analysis, editors Amory Gethin, Clara Martínez-Toledano, and Thomas Piketty offer a vital resource for understanding the voting patterns of the present and the likely sources of future political conflict.

In this book, John Roemer presents a unified and rigorous theory of political competition between parties. He models the theory under many specifications, including whether parties are policy oriented or oriented toward winning, whether they are certain or uncertain about voter preferences, and whether the policy space is uni- or multidimensional. He examines all eight possible combinations of these choice assumptions, and characterizes their equilibria.

He fleshes out a model in which each party is composed of three different factions concerned with winning, with policy, and with publicity. Parties compete with one another. When internal bargaining is combined with external competition, a natural equilibrium emerges, which Roemer calls party-unanimity Nash equilibrium.

Assuming only the distribution of voter preferences and the endowments of the population, he deduces the nature of the parties that will form. He then applies the theory to several empirical puzzles, including income distribution, patterns of electoral success, and why there is no labor party in the United States.

This book explores how the processes and practices of politics shape political values, such as liberty, justice, equality, and democracy. Mining the history of political episodes and political thinkers, including Caesar and Machiavelli, Mark Philp argues that it is through political activity that "values are articulated and embraced, and they become powerful motivating forces."

Political Conduct is thus an attempt to inform and enrich political theory--to show that its principles would be more relevant to actual politics if they were immersed in history and practice. Philp argues for a separation between moral and political philosophy and proposes that a less abstract and ideal approach to political philosophy than that provided by Rawls, Dworkin, Nagel, and Cohen would be more useful in illuminating the conduct of politicians and the limitations on what they can achieve.

In December 1978 the Chinese Communist Party announced dramatic changes in policy for both agriculture and industry that seemed to repudiate the Maoist “road to socialism” in favor of certain “capitalist” tendencies. The motives behind these changes, the nature of the reforms, and their effects upon the economy and political life of countryside and city are here analyzed by five political scientists and five economists. Their assessments of ongoing efforts to implement the new policies provide a timely survey of what is currently happening in China.

Part One delineates the content of agricultural reforms—including decollectivization and the provisions for households to realize private profits—and examines their impact on production, marketing, peasant income, family planning, local leadership, and rural violence. Part Two examines the evolution of industrial reforms, centering on enterprise profit retention, and their impact on political conflict, resource allocation, investment, material and financial flows, industrial structure, and composition of output. Through all ten chapters one theme is conspicuous—the multiple interactions between politics and economics in China’s new directions since the Cultural Revolution.

How can we achieve and sustain a "decent" liberal society, one that aspires to justice and equal opportunity for all and inspires individuals to sacrifice for the common good? In this book, a continuation of her explorations of emotions and the nature of social justice, Martha Nussbaum makes the case for love. Amid the fears, resentments, and competitive concerns that are endemic even to good societies, public emotions rooted in love—in intense attachments to things outside our control—can foster commitment to shared goals and keep at bay the forces of disgust and envy.

Great democratic leaders, including Abraham Lincoln, Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr., have understood the importance of cultivating emotions. But people attached to liberalism sometimes assume that a theory of public sentiments would run afoul of commitments to freedom and autonomy. Calling into question this perspective, Nussbaum investigates historical proposals for a public "civil religion" or "religion of humanity" by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill, and Rabindranath Tagore. She offers an account of how a decent society can use resources inherent in human psychology, while limiting the damage done by the darker side of our personalities. And finally she explores the cultivation of emotions that support justice in examples drawn from literature, song, political rhetoric, festivals, memorials, and even the design of public parks.

"Love is what gives respect for humanity its life," Nussbaum writes, "making it more than a shell." Political Emotionsis a challenging and ambitious contribution to political philosophy.

Are public officials morally justified in threatening violence, engaging in deception, or forcing citizens to act for their own good? Can individual officials be held morally accountable for the wrongs that governments commit? Dennis Thompson addresses these questions by developing a conception of political ethics that respects the demands of both morality and politics. He criticizes conventional conceptions for failing to appreciate the difference democracy makes, and for ascribing responsibility only to isolated leaders or to impersonal organizations. His book seeks to recapture the sense that men and women, acting for us and together with us in a democratic process, make the moral choices that govern our public life.

Thompson surveys ethical conflicts of public officials over a range of political issues, including nuclear deterrence, foreign intervention, undercover investigation, bureaucratic negligence, campaign finance, the privacy of officials, health care, welfare paternalism, drug and safety regulation, and social experimentation. He views these conflicts from the perspectives of many different kinds of public officials—elected and appointed executives at several levels of government, administrators, judges, legislators, governmental advisers, and even doctors, lawyers, social workers, and journalists whose professional roles often thrust them into public life.

In clarifying the ethical problems faced by officials, Thompson combines theoretical analysis with practical prescription, and begins to define a field of inquiry for which many have said there is a need but to which few have yet contributed. Philosophers, political scientists, policy analysts, sociologists, lawyers, and other professionals interested in ethics in government will gain insight from this book.

Taiwan is a classic case of export-led industrialization. But unlike South Korea and Japan, where large firms have been the major exporters, before the late 1980s Taiwan's successful exporters were overwhelmingly small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The SMEs became the engine of the entire economy, yet for many years the state virtually ignored the SMEs and their role as exporters.

What factors account for the success of the SMEs and their benign neglect by the state? The key was a strict division of labor: state and large private enterprises jointly monopolized the domestic market. This gave the SMEs a free run in export markets. How did this industrial structure come into being? The author argues that it was an unintended consequence of the state's policy toward the private sector and its political strategies for managing societal forces. Indeed, Taiwan's unique industrial structure was shaped by both the witting and the unwitting interactions of the state and the private sector. Moreover, as the author shows, this industrial policy was a product of the internal politics of the economic bureaucracy, and the formulation and implementation of economic policy hinged on mechanisms for solving differences within the state.

If a river runs through it, somewhere there is bound to be a bridge. Little in the landscape remains untouched by human hands, and every touch, from the simplest ditch to the most intricate monument, reveals a political decision or design. This is how Martin Warnke, one of Germany's leading art historians, looks at landscape in this book, which leads to a new way of seeing nature as we have appropriated, represented, and transformed it over time. Covering nearly a thousand years and most of western Europe, The Political Landscape provides a compelling summary history of modern humanity's ill-fated attempt to master nature.

Warnke finds evidence of the politicized landscape everywhere, on nature's own ground and in art, artifacts, and architecture, in features defined by the demands of conquest and defense, property rights and picturesque improvement, trade, tradition, communication, and commemoration. Whether considering the role of landscape in battle depictions, or investigating monumental figures from the Colossus of Rhodes to Mount Rushmore, or asking why gold backgrounds in paintings gave way to mountains topped with castles, Warnke reconfigures our idea of landscape, its significance, and its representations. The book sharpens our perceptions of nature in art and as art--a nature charged with symbol and meaning as a result of interventions by turns enlightened, insensitive, or, as now, dangerously corrosive.

The first full-length study of Francesco Patrizi—the most important political philosopher of the Italian Renaissance before Machiavelli—who sought to reconcile conflicting claims of liberty and equality in the service of good governance.

At the heart of the Italian Renaissance was a longing to recapture the wisdom and virtue of Greece and Rome. But how could this be done? A new school of social reformers concluded that the best way to revitalize corrupt institutions was to promote an ambitious new form of political meritocracy aimed at nurturing virtuous citizens and political leaders.

The greatest thinker in this tradition of virtue politics was Francesco Patrizi of Siena, a humanist philosopher whose writings were once as famous as Machiavelli’s. Patrizi wrote two major works: On Founding Republics, addressing the enduring question of how to reconcile republican liberty with the principle of merit; and On Kingship and the Education of Kings, which lays out a detailed program of education designed to instill the qualities necessary for political leadership—above all, practical wisdom and sound character.

The first full-length study of Patrizi’s life and thought in any language, Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy argues that Patrizi is a thinker with profound lessons for our time. A pioneering advocate of universal literacy who believed urban planning could help shape civic values, he concluded that limiting the political power of the wealthy, protecting the poor from debt slavery, and reducing the political independence of the clergy were essential to a functioning society. These ideas were radical in his day. Far more than an exemplar of his time, Patrizi deserves to rank alongside the great political thinkers of the Renaissance: Machiavelli, Thomas More, and Jean Bodin.

Franklin Ford's unprecedented inquiry into assassination traverses civilizations, cultures, religions, and modes of social behavior to locate the common threads of this often mysterious and always shocking phenomenon.

Are there similarities between the killings of the Gracchi brothers and the Kennedy brothers? Does the Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang have roots in the rightist murder teams of Weimar Germany? Was political context as important to the crucifixion of Jesus as to the death of Martin Luther King in 1968? Are political murders usually produced by elaborate conspiracies, or are they more often the work of lone assassins? What circumstances and impulses motivate an individual to risk his or her own life to kill another for reasons of state? This fast-paced narrative, interspersed with reflections, finds intriguing implications in a multitude of famous cases.

From the first known case of political murder, Ehud the Benjamite's stabbing of Eglon, to the recent gunning down of Indira Gandhi by two trusted Sikh bodyguards, the frequency of such acts has varied greatly over time. Mainland Greece suffered few political murders in the violent century of Pericles. The Romans, despite their bloody record under the Empire, avoided assassination for almost four hundred years under the Republic. There was a third such "remission" during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Europe's high Middle Ages, matched by yet another extending from 1650 to 1789. In the interval between, the sixteenth century was an especially violent time in countries such as Scotland, the Netherlands, and France. Assassination and terrorism increased again after 1815, but the nineteenth century did not come close to equaling the twentieth in the number of brutal episodes.

Ford's exploration of calculated, personalized assassination draws on history, literature, law, philosophy, sociology, and religion. Addressing the vast array of cases and combing thousands of years of history, he asks most of all whether assassination works. Does it, in even a minority of cases, produce results consistent with the aims of those who attempt it? Can it forestall evil acts or prevent irreparable damage inflicted by misguided leaders? Or is it "bad politics" in every sense of the term? The questions are large ones, and this book offers a sophisticated basis for seeking answers.

In this first scientific survey of political participation in the People's Republic of China, Tianjian Shi identifies twenty-eight participatory acts and groups them into seven areas: voting, campaign activities, appeals, adversarial activities, cronyism, resistance, and boycotts. What he finds will surprise many observers. Political participation in a closed society is not necessarily characterized by passive citizens driven by regime mobilization aimed at carrying out predetermined goals. Beijing citizens acknowledge that they actively engage in various voluntary participatory acts to articulate their interests.

In a society where communication channels are controlled by the government, Shi discovers, access to information from unofficial means becomes the single most important determinant for people's engaging in participatory acts. Government-sponsored channels of appeal are easily accessible to ordinary citizens, so socioeconomic resources are unimportant in determining who uses these channels. Instead, voter turnout is found to be associated with the type of work unit a person belongs to, subjective evaluations of one's own economic status, and party affiliation. Those most likely to engage in campaign activities, adversarial activities, cronyism, resistance, and boycotts are the more disadvantaged groups in Beijing. While political participation in the West fosters a sense of identification, the unconventional modes of participation in Beijing undermine the existing political order.

Political institutions are the main subject of political theory—or they ought to be. Making the case with his trademark forcefulness and intellectual aplomb, Jeremy Waldron argues in favor of reorienting the theory of politics toward the institutions and institutional principles of modern democracy and the mechanisms through which democratic ideals are achieved.

Too many political theorists are preoccupied with analyzing the nature and importance of justice, liberty, and equality, at the cost of ignoring the governmental institutions needed to achieve them. By contrast, political scientists have kept institutions in view, but they deploy a meager set of value-conceptions in evaluating them. Reflecting on an array of issues about constitutional structure, Waldron considers the uses and abuses of diverse institutions and traditions, from separation of powers and bicameralism to judicial review of legislation, the principle of loyal opposition, the nature of representation, political accountability, and the rule of law. He refines his well-known argument about the undemocratic character of judicial review, providing a capacious perspective on the proper role of courts in a constitutional democracy, and he offers an illuminating critique of the contrasting political philosophies of Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin.

Even if political theorists remain fixated on expounding the philosophical foundations of democracy, they need to complement their work with a firmer grasp of the structures through which democracy is realized. This is what political political theory means: theory addressing itself to the way political institutions frame political disagreements and orchestrate resolutions to our disputes over social ideals.

There can scarcely be a greater tribute to the vitality of the Fifth Republic's democracy than this monumental work. A searching analysis of how the will of the voters is translated into authoritative political decision making, this book not only uncovers political truths about contemporary France but also provides a model for the study of other popular forms of government.

The authors set out to find an answer to the perplexing question of how representative government operates in France in the seemingly unstable context of multiparties. By interviewing voters as well as legislators in 1967 and in 1968 after the great upheaval, and by monitoring policies of the National Assembly from 1967 to 1973, the authors test relationships between public opinion and decision making. They are able to sort out the abiding political cues that orient the French voter, to establish the normal electoral processes, to gauge the nature of mass perceptions of the political options available to voters, and to interpret the strikes, riots, and demonstrations of 1968 as a channel of communication parallel to the electoral process itself.

Lucid in style, methodologically sophisticated, and often comparative in approach, Political Representation in France is a seminal work for political scientists, sociologists, and historians.

Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru helped create the myth of a nonviolent ancient India while building a modern independence movement on the principle of nonviolence (ahimsa). But this myth obscures a troubled and complex heritage: a long struggle to reconcile the ethics of nonviolence with the need to use violence to rule. Upinder Singh documents the dynamic tension between violence and nonviolence in ancient Indian political thought and practice over twelve hundred years.

Political Violence in Ancient India looks at representations of kingship and political violence in epics, religious texts, political treatises, plays, poems, inscriptions, and art from 600 BCE to 600 CE. As kings controlled their realms, fought battles, and meted out justice, intellectuals debated the boundary between the force required to sustain power and the excess that led to tyranny and oppression. Duty (dharma) and renunciation were important in this discussion, as were punishment, war, forest tribes, and the royal hunt. Singh reveals a range of perspectives that defy rigid religious categorization. Buddhists, Jainas, and even the pacifist Maurya emperor Ashoka recognized that absolute nonviolence was impossible for kings.

By 600 CE religious thinkers, political theorists, and poets had justified and aestheticized political violence to a great extent. Nevertheless, questions, doubt, and dissent remained. These debates are as important for understanding political ideas in the ancient world as for thinking about the problem of political violence in our own time.

Pulitzer Prize–winner Steven Hahn’s provocative new book challenges deep-rooted views in the writing of American and African-American history. Moving from slave emancipations of the eighteenth century through slave activity during the Civil War and on to the black power movements of the twentieth century, he asks us to rethink African-American history and politics in bolder, more dynamic terms.

Historians have offered important new perspectives and evidence concerning the geographical expanse of slavery in the United States and the protracted process of abolishing it. They have also uncovered a wealth of new material on the political currents running through black communities from enslavement to the present day. Yet their scholarship has failed to dislodge familiar interpretive frameworks that may no longer make much sense of the past.

Based on the Nathan I. Huggins Lectures at Harvard University, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom asks why this may be so and offers sweeping reassessments. It defines new chronological and spatial boundaries for American and African-American politics during the first half of the nineteenth century. It suggests, with historical comparisons, that we may have missed a massive slave rebellion during the Civil War. And it takes a serious look at the development and appeal of Garveyism and the hidden history of black politics it may help to reveal. Throughout, it presents African Americans as central actors in the arenas of American politics, while emphasizing traditions of self-determination, self-governance, and self-defense among them.

The natural state of mankind.

Aristotle, great Greek philosopher, researcher, reasoner, and writer, born at Stagirus in 384 BC, was the son of a physician. He studied under Plato at Athens and taught there (367–347); subsequently he spent three years at the court of a former pupil in Asia Minor. After some time at Mitylene, in 343–342 he was appointed by King Philip of Macedon to be tutor of his teen-aged son Alexander. After Philip’s death in 336, Aristotle became head of his own school (of “Peripatetics”), the Lyceum at Athens. Because of anti-Macedonian feeling there after Alexander’s death in 323, he withdrew to Chalcis in Euboea, where he died in 322.

Nearly all the works Aristotle prepared for publication are lost; the priceless ones extant are lecture-materials, notes, and memoranda (some are spurious). They can be categorized as follows:

I Practical: Nicomachean Ethics; Great Ethics (Magna Moralia); Eudemian Ethics; Politics; Economics (on the good of the family); On Virtues and Vices.
II Logical: Categories; Analytics (Prior and Posterior); Interpretation; Refutations used by Sophists; Topica.
III Physical: Twenty-six works (some suspect) including astronomy, generation and destruction, the senses, memory, sleep, dreams, life, facts about animals, etc.
IV Metaphysics: on being as being.
V Art: Rhetoric and Poetics.
VI Other works including the Constitution of Athens; more works also of doubtful authorship.
VII Fragments of various works such as dialogues on philosophy and literature; and of treatises on rhetoric, politics, and metaphysics.

The Loeb Classical Library® edition of Aristotle is in twenty-three volumes.

Ian Shapiro makes a compelling case that the overriding purpose of politics should be to combat domination. Moreover, he shows how to put resistance to domination into practice at home and abroad. This is a major work of applied political theory, a profound challenge to utopian visions, and a guide to fundamental problems of justice and distribution.

“Shapiro’s insights are trenchant, especially with regards to the Citizens United decision, and his counsel on how the ‘status-quo bias’ in national political institutions favors the privileged. After more than a decade of imperial overreach, his restrained account of foreign policy should likewise find support.”
—Scott A. Lucas, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Shapiro has a brief and compelling section on the importance of hope in his first chapter. This book enacts and encourages hope, with its analytical clarity, deep engagement of complicated political issues that resist easy theorizing, and emphasis on the politically possible.”
—Kathleen Tipler, Political Science Quarterly

“Offers important insights for thinking about democracy’s prospects.”
—Christopher Hobson, Perspectives on Politics

James B. Palais theorizes in his important book on Korea that the remarkable longevity of the Yi dynasty (1392–1910) was related to the difficulties the country experienced in adapting to the modern world. He suggests that the aristocratic and hierarchical social system, which was the source of stability of the dynasty, was also the cause of its weakness.

The period from 1864 to 1873 was one in which the monarchy attempted to increase and expand central power at the expense of the powerful aristocracy. But the effort failed, and 1874 saw a rebirth of bureaucratic and aristocratic dominance. What this meant when Korea was “opened” two years later to the outside world was that the country was poorly suited to the attainment of modern national objectives—the aggrandizement of state wealth and power—in competition with other nations. Thus any sense of national purpose was subverted, and the leadership could not generate the unified support needed for either modernization or domestic harmony. The consequences for the twentieth-century world have been portentous.

James B. Palais theorizes in his important book on Korea that the remarkable longevity of the Yi dynasty (1392–1910) was related to the difficulties the country experienced in adapting to the modern world. He suggests that the aristocratic and hierarchical social system, which was the source of stability of the dynasty, was also the cause of its weakness.

The period from 1864 to 1873 was one in which the monarchy attempted to increase and expand central power at the expense of the powerful aristocracy. But the effort failed, and 1874 saw a rebirth of bureaucratic and aristocratic dominance. What this meant when Korea was “opened” two years later to the outside world was that the country was poorly suited to the attainment of modern national objectives—the aggrandizement of state wealth and power—in competition with other nations. Thus any sense of national purpose was subverted, and the leadership could not generate the unified support needed for either modernization or domestic harmony. The consequences for the twentieth-century world have been portentous.

Naito Konan's periodization of Chinese history is responsible for shaping the twentieth-century Western view of China. Naito was a journalist in the vibrant Meiji press for twenty years, during which he became recognized as Japan's leading Sinologist. He then assumed a chair in China Studies at Kyoto University, where he taught for twenty years, remaining all the while a prolific writer on public affairs. Joshua Fogel's biography treats Naito holistically, pointing up the intricate connections between his Sinological and political interests.

As a part of an ongoing tradition based in jitsugaku (concern with the practical applications of knowledge), Naito focused on what he took to be Japan's mission, after its own Meiji reforms, to help China implement comparable reforms. His emphasis on Chinese history and culture as the central influence in East Asia strengthened his Pan-Asian political convictions.

Fogel's study offers a penetrating look at a scholar-journalist whose influence, fifty years after his death, is still powerful.

This wide-ranging examination of the “newest” South is a leading candidate to replace the classic work by V. O. Key, now two generations old. Politics and Society in the South is a systematic interpretation of the most important national and state tendencies in southern politics since 1920. The authors begin by describing the salient features of the old southern politics, against which they then depict the emergence of the new South: the changing composition of the population, the growth of industry and cities, economic diversification, and the rise of an urban middle class. A major component of the greatest southern transformation since the Civil War is the altered status of blacks from a disfranchised underclass to a franchised citizenry, a change that the authors discuss in all its ramifications. The decline of the Democratic Party is charted and related to the rise of the black vote and the transitional attitudes of white southerners. Finally, regional trends in presidential, senatorial, and gubernatorial politics are set forth, and the overall political directions that are still reshaping southern politics and creating a two-party system for the first time are defined.

The authors contend that, notable improvements in race relations notwithstanding, the central tendencies in southern politics are primarily established by the values, beliefs, and objectives of the expanding white urban middle class. This is the crucible for a more competitive two-party politics that is emerging in the South.

David Kaiser looks at four hundred years of modern European history to find the political causes of general war in four distinct periods (1559–1659, 1661–1713, 1792–1815, and 1914–1945). He shows how war became a natural function of politics, a logical consequence of contemporary political behavior. Rather than fighting simply to expand, states in each war fought for specific political and economic reasons. The book illustrates the extraordinary power of politics and war in modern Western civilization, if not in history as a whole.

In a provocative and original new preface and chapter, Kaiser shows which aspects of four past areas of conflict do, and do not, seem relevant to the immediate future, and he sketches out some new possibilities for Europe.

Scholars normally emphasize the contrast between the two great eighteenth-century thinkers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith. Rousseau is seen as a critic of modernity, Smith as an apologist. Istvan Hont, however, finds significant commonalities in their work, arguing that both were theorists of commercial society and from surprisingly similar perspectives.

In making his case, Hont begins with the concept of commercial society and explains why that concept has much in common with what the German philosopher Immanuel Kant called unsocial sociability. This is why many earlier scholars used to refer to an Adam Smith Problem and, in a somewhat different way, to a Jean-Jacques Rousseau Problem. The two problems—and the questions about the relationship between individualism and altruism that they raised—were, in fact, more similar than has usually been thought because both arose from the more fundamental problems generated by thinking about morality and politics in a commercial society. Commerce entails reciprocity, but a commercial society also entails involuntary social interdependence, relentless economic competition, and intermittent interstate rivalry. This was the world to which Rousseau and Smith belonged, and Politics in Commercial Society is an account of how they thought about it.

Building his argument on the similarity between Smith’s and Rousseau’s theoretical concerns, Hont shows the relevance of commercial society to modern politics—the politics of the nation-state, global commerce, international competition, social inequality, and democratic accountability.

In November 1965 the white Rhodesian government headed by Prime Minister Ian D. Smith unilaterally declared itself independent. Ties with Britain which stretched back to the nineteenth century were severed, and Rhodesia, because of the nature of her decision and the orientation of her domestic racial policy, became the pariah of the international community.

Seven years later, no nation in the world had formally recognized the rebel Rhodesian government. The United Nations, for the first time in its history, voted to impose mandatory economic sanctions in an effort to force Rhodesia to renounce her action. And yet, white Rhodesia survived. Less than one-quarter million white Rhodesians continued to dominate five million Africans and to fend off all internal and international pressures for change.

Larry W. Bowman’s comprehensive analysis of Rhodesian society and politics, from the arrival of Europeans in 1890 to the present, shows that the political crises starting in the 1960s were firmly rooted in choices and patterns of interaction established much earlier. The author concentrates on the period from the beginning of the Central African Federation in 1953 to the Pearce Commission’s rejection in May 1972 of the attempt by the British and Rhodesian governments to resolve their differences. He challenges the widely held view that there existed during the 1950s and 1960s a viable possibility of serious interracial cooperation leading to a working multiracial or African nationalist government. His conclusion is that the white system is solidly entrenched, reflecting over eighty years of persistent growth and elaboration coupled with British indifference, and that change is unlikely to come about except through violence.

Bowman’s material is unique, for it was gathered during a two-year stay in Rhodesia when critical events were taking place; his documents, interviews, and research cannot be duplicated. His study includes a close examination of the internal workings of the Rhodesian Front Party which has governed Rhodesia since 1962.