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Exploring themes that preoccupied Albert Camus--absurdity, silence, revolt, fidelity, and moderation--Robert Zaretsky portrays a moralist who refused to be fooled by the nobler names we assign to ou

Throughout history, human societies have been organized preeminently as territories—politically bounded regions whose borders define the jurisdiction of laws and the movement of peoples. At a time whe

For as long as there have been nations, there has been an “international”—a sphere of cross-border relations. But for most of human history, this space was sparsely occupied. States and regions were c

A leading intellectual historian shows how free speech, once viewed as both hazardous and unnatural, was reinvented as an unalloyed good, with enormous consequences for our society today. Every premodern society, from Sumeria to China to seventeenth-century Europe, knew that bad words could destroy lives, undermine social order, and create political unrest. Given the obvious dangers of outspokenness, regulating speech and print was universally accepted as a necessary and proper activity of government. Only in the early 1700s did this old way begin to break down. In a brief span of time, the freedom to use words as one pleased was reimagined as an ideal to be held and defended in common. Fara Dabhoiwala explores the surprising paths free speech has taken across the globe since its invention three hundred years ago. Though free speech has become a central democratic principle, its origins and evolution have less to do with the high-minded pursuit of liberty and truth than with the self-i

Cundill Prize FinalistA Financial Times Book of the YearA Spectator Book of the YearA Five Books Book of the Year "Outstanding, original, and revolutionary. Favereau subjects the Mongols to a much-needed re-evaluation, showing how they were able not only to conquer but to control a vast empire. A remarkable book."--Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads "The Mongols have been ill-served by history, the victims of an unfortunate mixture of prejudice and perplexity...The Horde flourished, in Favereau's fresh, persuasive telling, precisely because it was not the one-trick homicidal rabble of legend."--Wall Street Journal "Fascinating...The Mongols were a sophisticated people with an impressive talent for government and a sensitive relationship with the natural world...An impressively researched and intelligently reasoned book."--Gerard DeGroot, The Times The Mongols are widely known for one thing: conquest. But in this first comprehensive history of the Horde, the western portion of th

In this monumental history of the First World War, Germany’s leading historian of the twentieth century’s first great catastrophe explains the war’s origins, course, and consequences. With an unrivale

The scale and the depth of Nazi brutality seem to defy understanding. What could drive people to fight, kill, and destroy with such ruthless ambition? Observers and historians have offered countless e

"The book addresses questions about the roles of law and politics and the challenge of legitimacy in constitutional adjudication in the Supreme Court. With all sophisticated observers recognizing that

A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year on Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet UnionThe Russian oil industry—which vies with Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest producer and exporter of oil, provid

The Image of the Black in African and Asian Art asks how the black figure was depicted by artists from the non-Western world. Beginning with ancient Egypt—positioned properly as part of African histor

For a Western world anxious to understand Islam and, in particular, Shi'ism, this book arrives with urgently needed information and critical analysis, Hamid Dabashi exposes the soul of Shi'ism as a re

Fusing high scholarship with high drama, Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg uncover a secret and extraordinary aspect of a legendary Renaissance scholar's already celebrated achievement. The French P

From January 1945, in the last months of the Third Reich, about 250,000 inmates of concentration camps perished on death marches and in countless incidents of mass slaughter. They were murdered with

In September 1945, after the fall of the atomic bomb--and with it, the Japanese empire--Asia was dominated by the British. Governing a vast crescent of land that stretched from India through Burma an

In his first term in office, Franklin Roosevelt helped pull the nation out of the Great Depression with his landmark programs. In November 1936, every state except Maine and Vermont voted enthusiasti

Along with the plays of William Shakespeare and the works of Charles Dickens, Jane Austen’s novels are among the most beloved books of Western literature. Pride and Prejudice (1813) was in Austen’s li

Today most Americans, black and white, identify slavery with cotton, the deep South, and the African-American church. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century, after almost two hundred years of

A long-awaited companion to The New Harvard Dictionary of Music, and compiled with the same meticulous scholarship and delight in detail, this biographical dictionary emphasizes classical and art mus

Has the worst of times for humanity--this century bloodied by wars and revolutions without precedent in history--been the best of times for women? How have the promises of freedom, parity with men, fu

Two hundred and thirty-four striking photographs of the port of Boston combine with interpretive commentary to recapture the flavor, buoyancy, and excitement of the city's years as one of the two or t

With engaging wit and subtle irony, Albert Hirschman maps the diffuse and treacherous world of reactionary rhetoric in which conservative public figures, thinkers, and polemicists have been arguing ag

The Dada Painters and Poets offers the authentic answer to the question "What is Dada?" This incomparable collection of essays, manifestos, and illustrations was prepared by Robert Motherwell with th

An account of the author's two grandfathers--a provincial samurai and founder of the Meiji government and an enterprising developer of the silk trade with America

Unlike the papers of some other great economists, those of Kenneth Arrow are being read and studied today with even greater care and attention than when they first appeared in the journals. The public

This Faustian tale of the spiritual disintegration of a young minister, written in the 1890s, deals subtly and powerfully with the impact of science on innocence and the collective despair that marked

A renowned political philosopher updates his classic book on the American political tradition to address the perils democracy confronts today. The 1990s were a heady time. The Cold War had ended, and America's version of liberal capitalism seemed triumphant. And yet, amid the peace and prosperity, anxieties about the project of self-government could be glimpsed beneath the surface. So argued Michael Sandel, in his influential and widely debated book Democracy's Discontent, published in 1996. The market faith was eroding the common life. A rising sense of disempowerment was likely to provoke backlash, he wrote, from those who would "shore up borders, harden the distinction between insiders and outsiders, and promise a politics to 'take back our culture and take back our country, ' to 'restore our sovereignty' with a vengeance." Now, a quarter century later, Sandel updates his classic work for an age when democracy's discontent has hardened into a country divided against itself. In this

Winner of the Scribes Book Award A highly original framework for restoring confidence in a government bureaucracy increasingly derided as "the deep state." "Has something to offer both critics and supporters...a valuable contribution to the ongoing debate over the constitutionality of the modern state."--Review of Politics "At no time more than the present, a defense of expertise-based governance and administration is sorely needed, and this book provides it with gusto."--Frederick Schauer, author of Thinking Like a Lawyer "As brilliantly imaginative as it is urgently timely. By identifying an inner morality of administrative law, Sunstein and Vermeule refute the most serious legal and political attacks on the administrative state since the New Deal."--Richard H. Fallon, Jr., Harvard Law School Is the modern administrative state illegitimate? Unconstitutional? Unaccountable? Dangerous? America has long been divided over these questions, but the debate has recently taken on more urgency

“Profound, beautifully written, and inspiring. It proves that Nussbaum deserves her reputation as one of the greatest modern philosophers.”—The Globe and Mail“At a time of growing national chauvinism, Martha Nussbaum’s excellent restatement of the cosmopolitan tradition is a welcome and much-needed contribution… Illuminating and thought-provoking.”—Times Higher Education“Lucid and accessible… In an age of resurgent nationalism, a study of the idea and ideals of cosmopolitanism is remarkably timely.”—Ryan Patrick Hanley, Journal of the History of PhilosophyThe cosmopolitan political tradition in Western thought begins with the Greek Cynic Diogenes, who, when asked where he came from, responded that he was a citizen of the world. Rather than declaring his lineage, city, social class, or gender, he defined himself as a human being, implicitly asserting the equal worth of all human beings.Martha Nussbaum pursues this “noble but flawed” vision of world citizenship as it finds expression in

Far from displacing religions, as has been supposed, capitalism became one, with money as its deity. Eugene McCarraher reveals how mammon ensnared us and how we can find a more humane, sacramental way

The award-winning author of The Music of the Primes explores the future of creativity and how machine learning will disrupt, enrich, and transform our understanding of what it means to be human.Can a well-programmed machine do anything a human can—only better? Complex algorithms are buying our groceries, picking our partners, and driving our investments. They can navigate more data than a doctor or lawyer and act with greater precision. For many years we’ve taken solace in the notion that they can’t create. But now that algorithms can learn and adapt, does the future of creativity belong to machines too?It is hard to imagine a better guide to the bewildering world of artificial intelligence than Marcus du Sautoy, a celebrated Oxford mathematician whose work on symmetry in the ninth dimension has taken him to the vertiginous edge of mathematical understanding. In The Creativity Code he considers what machine learning means for the future of creativity. Programs like Deep Dream produce d

The American founders did not endorse a citizen’s right to know. More openness in government, more frankness in a doctor’s communication with patients, more disclosure in a food manufacturer’s package

The Civil Rights Revolution carries Bruce Ackerman's sweeping reinterpretation of constitutional history into the era beginning with Brown v. Board of Education. From Rosa Parks’s courageous defiance, to Martin Luther King’s resounding cadences in “I Have a Dream,” to Lyndon Johnson’s leadership of Congress, to the Supreme Court’s decisions redefining the meaning of equality, the movement to end racial discrimination decisively changed our understanding of the Constitution.“The Civil Rights Act turns 50 this year, and a wave of fine books accompanies the semicentennial. Ackerman’s is the most ambitious; it is the third volume in an ongoing series on American constitutional history called We the People. A professor of law and political science at Yale, Ackerman likens the act to a constitutional amendment in its significance to the country’s legal development.”—Michael O’Donnell, The Atlantic“Ackerman weaves political theory with historical detail, explaining how the civil rights moveme

Honorable Mention, PROSE AwardA Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year A Junto Favorite Book of the YearBeginning with metaphysical debates in the sixteenth century over the nature of Christ’s

Many people are familiar with American Commodore Matthew Perry’s expedition to open trade relations with Japan in the early 1850s. Less well known is that on the heels of the Perry squadron followed a

When the State Meets the Street probes the complex moral lives of street-level bureaucrats: the frontline social and welfare workers, police officers, and educators who represent government’s human face to ordinary citizens. Too often dismissed as soulless operators, these workers wield a significant margin of discretion and make decisions that profoundly affect people’s lives. Combining insights from political theory with his own ethnographic fieldwork as a receptionist in an urban antipoverty agency, Bernardo Zacka shows us firsthand the predicament in which these public servants are entangled.Public policy consists of rules and regulations, but its implementation depends on how street-level bureaucrats interpret them and exercise discretionary judgment. These workers are expected to act as sensible moral agents in a working environment that is notoriously challenging and that conspires against them. Confronted by the pressures of everyday work, they often and unknowingly settle for

The almost 300 letters in volume 13 of Adams Family Correspondence were written during seventeen tumultuous months of John Adams’s presidency. Consumed with executive duties, he depended on surrogates

An enduring theme of Western philosophy is that we are all one another’s equals. Yet the principle of basic equality is woefully under-explored in modern moral and political philosophy. In a major new work, Jeremy Waldron attempts to remedy that shortfall with a subtle and multifaceted account of the basis for the West’s commitment to human equality.What does it mean to say we are all one another’s equals? Is this supposed to distinguish humans from other animals? What is human equality based on? Is it a religious idea, or a matter of human rights? Is there some essential feature that all human beings have in common? Waldron argues that there is no single characteristic that serves as the basis of equality. He says the case for moral equality rests on four capacities that all humans have the potential to possess in some degree: reason, autonomy, moral agency, and ability to love. But how should we regard the differences that people display on these various dimensions? And what are we t

Economists make confident assertions in op-ed columns and on cable news—so why are their explanations often at odds with equally confident assertions from other economists? And why are all economic

Americans have long viewed marriage between a white man and a white woman as a sacred union. But marriages between African Americans have seldom been treated with the same reverence. This discriminato

Because Thomas Hardy is so closely associated with the rural Wessex of his novels, stories, and poems, it is easy to forget that he was, in his own words, half a Londoner. Focusing on the formative fi