Princeton Classics

In her classic book The Global City, Saskia Sassen tells how New York, London, and Tokyo became command centers of the emerging global economy and, in the process, underwent massive and parallel changes. The book reorients the way we think about how cities shape and are shaped by globalization and provides lessons for the future. Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor Emerita of Sociology at Columbia University. Her books include Territory, Authority, Rights (Princeton) and A Sociology of Globalization. "This is brilliant stuff, both in its broadness of sociological scope and its voluminous collection of data from a vast number of sources in the three cities."---Scott Lash, Times Higher Education Supplement "A very significant book indeed. . . . A systematic detailed analysis of the three largest urban economies in the advanced world."---Peter Hall, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research "[A] high-powered and at times horrific book. Sassen shows how dangerously city life has been affected by the influx of employees of the multinational firms which move into major cities and virtually colonize them, riving even greater wedges between the rich and poor." "The most detailed and sophisticated anatomy yet published of the functioning of the new producer services sector in the global economy."---Mark Levine, Urban Affairs Quarterly "A multi-disciplinary tour de force that should be read not only by regional economists but also by urban geographers, sociologists, and planners." "An exciting and persuasive work. It incorporates a herculean research effort."---Susan Fainstein, Journal of the American Planning Association "The implications of Sassen's research . . . are sobering."---Rudolf Klein, Times Literary Supplement "A landmark study in the political economy of cities."---Anthony King, Newsline

A Nobel Prize–winning economist tells the remarkable story of how the world has grown healthier, wealthier, but also more unequal over the past two and half centuries The world is a better place than it used to be. People are healthier, wealthier, and live longer. Yet the escapes from destitution by so many has left gaping inequalities between people and nations. In The Great Escape, Nobel Prize–winning economist Angus Deaton-one of the foremost experts on economic development and on poverty-tells the remarkable story of how, beginning 250 years ago, some parts of the world experienced sustained progress, opening up gaps and setting the stage for today's disproportionately unequal world. Deaton takes an in-depth look at the historical and ongoing patterns behind the health and wealth of nations, and addresses what needs to be done to help those left behind. Deaton describes vast innovations and wrenching setbacks: the successes of antibiotics, pest control, vaccinations, and clean water on the one hand, and disastrous famines and the HIV/AIDS epidemic on the other. He examines the United States, a nation that has prospered but is today experiencing slower growth and increasing inequality. He also considers how economic growth in India and China has improved the lives of more than a billion people. Deaton argues that international aid has been ineffective and even harmful. He suggests alternative efforts-including reforming incentives to drug companies and lifting trade restrictions-that will allow the developing world to bring about its own Great Escape. Demonstrating how changes in health and living standards have transformed our lives, The Great Escape is a powerful guide to addressing the well-being of all nations. Angus Deaton, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in economics, is the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of Economics and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Economics Department at Princeton University. His many books include The Analysis of Household Surveys and Economics and Consumer Behavior. He is a past president of the American Economic Association. "If you want to learn about why human welfare overall has gone up so much over time, you should read The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality."-Bill Gates "There is nobody better than Angus Deaton to explain why our lives are longer, healthier, and more prosperous than those of our great-grandparents. The story he tells is much more than an inexorable march of progress-it has also been unequal, uneven, and incomplete, and at each step, politics has played a defining role. This is a must-read for anybody interested in the wealth and health of nations."-Daron Acemoglu, coauthor of Why Nations Fail "At once engaging and compassionate, this is an uplifting story by a major scholar."-Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion "Magisterial and superb."-William Easterly, author of The White Man's Burden "The Great Escape tells the two biggest stories in history: how humanity got healthy and wealthy, and why some people got so much healthier and wealthier than others. Angus Deaton, one of the world's leading development economists, takes us on an extraordinary journey-from an age when almost everyone was poor and sick to one where most people have escaped these evils-and he tells us how the billion still trapped in extreme poverty can join in this great escape. Everyone who wants to understand the twenty-first century should read this book."-Ian Morris, author of Why the West Rules-for Now "Deaton's account of global advances in health is magisterial. It is especially convincing in disentangling economic progress from technological growth as sources of health improvements. A very big story, this book should affect the way we think about human development and the role of science and science-based government programs. The language is m

In this landmark book, Scott Page redefines the way we understand ourselves in relation to one another. The Difference is about how we think in groups-and how our collective wisdom exceeds the sum of its parts. Why can teams of people find better solutions than brilliant individuals working alone? And why are the best group decisions and predictions those that draw upon the very qualities that make each of us unique? The answers lie in diversity-not what we look like outside, but what we look like within, our distinct tools and abilities. The Difference reveals that progress and innovation may depend less on lone thinkers with enormous IQs than on diverse people working together and capitalizing on their individuality. Page shows how groups that display a range of perspectives outperform groups of like-minded experts. Diversity yields superior outcomes, and Page proves it using his own cutting-edge research. Moving beyond the politics that cloud standard debates about diversity, he explains why difference beats out homogeneity, whether you're talking about citizens in a democracy or scientists in the laboratory. He examines practical ways to apply diversity's logic to a host of problems, and along the way offers fascinating and surprising examples, from the redesign of the Chicago "El" to the truth about where we store our ketchup. Page changes the way we understand diversity-how to harness its untapped potential, how to understand and avoid its traps, and how we can leverage our differences for the benefit of all. Scott E. Page is the John Seely Brown Distinguished University Professor of Complexity, Social Science, and Management and the Williamson Family Professor of Business Administration at the University of Michigan. His books include The Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You. "Scott Page has brought to our attention a practically important proposition: diversity of viewpoints is of the greatest importance in solving the problems that face us individually and collectively. Diversity among a group of problem solvers is more important than individual excellence. Page's exposition remarkably combines lightness and breadth of knowledge with rigor and evidence."-Kenneth J. Arrow, Nobel Prize-winning economist "Scott Page knows more about diversity than anyone anywhere. In The Difference, he shows why diversity matters, how it leads to better outcomes, and most importantly why achieving the significant benefits of diversity requires thinking well beyond traditional categories such as race, gender, or ethnicity. Knowledge of this book should be a litmus test for educators and diversity trainers-if you haven't read it, you are just talking metaphor. Stop playing defense and start playing offense by buying this book."-Bill Miller, Chairman and Chief Investment Officer, Legg Mason Capital Management "The book is brilliant. Page has a dazzling eclecticism."-Max Bazerman, Harvard Business School "Does diversity trump ability when it comes to problem solving? Scott Page shows that the answer is, at least sometimes, yes. You'd do better to add more diversity of perspectives to your problem-solving team than to increase the average ability of individual team members. Diversity in both experience and identity can spark a group's creativity. Page pursues the logic of diversity and shows why and when hiring people who differ can lead to a better bottom line."-Ian Ayres, coauthor of Why Not? How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems Big and Small "Rather than ponder moral questions like, 'Why can't we all get along?' Dr. Page asks practical ones like, 'How can we all be more productive together?' The answer, he suggests, is in messy, creative organizations and environments with individuals from vastly different backgrounds and life experiences."---Claudia Dreifus, New York Times "The Difference is brimming with so many intriguing insights and findings that I cannot do ju

"Winner of the Warren F. Kuehl Prize, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations" James M. McPherson is the George Henry Davis '86 Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University. His many books include the Pulitzer Prize-winning Battle Cry of Freedom and the New York Times bestseller Crossroads of Freedom. Originally published in 1964, The Struggle for Equality presents an incisive and vivid look at the abolitionist movement and the legal basis it provided to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Pulitzer Prize–winning historian James McPherson explores the role played by rights activists during and after the Civil War, and their evolution from despised fanatics into influential spokespersons for the radical wing of the Republican Party. Asserting that it was not the abolitionists who failed to instill principles of equality, but rather the American people who refused to follow their leadership, McPherson raises questions about the obstacles that have long hindered American reform movements. This new Princeton Classics edition marks the fiftieth anniversary of the book's initial publication and includes a new preface by the author. "Must surely be assigned an important place in the literature of the history of ideas and of race relations in the United States." "The Abolitionist Legacy shows many of the same graces as its predecessor: wide-ranging and careful research, a strong sense of story line, an eye for good quotations, unyielding sympathy for those who devoted their lives to uplifting the freedmen." "In addition to discussing the complex blend of egalitarianism and paternalism in the thought of white proponents of black advancement, McPherson offers suggestions of the intricate mixture of racial consciousness, individual ambition, and racial romanticism that continues to fuel modern black separatism."

"Winner of the 2018 Legacy Award, Presidents and Executive Politics Section of the American Political Science Association" Jeffrey K. Tulis teaches in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. His books include Legacies of Losing in American Politics. Russell Muirhead is the Robert Clements Professor of Democracy and Politics at Dartmouth College. Modern presidents regularly appeal over the heads of Congress to the people at large to generate support for public policies. The Rhetorical Presidency makes the case that this development, born at the outset of the twentieth century, is the product of conscious political choices that fundamentally transformed the presidency and the meaning of American governance. Now with a new foreword by Russell Muirhead and a new afterword by the author, this landmark work probes political pathologies and analyzes the dilemmas of presidential statecraft. Extending a tradition of American political writing that begins with The Federalist and continues with Woodrow Wilson's Congressional Government, The Rhetorical Presidency remains a pivotal work in its field. "[The] canonical book on the history of presidential rhetoric."---Christopher Baylor, Washington Post "Over the past few years the conceptual foundations of presidential studies have been recast. Jeffrey Tulis's The Rhetorical Presidency stands . . . as one of the benchmarks of the new formulation. . . . [A] formidable piece of scholarship."---Stephen Skowronek, The Review of Politics "The Rhetorical Presidency is one of the two or three most important and perceptive works written by a political scientist in the twentieth century, and it is the one that may help the most to explain the pathological aspects of modern politics--not only in the United States but in all social democracies."---Jeffrey Friedman, Critical Review "In this outstanding work Tulis elegantly portrays the increased use of rhetoric by 20th-century presidents, portraying the negative effects of the 'rhetorical Presidency.' Presidents of the 19th century were seldom seen or heard by the public, a comportment intended by the founders who feared the excitation of the masses by demagogic leaders. Theodore Roosevelt changed the practice, and Woodrow Wilson provided the rationale for speaking 'the common meaning of the common voice.' The drawbacks of this behavior include an increasing lack of 'fit' between the office and its occupant, a greater mutability of policy by rhetorical persuasion, the erosion of careful deliberation, and the decay of political discourse. This is an exemplary work of mutually supportive normative argument and empirical investigation. Tulis's quantitative analysis is motivated by concern for the health of the American republic, not by a banal attempt to be 'scientific.' The work is a must for all undergraduate libraries."---S.E. Schier, Choice "Brilliant."---George Will, Newsweek "Writing in 1988, I argued that The Rhetorical Presidency was right in all its essentials, and beseeched political scientists to center future presidential studies on its perceptive interpretations and practical insights. Now, some two decades and one White House experience later, I must revise that assessment. Upward, that is . . . The Rhetorical Presidency has proven to be even better as political development crystal ball than it was as a rear view mirror."---John J. DiIulio, Critical Review "The best book on this subject."---Walter Berns, Wall Street Journal "Jeffrey Tulis's book The Rhetorical Presidency has experienced a scholarly reception enjoyed by few other works in presidency studies. Ten years after its 1987 publication, it was the subject of at least two retrospective edited volumes (Ellis 1998; Medhurst 1996). Ten years later, Critical Review published a 20-year retrospective on the work, with another edited volume plumbing the nuances of the book's thesis following (Friedman 2007; Medhurst 2008)."---David Crockett, Presidential Studi

Henri Pirenne (1862–1935) was professor emeritus at Ghent University and one of the world's leading historians. His books include Mohammed and Charlemagne and Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe. Michael McCormick is the Francis Goelet Professor of Medieval History at Harvard University. Nearly a century after it was first published in 1925, Medieval Cities remains one of the most provocative works of medieval history ever written. Here, Henri Pirenne argues that it was not the invasion of the Germanic tribes that destroyed the civilization of antiquity, but rather the closing of Mediterranean trade by Arab conquest in the seventh century. The consequent interruption of long-distance commerce accelerated the decline of the ancient cities of Europe. Pirenne challenges conventional wisdom by attributing the origins of medieval cities to the revival of trade, tracing their growth from the tenth century to the twelfth. He also describes the important role the middle class played in the development of the modern economic system and modern culture. Featuring a new introduction by Michael McCormick, this Princeton Classics edition of Medieval Cities is essential reading for all students of medieval European history. "Praise for the previous edition: "An indispensable complement to the confusing history of the Carolingian period and early days of European civic development. . . . In short, it is one of the best sort of contributions to historical writing--those which combine simplicity with erudition and imagination with accuracy.""

R. R. Palmer (1909–2002) was professor emeritus of history at Yale University and a guest scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His books include Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution (Princeton). The first volume of The Age of the Democratic Revolution won the Bancroft Prize in 1960. David Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University. For the Western world, the period from 1760 to 1800 was the great revolutionary era in which the outlines of the modern democratic state came into being. Here for the first time in one volume is R. R. Palmer's magisterial account of this incendiary age. Palmer argues that the American, French, and Polish revolutions-and the movements for political change in Britain, Ireland, Holland, and elsewhere-were manifestations of similar political ideas, needs, and conflicts. Palmer traces the clash between an older form of society, marked by legalized social rank and hereditary or self-perpetuating elites, and a new form of society that placed a greater value on social mobility and legal equality. Featuring a new foreword by David Armitage, this Princeton Classics edition of The Age of the Democratic Revolution introduces a new generation of readers to this enduring work of political history. "Praise for the previous Volume 1 edition: "Robert Palmer possesses the combination of patient scholarship and broad philosophical inquiry the task demands. . . . This book will enlarge and clarify our understanding of modern Western history. It will do more than that. It will re-emphasize the strength and vitality of the roots that supported the growth of democracy in the Old and New Worlds.""---Geoffrey Bruun, The New York Times "Praise for the previous Volume 2 edition: ". . . This is the most important book on the Europe of the French Revolution published in English for more than a generation. It marks the turn of the tide, demonstrating as it does the hollowness of the current conservative interpretation of the Revolution and it will discredit for the future all sloppy generalizations about Jacobins, demagogues, and revolutionary mobs. . . . [Professor Palmer's] knowledge of printed sources is exceptionally thorough, ancient as well as modern, and his judgment of what is good and reliable seems unerring.""---J. H. Plumb, New York Review of Books "Praise for the previous Volume 1 edition: "Professor Palmer presents his historical synthesis with meticulous scholarship, pungent clarity, and emphatic conviction. . . . He has the rare gift of analyzing a historical situation in a manner that reveals, at the same time, both its past and its present significance.""---J. Salwyn Schapiro, Saturday Review "Praise for the previous Volume 1 edition: "It is a stimulating and provocative book in explicit defense of a position--a moral, political, if not quite religious position--which is the relatively unexamined position of the great majority of Americans. A reading of this book should help many to an explicit examination of their beliefs that may strengthen them and should certainly clarify them.""---Crane Brinton, New York Herald Tribune "Praise for the previous Volume 2 edition: "With the publication of this second volume of The Age of the Democratic Revolution, R. R. Palmer concludes his patient and magisterial reassessment of the revolutionary ferment that stirred Europe and America between 1760 and 1800. . . . While Volume I covered thirty-two years, Volume II covers only eight, and the detail is correspondingly enriched. The stage remains the same, a vast stage extending from Scotland to Sicily and from Moscow to the Mississippi. Manipulating the spotlight of attention with skill and precision, Palmer shifts the focus from country to country, clarifying the particular conditions and specific developments in each. Despite the frequent changes of scene the drama is saved from incoherence by its dominant theme, a theme that emerg

Amos Ih Tiao Chang (1916–98) was professor of architecture at Kansas State University. His books include China: Tao in Architecture. David Wang is professor of architecture in the School of Design and Construction at Washington State University. He is the author of A Philosophy of Chinese Architecture: Past, Present, Future. Frank Lloyd Wright first noted the affinity between modern Western architecture and the philosophy of the ancient Chinese writer Laotzu. In this classic work, Amos Ih Tiao Chang expands on that idea, developing the parallel with the aid of architectural drawings and Chinese paintings. Now with a new foreword by David Wang, this book reveals the vitality of intangible, or negative, elements. Chang writes that these qualities make architectonic forms "come alive, become human, naturally harmonize with one another, and enable us to experience them with human sensibility." The Tao of Architecture continues to be essential reading for understanding the intersection between architecture and philosophy. "An extremely captivating and thought-provoking essay." "The measure of Dr. Chang's achievement is [in] its broad vision and insight. . . In sum, [this book] wonderfully repays the intense and difficult reading it demands."-Alan Gowans, Art Bulletin

"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2005" F. E. Peters is professor emeritus of history, religion, and Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at New York University. His many books include Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians (Princeton). F.E. Peters, a scholar without peer in the comparative study of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, revisits his pioneering work. Peters has rethought and thoroughly rewritten his classic The Children of Abraham for a new generation of readers-at a time when the understanding of these three religious traditions has taken on a new and critical urgency. He began writing about all three faiths in the 1970s, long before it was fashionable to treat Islam in the context of Judaism and Christianity, or to align all three for a family portrait. In this updated edition, he lays out the similarities and differences of the three religious siblings with great clarity and succinctness and with that same remarkable objectivity that is the hallmark of all the author's work. Peters traces the three faiths from the sixth century B.C., when the Jews returned to Palestine from exile in Babylonia, to the time in the Middle Ages when they approached their present form. He points out that all three faith groups, whom the Muslims themselves refer to as "People of the Book," share much common ground. Most notably, each embraces the practice of worshipping a God who intervenes in history on behalf of His people. The book's text is direct and accessible with thorough and nuanced discussions of each of the three religions. Footnotes provide the reader with expert guidance into the highly complex issues that lie between every line of this stunning edition of The Children of Abraham. Complete with a new preface by the author, this Princeton Classics edition presents this landmark study to a new generation of readers. "As John L. Esposito makes clear in his helpful foreword, Professor F.E. Peters' revision of this important, accessible discussion of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition is a welcome contribution for a new generation of readers facing an international political environment where respectful engagement is imperative." "The new edition of Francis E. Peters' The Children of Abraham: Judaism, Christianity, Islam . . . is written in a direct and accessible style with thorough and nuanced discussions of each of the three Abrahamic traditions. . . . We have to try our best to understand other religions and our own. Perhaps Peters' book can help us in this."---Horst Jesse, European Legacy "I know of no more measured and thoughtful historical survey of the formative development of the conjoined tradition of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thought and practice than this one."-William A. Graham, Harvard Divinity School "The Children of Abraham is a concise introduction to the work of a scholar who thinks about every aspect of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam 'in triplicate.' This new edition deserves a warm welcome."-Jack Miles, author of God: A Biography and Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God "For many years this book has occupied a treasured spot on my shelves and I have recommended it countless times. A new, substantially rewritten edition could not be more welcome. There is simply no other volume that presents such broad erudition in a compact, accessible, and beautifully written format."-Jane Dammen McAuliffe, general editor of the Encyclopaedia of the Qur'an "The Children of Abraham is one of the first synoptic presentations of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that compares the structures of the three religions without asserting the superiority of any one of them. Fully revised, this new edition reflects current scholarship in the field and contains new footnotes and chapter subheads that make it even more user friendly than before. The book will appeal to teachers of comparative religion as well as to historians looking for a concise narrative about Christianity, Judaism, or Is

"Winner of the 2006 David and Elaine Spitz Prize, Conference for the Study of Political Thought" Sheldon S. Wolin (1922–2015) was professor emeritus of politics at Princeton University. He taught political theory for forty years and was the founding editor of the journal Democracy. Wendy Brown is Class of 1936 First Chair of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Politics and Vision is a landmark work by one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century. This is a significantly expanded edition of one of the greatest works of modern political theory. Sheldon Wolin's Politics and Vision inspired and instructed two generations of political theorists after its appearance in 1960. Substantially expanded for republication in 2004, it is both a sweeping survey of Western political thought and a powerful account of contemporary predicaments of power and democracy. In lucid and compelling prose, Sheldon Wolin offers original, subtle, and often surprising interpretations of political theorists from Plato to Rawls. Situating them historically while sounding their depths, he critically engages their diverse accounts of politics, theory, power, justice, citizenship, and institutions. The new chapters, which show how thinkers have grappled with the immense possibilities and dangers of modern power, are themselves a major theoretical statement. They culminate in Wolin's remarkable argument that the United States has invented a new political form, "inverted totalitarianism," in which economic rather than political power is dangerously dominant. In this expanded edition, the book that helped to define political theory in the late twentieth century should energize, enlighten, and provoke generations of scholars to come. Wolin originally wrote Politics and Vision to challenge the idea that political analysis should consist simply of the neutral observation of objective reality. He argues that political thinkers must also rely on creative vision. Wolin shows that great theorists have been driven to shape politics to some vision of the Good that lies outside the existing political order. As he tells it, the history of theory is thus, in part, the story of changing assumptions about the Good. Acclaimed as a tour de force when it was first published, and a major scholarly event when the expanded edition appeared, Politics and Vision will instruct, inspire, and provoke for generations to come. "{T}he original edition . . . provided the most impressive synoptic interpretation of politics by any recent Western thinker. Measured, assured, and resolutely independent, it was also wonderfully lacking in self-importance. . . . {T}hat first book remains just as illuminating and every bit as imposing; but it is now accompanied by a second and very different book. . . . Its message is chilling . . . that politics itself, in its generous Western understanding, is well on the way to being eliminated from the experience of human beings. Each of these books is a remarkable achievement."---John Dunn, Times Higher Education Supplement "Politics and Vision is one of the twentieth century's most important works of political philosophy. Its magisterial sweep of the ideas and philosophical debates that define western civilization illuminates what allows a civic democracy to flourish and what destroys it. Wolin uses the insights of the great philosophical minds of the past, from Plato to Karl Marx, Max Weber and Hannah Arendt, as a lens by which he examines our own failed democracy, a system he describes as "inverted totalitarianism." In the pantheon of contemporary political philosophers Sheldon Wolin stands alone, not only for his brilliance but for his courage."-Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize–winner and author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning "Sheldon Wolin is our premier contemporary theorist of engaged democracy. This expanded edition of Politics and Vision offers an extraordinarily comprehensive and acute acco

Anthony Grafton is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University. Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) was a Dutch humanist, scholar, and social critic, and one of the most important figures of the Renaissance. The Praise of Folly is perhaps his best-known work. Originally written to amuse his friend Sir Thomas More, this satiric celebration of pleasure, youth, and intoxication irreverently pokes fun at the pieties of theologians and the foibles that make us all human, while ultimately reaffirming the value of Christian ideals. No other book displays quite so completely the transition from the medieval to the modern world, and Erasmus's wit, wisdom, and critical spirit have lost none of their timeliness today. This Princeton Classics edition of The Praise of Folly features a new foreword by Anthony Grafton that provides an essential introduction to this iridescent and enduring masterpiece. "There is no more joyous and delightful bit of forensic jugglery than Desiderius Erasmus's The Praise of Folly and a debt of gratitude is owed Professor Hoyt Hopewell Hudson for translating the old Latin of 1511 into lively, vivid, contemporary English, at once lucid and free. . . . Like all great minds Erasmus has the faculty of being perennially contemporary, and The Praise of Folly is a gay, witty revelation of the subtleties and intricacies of the scholarly mind of the Renaissance."---Edward Larocque Tinker, New York Times "The scholarship and grace of Hudson's translation and introduction assure that the book will be accepted as the standard English version." "[Hudson] has spared no pains to provide whatever might increase the general reader's appreciation and enjoyment of this world-famous, perennially humane satire."---John Archer Gee, Journal of English and Germanic Philology "Erasmus's Praise of Folly is certainly one of the most characteristic and delightful pieces of Renaissance literature and has rightly enjoyed a wide popularity. . . . This handsome volume will certainly please the student as well as the general reader."

How only violence and catastrophes have consistently reduced inequality throughout world history Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes. Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that inequality never dies peacefully. Inequality declines when carnage and disaster strike and increases when peace and stability return. The Great Leveler is the first book to chart the crucial role of violent shocks in reducing inequality over the full sweep of human history around the world. Ever since humans began to farm, herd livestock, and pass on their assets to future generations, economic inequality has been a defining feature of civilization. Over thousands of years, only violent events have significantly lessened inequality. The "Four Horsemen" of leveling-mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues-have repeatedly destroyed the fortunes of the rich. Scheidel identifies and examines these processes, from the crises of the earliest civilizations to the cataclysmic world wars and communist revolutions of the twentieth century. Today, the violence that reduced inequality in the past seems to have diminished, and that is a good thing. But it casts serious doubt on the prospects for a more equal future. An essential contribution to the debate about inequality, The Great Leveler provides important new insights about why inequality is so persistent-and why it is unlikely to decline anytime soon. Walter Scheidel is the Dickason Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Classics and History, and a Kennedy-Grossman Fellow in Human Biology at Stanford University. The author or editor of sixteen previous books, he has published widely on premodern social and economic history, demography, and comparative history. He lives in Palo Alto, California. "If you think you've heard it all about economic inequality, think again. Walter Scheidel's analysis of what really reduces inequality is provocative, but he makes the case with reason, evidence, and style."-Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined "Brilliant, erudite, and chock-full of historical detail, The Great Leveler has a powerful message and asks a big question for the twenty-first century: Can we find a cure for inequality that isn't worse than the disease?"-Branko Milanovic, author of Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization "This is the best book on the history of income inequality. And the central message is that most significant reductions in inequality come through violence and destruction. Have a nice day!"-Tyler Cowen, author of The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream "This brilliant and thoroughly researched book solves a major paradox in the study of historical inequality. If we accept Thomas Piketty's rule that returns on capital are greater than the rate of economic growth, the 10,000 years of evolution since the Neolithic period should have resulted in all wealth becoming concentrated in the hands of a single individual or family. The Great Leveler explains why that didn't happen. A major breakthrough in our understanding of the historical dynamics of income and wealth inequality."-Peter Turchin, author of Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth "Inequality and violence are fundamental features of human society. No one before Walter Scheidel has shown us just how closely they have been intertwined. This is a masterful new assessment of an age-old problem."-David Stasavage, coauthor of Taxing the Rich: A History of Fiscal Fairness in the United States and Europe "The Great Leveler makes a convincing case."-Robert J. Gordon, author of The Rise and Fall of American Growth "This

Gershom Scholem (1897–1982) was one of the most important Jewish intellectuals of the twentieth century and the father of the academic study of Jewish mysticism. He was a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Yaacob Dweck is associate professor of history and Judaic studies at Princeton University. He is the author of The Scandal of Kabbalah (Princeton). Gershom Scholem stands out among modern thinkers for the richness and power of his historical imagination. A work widely esteemed as his magnum opus, Sabbatai Ṣevi offers a vividly detailed account of the only messianic movement ever to engulf the entire Jewish world. Sabbatai Ṣevi was an obscure kabbalist rabbi of seventeenth-century Turkey who aroused a fervent following that spread over the Jewish world after he declared himself to be the Messiah. The movement suffered a severe blow when Ṣevi was forced to convert to Islam, but a clandestine sect survived. A monumental and revisionary work of Jewish historiography, Sabbatai Ṣevi details Ṣevi's rise to prominence and stands out for its combination of philological and empirical authority and passion. This edition contains a new introduction by Yaacob Dweck that explains the scholarly importance of Scholem's work to a new generation of readers. "Scholem's scholarship betrays an alert presentness. . . . No great textual scholar, no master of philology and historical criticism commands a technique at once more scrupulously attentive to its object and more instinct with the writer's voice. That voices reaches and grips. . . . [M]agisterial." "Immensely important and fascinating. . . . A monumental work of historical scholarship, which recounts in minute detail a moving tragedy of vast dimensions." "Comprehensive. . . the last word on an astonishing episode of Jewish history." "A masterful mix of traditional Jewish scholarship and. . . original insight into the psychology of Judaism." "Undoubtedly one of the all-time masterpieces of scholarship and intellectual history." "A major contribution not only to the study of messianic movements but also a study enlightening to the history of the Jewish people." "This monumental work is an in-depth study of the charming and now widely known – thanks to Scholem ‒ history of the messianic movement of Sabbatai Ṣevi."---George Koutzakiotis, Historical Review

Heinrich Zimmer (1890–1943) was an Indologist, linguist, and historian of South Asian art. Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) was the author of many books on comparative mythology, including The Hero with a Thousand Faces and The Masks of God. A Princeton Classics edition of an essential work of twentieth-century scholarship on India Since its first publication, Philosophies of India has been considered a monumental exploration of the foundations of Indian philosophy. Based on the copious notes of Indologist, linguist, and art historian Heinrich Zimmer, and edited by Joseph Campbell, this book is organized into three sections. "The Highest Good" looks at Eastern and Western thought and their convergence; "The Philosophies of Time" discusses the philosophies of success, pleasure, and duty; and "The Philosophies of Eternity" presents the fundamental concepts of Buddhism, Brahmanism, Jainism, Sankhya and yoga, and Tantra. This work examines such areas as the Buddhist Tantras, Buddhist Genesis, the Tantric presentation of divinity, the preparation of disciples and the meaning of initiation, and the symbolism of the mandala-palace Tantric ritual and twilight language. It also delves into the Tantric teachings of the inner Zodiac and the fivefold ritual symbolism of passion. Appendices, a bibliography, and general and Sanskrit indexes are included. "[A] major contribution to our understanding of Asia. It is both the most complete and most intelligent account of this extraordinarily rich and complex philosophical tradition yet written."-Alan Watts, New York Times "Zimmer has introduced such order and coherence into the rich profusion of Indian thought that one wonders whether his services to Indian philosophy are not as great as his contribution to Western understanding of India."-R. J. K. Murray, Philosophical Quarterly

A landmark work from one of our leading political theorists A sympathetic critique that attempts to free Left politics from its own snares, States of Injury explores how woundedness became a basis for contemporary political identity. Without condemning identity politics, Wendy Brown carefully probes the varied historical forces generating them today and the ways these formative conditions constrain emancipatory desire. Along the way, she advances a novel feminist critical theory of liberalism and the liberal democratic state. She also develops an original theoretical practice that weaves together Nietzsche, Marx, Weber, Foucault, and cultural theories of gender and race to analyze contemporary political predicaments. In a new preface, Brown places States of Injury in political and intellectual context, including the rise of neoliberalism, and addresses the book's renewed relevance in today's political landscape. Wendy Brown is the UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study. Her books include Nihilistic Times, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, and Undoing the Demos. Praise for Wendy Brown "One of the most original political theorists writing today."-Robert Gooding-Williams, Columbia University "The great radical theorist of democracy of our time."-Cornel West, Union Theological Seminary "There is no one who has such an acute eye for the structural perversities of American politics."-Anne Norton, University of Pennsylvania "Our most astute and far-reaching political anatomist."-Nikhil Pal Singh, New York University "The most important theorist of her generation."-Kathryn Lofton, Yale University "Wendy Brown undertakes a critical analysis of late modern state power to reveal how identity politics translated into rights claims. . . . [This study] significantly advances our understanding of aspects of politics where particular identities and universal rights are currently in conflict."

J.G.A. Pocock is the Harry C. Black Professor of History Emeritus at Johns Hopkins University. His many books include Political Thought and History; Politics, Language, and Time; and The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law. Richard Whatmore is professor of modern history at the University of St Andrews and director of the St. Andrews Institute of Intellectual History. He is the author of Republicanism and the French Revolution and Against War and Empire. Originally published in 1975, The Machiavellian Moment remains a landmark of historical and political thought. Celebrated historian J.G.A. Pocock looks at the consequences for modern historical and social consciousness arising from the ideal of the classical republic revived by Machiavelli and other thinkers of Renaissance Italy. Pocock shows that Machiavelli's prime emphasis was on the moment in which the republic confronts the problem of its own instability in time, which Pocock calls the "Machiavellian moment." After examining this problem in the works of Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Giannotti, Pocock turns to the revival of republican ideology in Puritan England and in Revolutionary and Federalist America. He argues that the American Revolution can be considered the last great act of civic humanism of the Renaissance and he relates the origins of modern historicism to the clash between civic, Christian, and commercial values in eighteenth-century thought. This Princeton Classics edition of The Machiavellian Moment features a new introduction by Richard Whatmore. "The Machiavellian Moment reinterpreted the entire history of political ideology in early modern England and America."---T. H. Breen, New York Times "The Machiavellian Moment raised a thousand issues, settled two or three, and gave historians and philosophers a generation's work. It is a must-read and a must-have."-Philip Pettit, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics, Princeton University "In analyzing the history of consciousness as explicated through philosophers, political theorists, historians, theologians, lawyers, and prophets, [this book] presents a new interpretation of wide-ranging problems. It should be of great value to scholars in many disciplines concerned with the history of ideas."-Marvin B. Becker

A bold vision of liberal humanism for navigating today's complex world of growing identity politics and rising nationalism Collective identities such as race, nationality, religion, gender, and sexuality clamor for recognition and respect, sometimes at the expense of other things we value. To what extent do they constrain our freedom, and to what extent do they enable our individuality? Is diversity of value in itself? Has the rhetoric of human rights been overstretched? Kwame Anthony Appiah draws on thinkers through the ages and across the globe to explore such questions, developing an account of ethics that connects moral obligations with collective allegiances and that takes aim at clichés and received ideas about identity. This classic book takes seriously both the claims of individuality-the task of making a life-and the claims of identity, these large and often abstract social categories through which we define ourselves. Kwame Anthony Appiah is professor of philosophy and law at New York University. His many books include the prize-winning Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers and The Lies That Bind. His column, "The Ethicist," appears weekly in the New York Times Magazine. "Appiah has written a remarkably impressive book, one that makes a number of important advances on the existing literature and stands as an important contribution to political and moral philosophy and moral psychology. It will be very widely read."-Jacob Levy, McGill University "The Ethics of Identity is a major overhaul of the vocabulary of contemporary political and critical thought-the vocabulary of identity, diversity, authenticity, cosmopolitanism, and culture. The load of hidden assumptions carried by these words had become overwhelming, and someone needed to take them to the shop and give them a thorough philosophical servicing. But Kwame Anthony Appiah has done more than that. He has returned those terms to us clarified, refreshed, and ready for use in a more sophisticated and flexible philosophy of liberalism-and, along the way, he has provided us with a new reading of liberalism's old hero, John Stuart Mill. Appiah's writing is unparalleled in its elegance, its lucidity, and its humanity. Accept no substitutes."-Louis Menand, Harvard University "In the debates over diversity, rights, group identities, and group conflict, The Ethics of Identity is the land of lucidity. Appiah's elegant book resists the easy alternatives of universal liberalism and multiculturalism and instead defends-and illustrates on every page-a rooted cosmopolitanism. The sparkling prose, vivid examples, and probing questions navigate the choppy waters of personal and political constructions of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and sexuality. This fine and wise book invites readers to remain willing to distinguish tolerance and respect-and by engaging with both the lives people make for themselves and the communities and narratives that render them meaningful."-Martha Minow, Harvard Law School and author of Not Only for Myself: Identity, Politics, and the Law ""Nobody is better placed than Anthony Appiah to make the case for rooted cosmopolitanism.""---Alan Ryan, New York Review of Books "Suave and discerning. . . . Appiah seeks to reorient political philosophy by returning to the example set by John Stuart Mill. . . . For all of Appiah's philosophic precision, his writing often resembles not Mill's but that of Oscar Wilde-to my mind, the finest prose stylist of the 19th century. . . . The superb rhetorical performance of this book offers the most persuasive evidence for his case. . . . To read The Ethics of Identity is to enter into the world it describes; it is also to imagine what it might be like to live in so urbane and expansive a place."---Jonathan Freedman, New York Times Book Review "[An] impressive book. . . . [A] thorough exploration of moral concepts such as authenticity, tolerance, individu

Bernard Lewis is the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, a long-term member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the author of numerous works on the Middle East. Mark R. Cohen is the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor Emeritus of Jewish Civilization in the Near East at Princeton. This landmark book probes Muslims' attitudes toward Jews and Judaism as a special case of their view of other religious minorities in predominantly Muslim societies. With authority, sympathy and wit, Bernard Lewis demolishes two competing stereotypes: the Islamophobic picture of the fanatical Muslim warrior, sword in one hand and Qur'ān in the other, and the overly romanticized depiction of Muslim societies as interfaith utopias. Featuring a new introduction by Mark R. Cohen, this Princeton Classics edition sets the Judaeo-Islamic tradition against a vivid background of Jewish and Islamic history. For those wishing a concise overview of the long period of Jewish-Muslim relations, The Jews of Islam remains an essential starting point. "An elegant and masterly survey. It is a measure of Mr. Lewis's gift for synthesis that all the many findings of recent sholarship, including his own in the Turkish archives, are made to fit into a coherent and plausible pattern." "Lewis refuses . . . simplistic approaches and tries to explain the complex and often contradictory history of Jewish-Muslim relations over fourteen hundred years. He does this in prose that combines eloquence, dispassion, and wit."---Norman A. Stillman, New York Review of Books "[A] pioneering and masterful primer."---Jacob Neusner, Boston Globe

In the summer of 1964, the turmoil of the civil rights movement reached its peak in Mississippi, with activists across the political spectrum claiming that God was on their side in the struggle over racial justice. This was the summer when violence against blacks increased at an alarming rate and when the murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi resulted in national media attention. Charles Marsh takes us back to this place and time, when the lives of activists on all sides of the civil rights issue converged and their images of God clashed. He weaves their voices into a gripping narrative: a Ku Klux Klansman, for example, borrows fiery language from the Bible to link attacks on blacks to his "priestly calling"; a middle-aged woman describes how the Gospel inspired her to rally other African Americans to fight peacefully for their dignity; a SNCC worker tells of harrowing encounters with angry white mobs and his pilgrimage toward a new racial spirituality called Black Power. Through these emotionally charged stories, Marsh invites us to consider the civil rights movement anew, in terms of religion as a powerful yet protean force driving social action. The book's central figures are Fannie Lou Hamer, who "worked for Jesus" in civil rights activism; Sam Bowers, the Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi; William Douglas Hudgins, an influential white Baptist pastor and unofficial theologian of the "closed society"; Ed King, a white Methodist minister and Mississippi native who campaigned to integrate Protestant congregations; and Cleveland Sellers, a SNCC staff member turned black militant. Marsh focuses on the events and religious convictions that led each person into the political upheaval of 1964. He presents an unforgettable American social landscape, one that is by turns shameful and inspiring. In conclusion, Marsh suggests that it may be possible to sift among these narratives and lay the groundwork for a new thinking about racial reconciliation and the beloved community. He maintains that the person who embraces faith's life-affirming energies will leave behind a most powerful legacy of social activism and compassion. Charles Marsh is professor of religious studies and director of the Project on Lived Theology at the University of Virginia. A graduate of Harvard Divinity School, he is the author of Reclaiming Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Last Days and, most recently, The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice, from the Civil Rights Movement to Today. "Marsh celebrates the importance of Christian faith in founding the civil rights movement, [exploring] as well the devastating dichotomy of hate and prejudice."-Andrew Young "Mississippi Freedom Summer tested my commitment and my faith.... To this day, I wonder how those who opposed us reconciled their faith with their hatred and their anger or even their inaction. [Marsh] admirably attempts to explore this unfathomable paradox."-John Lewis, Member of Congress, 5th District, Georgia "This wonderfully narrated book offers truths about the civil rights struggle of the 1960s often overlooked-the intensely moral and spiritual side of an effort that had an enormous impact on our secular life."-Robert Coles "Original and uncommonly thoughtful. . . . This is a comprehensive, imaginative, fair-minded and perceptive book, a significant contribution to our understanding of those men and women who fought those terrible wars in what seems so long ago but was, in fact, only yesterday."---Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World "With vivid description and chilling analysis, Marsh evokes the violence and oppression in the South of the civil-rights era.... Many will find the results haunting.... Marsh's work speaks directly to the development of our own moral lives."---Randy Frame, Christianity Today "Marsh's slice of history is imperative reading for understanding the religious foundations of social movements." "

Anne Carson was born in Canada and now lives partly in Iceland. She is an acclaimed poet, essayist, translator, and classicist, and has won numerous awards, including a MacArthur, the PEN/Nabokov Award, the T. S. Eliot Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her books Autobiography of Red and Nox were both finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. Named one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time by the Modern Library Anne Carson's remarkable first book about the paradoxical nature of romantic love Since it was first published, Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson's lyrical meditation on love in ancient Greek literature and philosophy, has established itself as a favorite among an unusually broad audience, including classicists, essayists, poets, and general readers. Beginning with the poet Sappho's invention of the word "bittersweet" to describe Eros, Carson's original and beautifully written book is a wide-ranging reflection on the conflicted nature of romantic love, which is both "miserable" and "one of the greatest pleasures we have." "It is a remarkable piece of writing: a wittily epigrammatic analysis of the role of Eros in Greek culture. Carson marshals examples from Sappho, Plato, and lesser-known Greek poets, deftly explicating their vision of erotic love as temporary, contingent, and characterized by a thrilling sensation of lack. . . . Well-received among classicists, Eros quickly percolated into the living rooms of literary essayists-perhaps in part because it offers a plausible and pleasingly intellectual framework for a post-marriage society. Carson was singled out as a bracingly original writer by figures like Harold Bloom, Susan Sontag, and Annie Dillard."-Meghan O'Rourke, Slate "In 1986, when Eros the Bittersweet was published, it first stunned the classics community as a work of Greek scholarship; then it stunned the nonfiction community as an inspired return to the lyrically based essays once produced by Seneca, Montaigne, and Emerson; and then, and only then, deep into the 1990s, reissued as 'literature' and redesigned for an entirely new audience, it finally stunned the poets."-John D'Agata, Boston Review "Anne Carson is a rare talent, brilliant and full of wit, passionate and also deeply moving."-Michael Ondaatje "[Carson] is one of the few writers writing in English that I would read anything that she wrote. If there's a magazine that has something of hers in it, I buy it automatically. So she's in a less-than-fingers-on-one-hand group of writers for me."-Susan Sontag "What we learn from Eros the Bittersweet while being spun alive by its brilliance is that its author is a philosopher of much cunning and an agile reader, a scholar with a mind as fresh as a spring meadow, no dust anywhere on her."―Guy Davenport "Highly recommended."-Choice "There is a fine beauty to the work, and it deserves reading."―Library Journal "A wide-ranging exploration of the importance of Eros as an act of the imagination in love, writing, reading and speech. . . . Eros the Bittersweet will remind the reader of the novels and essays of Italo Calvino-both give us the pleasure of making the acquaintance of so many known, forgotten or altogether unknown writers and entice us with the author's sheer delight in playing with language."-Barbara K. Gold, American Journal of Philology "[Carson's] style is a constant source of pleasure. . . . [She] reads the fine details of Greek poetry with such acuteness that her book would command our interest even if she attempted nothing else."-George B. Walsh, Classical Philology "This is an extraordinary book-the book of a poet, a subtle critic, and a scholar. It is also a brilliant piece of writing: flawlessly phrased throughout, constantly surprising but never disappointing, and laced with a wit that is all the more effective because it is perfectly disciplined."

The Muqaddimah, often translated as "Introduction" or "Prolegomenon," is the most important Islamic history of the premodern world. Written by the great fourteenth-century Arab scholar Ibn Khaldûn (d. 1406), this monumental work established the foundations of several fields of knowledge, including the philosophy of history, sociology, ethnography, and economics. The first complete English translation, by the eminent Islamicist and interpreter of Arabic literature Franz Rosenthal, was published in three volumes in 1958 as part of the Bollingen Series and received immediate acclaim in the United States and abroad. A one-volume abridged version of Rosenthal's masterful translation first appeared in 1969. This Princeton Classics edition of the abridged version includes Rosenthal's original introduction as well as a contemporary introduction by Bruce B. Lawrence. This volume makes available a seminal work of Islam and medieval and ancient history to twenty-first century audiences. "Ibn Khaldûn, the great 14th-century Arab scholar, is the most authoritative and most beguiling of Arabic polymaths…. His learning and ideas have an astonishingly modern relevance. His encyclopaedic work is a wonderfully readable mixture of history, sociology, ethnography, economics, science, art, literature, cookery, and medicine."---Iain Finlayson, Times "{The} most remarkable book written during the entire Middle Ages, one of the great intellectual achievements of all time." "From review of Princeton's original edition: "{N. J. Dawood} has, by skillful abridgement and deft but unobtrusive editing, produced an attractive and manageable volume, which should make the essential ideas of Ibn Khaldûn accessible to a wide circle of readers."" "From review of Princeton's original edition: "Undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever been created by any mind in any time or place . . . the most comprehensive and illuminating analysis of how human affairs work that has been made anywhere.""---Arnold J. Toynbee, Observer

S. Y. Agnon (1888–1970) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966. Among his works that have been translated into English are A Simple Story, In the Heart of the Seas, and Shira. When Israeli Nobel Laureate S. Y. Agnon published the novel Only Yesterday in 1945, it quickly became recognized as a major work of world literature, not only for its vivid historical reconstruction of Israel's founding society. The book tells a seemingly simple tale about a man who immigrates to Palestine with the Second Aliya--the several hundred idealists who returned between 1904 and 1914 to work the Hebrew soil as in Biblical times and revive Hebrew culture. This epic novel also engages the reader in a fascinating network of meanings, contradictions, and paradoxes all leading to the question, what, if anything, controls human existence? Seduced by Zionist slogans, young Isaac Kumer imagines the Land of Israel filled with the financial, social, and erotic opportunities that were denied him, the son of an impoverished shopkeeper, in Poland. Once there, he cannot find the agricultural work he anticipated. Instead Isaac happens upon house-painting jobs as he moves from secular, Zionist Jaffa, where the ideological fervor and sexual freedom are alien to him, to ultra-orthodox, anti-Zionist Jerusalem. While some of his Zionist friends turn capitalist, becoming successful merchants, his own life remains adrift and impoverished in a land torn between idealism and practicality, a place that is at once homeland and diaspora. Eventually he marries a religious woman in Jerusalem, after his worldly girlfriend in Jaffa rejects him. Led astray by circumstances, Isaac always ends up in the place opposite of where he wants to be, but why? The text soars to Surrealist-Kafkaesque dimensions when, in a playful mode, Isaac drips paint on a stray dog, writing "Crazy Dog" on his back. Causing panic wherever he roams, the dog takes over the story, until, after enduring persecution for so long without "understanding" why, he really does go mad and bites Isaac. The dog has been interpreted as everything from the embodiment of Exile to a daemonic force, and becomes an unforgettable character in a book about the death of God, the deception of discourse, the power of suppressed eroticism, and the destiny of a people depicted in all its darkness and promise. "{Only Yesterday} is considered {Agnon's} masterpiece and has a claim to being the Great Israeli Novel."-Adam Kirsch, New Yorker "Ancient religious longing, modern political aspirations, and personal dreams of liberation all intersect. . . . . {Agnon's} writing is so packed, so intensely allusive. This is one of the glories of {his} prose."-Jonathan Rosen, New York Times Book Review "A work of powerful, and eccentric, originality."-Robert Alter, Los Angeles Times "An epic novel . . . in a lively and accessible translation by Barbara Harshav. She uncannily captures the highly idiosyncratic voice and lilt, the full measure of provincialism and sophistication, of the master…. For this miracle of a translation . . . we can only be grateful."-Tova Reich, Washington Post "Princeton University Press has made Agnon's most celebrated work available for ordinary readers … with the first English translation of Agnon's . . . mega-novel."-Susan Miron, Philadelphia Inquirer "Barbara Harshav's translation-the first ever in English-is thoroughly smooth and enjoyable. She succeeds in preserving Agnon's unique style, Voltaire-like witticism, and literary beauty."-Alexander Zvielli, Jerusalem Post

What does it mean to be truthful? What role does truth play in our lives? What do we lose if we reject truthfulness? No philosopher is better suited to answer these questions than Bernard Williams. Writing with his characteristic combination of passion and elegant simplicity, he explores the value of truth and finds it to be both less and more than we might imagine. Modern culture exhibits two attitudes toward truth: suspicion of being deceived (no one wants to be fooled) and skepticism that objective truth exists at all (no one wants to be naive). This tension between a demand for truthfulness and the doubt that there is any truth to be found is not an abstract paradox. It has political consequences and signals a danger that our intellectual activities, particularly in the humanities, may tear themselves to pieces. Williams's approach, in the tradition of Nietzsche's genealogy, blends philosophy, history, and a fictional account of how the human concern with truth might have arisen. Without denying that we should worry about the contingency of much that we take for granted, he defends truth as an intellectual objective and a cultural value. He identifies two basic virtues of truth, Accuracy and Sincerity, the first of which aims at finding out the truth and the second at telling it. He describes different psychological and social forms that these virtues have taken and asks what ideas can make best sense of them today. Truth and Truthfulness presents a powerful challenge to the fashionable belief that truth has no value, but equally to the traditional faith that its value guarantees itself. Bernard Williams shows us that when we lose a sense of the value of truth, we lose a lot both politically and personally, and may well lose everything. Bernard Williams (1929–2003) held Chairs of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge, Berkeley, and Oxford. His books include Making Sense of Humanity; Morality, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy; Shame and Necessity; and Moral Luck. Miranda Fricker is the Julius Silver Professor of Philosophy at New York University and Codirector of the New York Institute of Philosophy. "This book, his final one, is a testament to what made Bernard Williams such a remarkable philosopher. It is creative, erudite, humane, and important; a book about truth-its nature and value-but also about how to do philosophy."-Amia Srinivasan, author of The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century "In this exceptionally brilliant book, ranging effortlessly from Herodotus and Thucydides to Diderot and Nietzsche, Bernard Williams daringly asks-and still more daringly answers-one of the central questions of philosophy: what is the point of telling the truth? Lucid, penetrating, and profound, Williams' reflections are vitally important not for philosophers alone but for anyone interested in human thought and creativity."-Stephen Greenblatt, Harvard University "This is a major, wide-ranging, and comprehensive book. A philosophical investigation that is also a literary and historical study, Truth and Truthfulness asks how and why we have come to think of accuracy, sincerity, and authenticity as virtues. Bernard Williams' account of their emergence is as detailed and imaginative as his defense of their importance is spirited and provocative. Williams asks hard questions, and gives them straightforward and controversial answers. His book does not simply describe and advocate these virtues of truthfulness; it manifests them."-Alexander Nehamas, Princeton University "[Truth and Truthfulness] shows all Williams's characteristic virtues. He is always a pleasure to read, and as it has often done before, his deft, sparkling intelligence newly illuminates an old philosophical subject, scattering light into many surprising corners as it does so. . . . He is consistently amusing, but at absolutely no cost to the depth of the enterprise. And what a wonderful life it would be if even a small proportio

"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2003" George M. Fredrickson (1934–2008) was the Edgar E. Robinson Professor of U.S. History at Stanford University. His many books include Diverse Nations, Black Liberation, and White Supremacy. Albert M. Camarillo is the Leon Sloss Jr. Memorial Professor of American History at Stanford University. Are antisemitism and white supremacy manifestations of a general phenomenon? Why didn't racism appear in Europe before the fourteenth century, and why did it flourish as never before in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Why did the twentieth century see institutionalized racism in its most extreme forms? Why are egalitarian societies particularly susceptible to virulent racism? What do apartheid South Africa, Nazi Germany, and the American South under Jim Crow have in common? How did the Holocaust advance civil rights in the United States? With a rare blend of learning, economy, and cutting insight, George Fredrickson surveys the history of Western racism from its emergence in the late Middle Ages to the present. Beginning with the medieval antisemitism that put Jews beyond the pale of humanity, he traces the spread of racist thinking in the wake of European expansionism and the beginnings of the African slave trade. And he examines how the Enlightenment and nineteenth-century romantic nationalism created a new intellectual context for debates over slavery and Jewish emancipation. Fredrickson then makes the first sustained comparison between the color-coded racism of nineteenth-century America and the antisemitic racism that appeared in Germany around the same time. He finds similarity enough to justify the common label but also major differences in the nature and functions of the stereotypes invoked. The book concludes with a provocative account of the rise and decline of the twentieth century's overtly racist regimes--the Jim Crow South, Nazi Germany, and apartheid South Africa--in the context of world historical developments. This illuminating work is the first to treat racism across such a sweep of history and geography. It is distinguished not only by its original comparison of modern racism's two most significant varieties--white supremacy and antisemitism--but also by its eminent readability. "In Racism: A Short History, written in . . . [Fredrickson's] characteristically crisp, clear prose, he draws both on a wide range of recent work by others and on nearly half a century of his own writings on immigration, race and nationalism, in the United States and elsewhere, to provide us with a masterly--though not uncontroversial--synthesis. . . . The book is worth reading just for its pathbreaking attempt to tell the stories of anti-Semitism and white supremacy together, while insisting both on their inter-connections and their differences."---Kwame Anthony Appiah, The New York Times Book Review "Fredrickson deftly combines intellectual with social and political history to explain the emergence of racism and its recent decline. Learned and elegant."---William H. McNeill, The New York Review of Books "Fredrickson [stands] out from a number of distinguished collegues [because of] his continuing urge to widen the comparative framework he uses to try to understand why these relations have developed as they did. Racism: A Short History is his most drastic venture to date--a brisk positioning of Southern racial domination within world history as a whole."---John Dunn, Times Literary Supplement "An erudite comparison of racism and anti-Semitism throughout Western history. . . . Fredrickson offers a scholarly but compelling and accessible narrative." "Fredrickson's book should be celebrated. The chief reason is the text itself. One of only a handful of attempts to cover Western attitudes towards race comprehensively, Fredrickson's Racism is by far the most concise and lucid. It is also the most balanced. . . . [W]hat ultimately makes Fredrickson's book so valuab

The landmark book that situates Blake's poetry within the intellectual movements of his day and unlocks his symbolism for modern readers Since it was first published, Northrop Frye's Fearful Symmetry has established itself as the defining commentary on the poetic vision of William Blake. Frye gives a complete solution to the riddles of Blake's longer poems-the so-called "Prophecies"-and demonstrates how Blake's works form a coherent mythical pattern that broadens our conception of literature. He explains how Blake arrived at a theory of knowledge that was also, for him, a theory of religion, life, and art, and how this rigorously defined system of ideas found expression in the complicated but consistent symbolism of his poetry. With an incisive foreword by scholar and literary critic Nicholas Halmi, this Princeton Classics edition shows how Blake reflects the literary and the intellectual atmosphere of his time while holding renewed meaning for us today. Northrop Frye (1912–1991) was University Professor at the University of Toronto, where he was also professor of English at Victoria College. His books include Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton). Nicholas Halmi is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Oxford and the Margaret Candfield Tutorial Fellow in English at University College. "An intelligent and beautifully written critical interpretation of the poetry and symbolic thought of William Blake."-The New Yorker "To say it is a magnificent, extraordinary book is to praise it as it should be praised, but in doing so one gives little idea of the huge scope of the book and of its fiery understanding. Several great poets have written of Blake, but this book, I believe, is the first to show the full magnitude of Blake's mind, its vast creative thought."-Edith Sitwell, The Spectator "According as we agree or disagree with Mr. Frye's contention, we shall decide finally on the supremacy of his book. In following the structure of Blake's total vision and relating it to the thought of his age, he has triumphantly carried out a task which, given the giant shape of the material, cannot help being immense. His cadences, by sheer explanatory devotion, approach the sonorities of Blake's own."-Times Literary Supplement "Frye conducts his ambitious study with unflagging energy, great enthusiasm, and immense erudition."-Poetry

Stephen Greenblatt is the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. His many books include Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare and The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, which won a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. He is a general editor of The Norton Shakespeare and The Norton Anthology of English Literature In Hamlet in Purgatory, renowned literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt delves into his longtime fascination with the ghost of Hamlet's father, and his daring and ultimately gratifying journey takes him through surprising intellectual territory. It yields an extraordinary account of the rise and fall of Purgatory as both a belief and a lucrative institution--as well as a capacious new reading of the power of Hamlet. In the mid-sixteenth century, English authorities abruptly changed the relationship between the living and dead. Declaring that Purgatory was a false "poem," they abolished the institutions and banned the practices that Christians relied on to ease the passage to Heaven for themselves and their dead loved ones. Greenblatt explores the fantastic adventure narratives, ghost stories, pilgrimages, and imagery by which a belief in a grisly "prison house of souls" had been shaped and reinforced in the Middle Ages. He probes the psychological benefits as well as the high costs of this belief and of its demolition. With the doctrine of Purgatory and the elaborate practices that grew up around it, the church had provided a powerful method of negotiating with the dead. The Protestant attack on Purgatory destroyed this method for most people in England, but it did not eradicate the longings and fears that Catholic doctrine had for centuries focused and exploited. In his strikingly original interpretation, Greenblatt argues that the human desires to commune with, assist, and be rid of the dead were transformed by Shakespeare--consummate conjurer that he was--into the substance of several of his plays, above all the weirdly powerful Hamlet. Thus, the space of Purgatory became the stage haunted by literature's most famous ghost. This book constitutes an extraordinary feat that could have been accomplished by only Stephen Greenblatt. It is at once a deeply satisfying reading of medieval religion, an innovative interpretation of the apparitions that trouble Shakespeare's tragic heroes, and an exploration of how a culture can be inhabited by its own spectral leftovers. This expanded Princeton Classics edition includes a new preface by the author. "Greenblatt's mode of analysis has always been to leap the gulf between the early modern past and the present. . . . Hamlet in Purgatory, his finest book in years, is a magnificent extended commentary on the otherness of the work in which Hamlet's father's ghost walked on stage. Greenblatt leaves it to us to find the spaces that it now haunts within the family or the world of politics, in the bedroom or on the battlements."---Peter Holland, New York Review of Books "[A] highly instructive investigation of the role of spirits from the other world in Shakespeare. [Greenblatt's] writing here is poised, precise, and . . . eloquent. . . . Hamlet in Purgatory is an exemplary work of historically informed literary interpretation."---Robert Alter, New York Times Book Review "This is an interesting book on a grave matter . . . We marvel that the author can make so much out of a slender theme, but it is the device of the good academic writer to make small amounts of material yield golden insights."---Peter Ackroyd, The Times of London "Greenblatt's fascination with ghostly texts is contagious, and he is virtually unequaled among literary critics as a prose stylist. . . . [Hamlet in Purgatory] greatly succeeds in bringing alive the powerful complex of fear and longing Shakespeare so deftly deployed. Required reading for those who study Shakespeare, this graceful analysis should also give considerable pleasure to th

José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) was a Spanish philosopher and essayist. His many books include What is Knowledge? and The Revolt of the Masses. Anthony J. Cascardi is dean of arts and humanities and professor of comparative literature, rhetoric, and Spanish at the University of California, Berkeley. A classic work on radical aesthetics by one of the great philosophers of the early twentieth century No work of philosopher and essayist José Ortega y Gasset has been more frequently cited, admired, or criticized than his response to modernism, "The Dehumanization of Art." The essay, originally published in Spanish in 1925, grappled with the newness of nonrepresentational art and sought to make it more understandable to the public. Many embraced the essay as a manifesto extolling the virtues of vanguard artists and promoting efforts to abandon the realism and the romanticism of the nineteenth century. Others took it as a denunciation of everything that was radical about the avant-garde. This Princeton Classics edition makes this essential work, along with four of Ortega's other critical essays, available in English. A new foreword by Anthony J. Cascardi considers how Ortega's philosophy remains relevant and significant in the twenty-first century. "José Ortega y Gasset is certainly the greatest philosophical essayist of the first half of the 20th century, and very likely one of its few genuinely seminal minds. . . . The Dehumanization of Art is still among the best efforts to define and interpret the radical break in continuity between modern art and the whole Renaissance tradition of representation which ended in the 19th century."-Joseph Frank, New Republic "An erudite and magnanimous capitulation of the old to the young . . . both wise and noble."-Mark Helprin, New Criterion

Gershom Scholem (1897–1982) was a German-born Israeli philosopher and historian. He was professor of Jewish mysticism at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. David Biale is the Emanuel Ringelblum Distinguished Professor of Jewish History at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Gershom Scholem: Master of the Kabbalah. With the publication of The Origins of the Kabbalah in 1950, one of the most important scholars of our century brought the obscure world of Jewish mysticism to a wider audience for the first time. A crucial work in the oeuvre of Gershom Scholem, this book details the beginnings of the Kabbalah in twelfth- and thirteenth-century southern France and Spain, showing its rich tradition of repeated attempts to achieve and portray direct experiences of God. The Origins of the Kabbalah is a contribution not only to the history of Jewish medieval mysticism, but also to the study of medieval mysticism in general. Now with a new foreword by David Biale, this book remains essential reading for students of the history of religion. "No great textual scholar, no master of philology and historical criticism commands a technique at once more scrupulously attentive to its object and more instinctive with the writer's voice {than Scholem}. That voice reaches out and grabs the layman."-George Steiner, New Yorker "{Scholem's} work on Jewish mysticism, messianism, and sectarianism, spanning now half a century, constitutes … one of the major achievements of the historical imagination in our time. I would contend that it is of vital interest not only to anyone concerned with the history of religion but to anyone struggling to understand the underlying problematics of the human predicament."-Robert Alter, Commentary "This book has been a classic in its field since it was first issued in 1950, and it still stands as uniquely authoritative and intriguingly instructive…. {It is} a monument of revelation and insight bridging anthropology, religion, sociology, and history."-Publishers Weekly

"Winner of the 2002 Award for Best Professional/Scholarly Book in Philosophy, Association of American Publishers" "Winner of the 2003 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion, American Academy of Religion" "One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2003" Susan Neiman is director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam. Her books include Why Grow Up? and Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists (Princeton). A compelling look at the problem of evil in modern thought, from the Inquisition to global terrorism Evil threatens human reason, for it challenges our hope that the world makes sense. For eighteenth-century Europeans, the Lisbon earthquake was manifest evil. Today we view evil as a matter of human cruelty, and Auschwitz as its extreme incarnation. Examining our understanding of evil from the Inquisition to contemporary terrorism, Susan Neiman explores who we have become in the three centuries that separate us from the early Enlightenment. In the process, she rewrites the history of modern thought and points philosophy back to the questions that originally animated it. Whether expressed in theological or secular terms, evil poses a problem about the world's intelligibility. It confronts philosophy with fundamental questions: Can there be meaning in a world where innocents suffer? Can belief in divine power or human progress survive a cataloging of evil? Is evil profound or banal? Neiman argues that these questions impelled modern philosophy. Traditional philosophers from Leibniz to Hegel sought to defend the Creator of a world containing evil. Inevitably, their efforts-combined with those of more literary figures like Pope, Voltaire, and the Marquis de Sade-eroded belief in God's benevolence, power, and relevance, until Nietzsche claimed He had been murdered. They also yielded the distinction between natural and moral evil that we now take for granted. Neiman turns to consider philosophy's response to the Holocaust as a final moral evil, concluding that two basic stances run through modern thought. One, from Rousseau to Arendt, insists that morality demands we make evil intelligible. The other, from Voltaire to Adorno, insists that morality demands that we don't. Beautifully written and thoroughly engaging, this book tells the history of modern philosophy as an attempt to come to terms with evil. It reintroduces philosophy to anyone interested in questions of life and death, good and evil, suffering and sense. Featuring a substantial new afterword by Neiman that raises provocative questions about Hannah Arendt's take on Adolf Eichmann and the rationale behind the Hiroshima bombing, this Princeton Classics edition introduces a new generation of readers to this eloquent and thought-provoking meditation on good and evil, life and death, and suffering and sense. "Evil has become the subject of one book after another, but [this] is one book unlike any other--by a philosopher unlike any other."---Bill Moyers, NOW "Scintillating-- a very rare thing in a philosopher."---Jonathan Ree, Times Literary Supplement "Provocative and profound."---Damon Linker, The Wall Street Journal "The American philosopher Susan Neiman has written the book for this world-political hour." "A brilliant new book. . . . No summary can convey the intellectual firepower of Neiman's book. Within her field of interest, she seems not only to have read everything but to have understood it at the deepest level."---William C. Placher, Christian Century "Eloquent... [Neiman argues that] evil is not just an ethical violation, it disrupts and challenges our interpretation of the world."---Edward Rothstein, The New York Times "Neiman follows the argument like a sleuth, and, indeed, her book is a kind of thriller: What is it that menaces us? Will we find what evil is? And how may we escape it? The path leads from a God found absent past a Nature that's indifferent till it fetches up at the house of a man himself. . . . Neiman leads the reader throug

Albert O. Hirschman (1915-2012) was one of the leading intellectuals of the twentieth century, renowned for his contributions to economics, the social sciences, and the history of ideas. He is the author of many books, including the influential Exit, Voice, and Loyalty and The Strategy of Economic Development. In this volume, Albert Hirschman reconstructs the intellectual climate of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to illuminate the intricate ideological transformation that occurred, wherein the pursuit of material interests--so long condemned as the deadly sin of avarice--was assigned the role of containing the unruly and destructive passions of man. Hirschman here offers a new interpretation for the rise of capitalism, one that emphasizes the continuities between old and new, in contrast to the assumption of a sharp break that is a common feature of both Marxian and Weberian thinking. Among the insights presented here is the ironical finding that capitalism was originally supposed to accomplish exactly what was soon denounced as its worst feature: the repression of the passions in favor of the "harmless," if one-dimensional, interests of commercial life. To portray this lengthy ideological change as an endogenous process, Hirschman draws on the writings of a large number of thinkers, including Montesquieu, Sir James Steuart, and Adam Smith. Featuring a new afterword by Jeremy Adelman and a foreword by Amartya Sen, this Princeton Classics edition of The Passions and the Interests sheds light on the intricate ideological transformation from which capitalism emerged triumphant, and reaffirms Hirschman's stature as one of our most influential and provocative thinkers. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions. "Hirschman's volume stands as a principal contribution to the growing literature that is beginning to reshape our understanding of the legitimating beliefs undergirding the rise of the modern market economy."---Robert Wuthnow, American Journal of Sociology "A fresh and exciting argument of a fascinating thesis."---Nannerl O. Keohane, Journal of Interdisciplinary History

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was one of the greatest artists of the German Romantic period. He was a poet, playwright, novelist, and natural philosopher. David E. Wellbery is the LeRoy T. and Margaret Deffenbaugh Carlson University Professor in the Department of Germanic Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. One of the great classics of European literature, Faust is Goethe's most complex and profound work. To tell the dramatic and tragic story of one man's pact with the Devil in exchange for knowledge and power, Goethe drew from an immense variety of cultural and historical material, and a wealth of poetic and theatrical traditions. What results is a tour de force illustrating Goethe's own moral and artistic development, and a symbolic, cautionary tale of Western humanity striving restlessly and ruthlessly for progress. Capturing the sense, poetic variety, and tonal range of the German original in present-day English, Stuart Atkins's translation presents the formal and rhythmic dexterity of Faust in all its richness and beauty, without recourse to archaisms or interpretive elaborations. Featuring a new introduction by David Wellbery, this Princeton Classics edition of Faust is the definitive English version of a timeless masterpiece.

A passionate defense of the humanities from one of today's foremost public intellectuals In this short and powerful book, celebrated philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum makes a passionate case for the importance of the liberal arts at all levels of education. Historically, the humanities have been central to education because they have been seen as essential for creating competent democratic citizens. But recently, Nussbaum argues, thinking about the aims of education has gone disturbingly awry in the United States and abroad. We increasingly treat education as though its primary goal were to teach students to be economically productive rather than to think critically and become knowledgeable, productive, and empathetic individuals. This shortsighted focus on profitable skills has eroded our ability to criticize authority, reduced our sympathy with the marginalized and different, and damaged our competence to deal with complex global problems. And the loss of these basic capacities jeopardizes the health of democracies and the hope of a decent world. In response to this dire situation, Nussbaum argues that we must resist efforts to reduce education to a tool of the gross national product. Rather, we must work to reconnect education to the humanities in order to give students the capacity to be true democratic citizens of their countries and the world. Translated into twenty-five languages, Not for Profit draws on the stories of troubling-and hopeful-global educational developments. Nussbaum offers a manifesto that should be a rallying cry for anyone who cares about the deepest purposes of education. Martha C. Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the Law School and in the Philosophy Department at the University of Chicago. Her many books include Justice for Animals and Hiding from Humanity (Princeton). "Martha Nussbaum is the most erudite and visionary scholar writing on higher education today. Once again, she has laid out a novel and compelling argument with all of the clarity and rigor we expect from her writing. Not for Profit reminds us all that the deeper purposes of liberal education go well beyond personal advancement or national competitiveness. The real project is to educate responsible global citizens who will champion democracy and human development, and who have the skills to collaborate across differences and borders to solve pressing global problems."-Grant H. Cornwell, president of Rollins College "This book could not be more timely nor more on target. Martha Nussbaum argues that education has become increasingly utilitarian, market-driven, career-oriented, and impoverished in its attention to the arts and humanities. The arts and humanities don't necessarily make people humane and creative, but they are, Nussbaum argues, required for Socratic examination and self-examination. If we agree with Socrates that the unexamined life is not worth living, then we need Nussbaum's argument."-Peter Brooks, Princeton University "This is an important book and a superb piece of writing, combining passionate enthusiasm with calm arguments and informative examples. Written with a lovely light touch, it introduces the reader to the much misunderstood history of progressive education and shows its contemporary relevance."-Harry Brighouse, University of Wisconsin–Madison "Nussbaum makes a persuasive case."---The New Yorker "Nussbaum . . . brings to this perennial [education] debate an impassioned urgency . . . and broad erudition. . . . Nussbaum's defense of this worthy cause is deeply learned."---Mick Sussman, New York Times Book Review "One turns with some relief to Martha Nussbaum's Not for Profit, and her impassioned . . . argument in favor of study of the humanities."---Peter Brooks, New York Review of Books "Against the commercialisation of the academy, [Nussbaum] poses a sentient, Socratic and cosmopolitan vision of higher education."---Jon Nixon, Times

R. R. Palmer (1909–2002) was professor emeritus of history at Yale University and a guest scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He taught at Princeton University from 1936 to 1963. He was the author of many books, including the two-volume The Age of the Democratic Revolution (Princeton), the first volume of which won the Bancroft Prize in 1960, and the translator of The Coming of the French Revolution by Georges Lefebvre. Isser Woloch is the Moore Collegiate Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University. The Reign of Terror continues to fascinate scholars as one of the bloodiest periods in French history, when the Committee of Public Safety strove to defend the first Republic from its many enemies, creating a climate of fear and suspicion in revolutionary France. R. R. Palmer's fascinating narrative follows the Committee's deputies individually and collectively, recounting and assessing their tumultuous struggles in Paris and their repressive missions in the provinces. A foreword by Isser Woloch explains why this book remains an enduring classic in French revolutionary studies. "Excellently documented. . . . [O]ne of the best pictures that has ever been put together of the twelve men who made up [the] Committee of Public Safety. . . . There is fine scholarship here." "An excellent book on the administration of France by the great Committee of Public Safety. . . . [Palmer] has made the members of the Committee living characters and the events of the period real occurrences." "A wonderful collective portrait of the Committee of Public safety; from the first sight of the room where they met at the Tuileries, you are plunged into the drama of their adventure."---Biancamaria Fontana, Times Higher Education

Maria Tatar is the John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. Her many books include Off with Their Heads! Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood and Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany (both Princeton). Murder, mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide, and incest: the darker side of classic fairy tales is the subject of this groundbreaking and intriguing study of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's Nursery and Household Tales. This expanded edition includes a new preface and an appendix featuring translations of six tales with commentary by Maria Tatar. Throughout the book, Tatar draws on the disciplinary tools of psychoanalysis and folklore while also providing historical context to explore the harsher aspects of these stories, presenting new interpretations of tales that engage in a kind of cultural repetition compulsion. No other book so thoroughly challenges us to rethink the happily-ever-after of these classic stories. "The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales-related in language that is sharp, lively, and free of jargon-is delightful evidence that Grimm scholarship can give pleasure to the general reader."-Janet Adam Smith, New York Review of Books "Tatar takes detours into literary history here and into comparative anthropology there. What results is at once intelligently eclectic and refreshingly commonsensical, a thoughtful ramble through the dark childhood woods that haunt our adult dreams."-Carl Maves, San Francisco Chronicle "A clear, imaginative and fascinating illumination of the stories we thought we knew."-Los Angeles Times Book Review "For scholars, students, and general readers, Tatar's book is a balanced, sensitive, and informative guide to the content and context of Grimms' fairy tales."-Merle Rubin, Christian Science Monitor

"Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Winners of the 2005 Erasmus Prize, Praemium Erasmianum Foundation" Steven Shapin is the Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. Simon Schaffer is professor of history of science at the University of Cambridge. Leviathan and the Air-Pump examines the conflicts over the value and propriety of experimental methods between two major seventeenth-century thinkers: Thomas Hobbes, author of the political treatise Leviathan and vehement critic of systematic experimentation in natural philosophy, and Robert Boyle, mechanical philosopher and owner of the newly invented air-pump. The issues at stake in their disputes ranged from the physical integrity of the air-pump to the intellectual integrity of the knowledge it might yield. Both Boyle and Hobbes were looking for ways of establishing knowledge that did not decay into ad hominem attacks and political division. Boyle proposed the experiment as cure. He argued that facts should be manufactured by machines like the air-pump so that gentlemen could witness the experiments and produce knowledge that everyone agreed on. Hobbes, by contrast, looked for natural law and viewed experiments as the artificial, unreliable products of an exclusive guild. The new approaches taken in Leviathan and the Air-Pump have been enormously influential on historical studies of science. Shapin and Schaffer found a moment of scientific revolution and showed how key scientific givens--facts, interpretations, experiment, truth--were fundamental to a new political order. Shapin and Schaffer were also innovative in their ethnographic approach. Attempting to understand the work habits, rituals, and social structures of a remote, unfamiliar group, they argued that politics were tied up in what scientists did, rather than what they said. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer use the confrontation between Hobbes and Boyle as a way of understanding what was at stake in the early history of scientific experimentation. They describe the protagonists' divergent views of natural knowledge, and situate the Hobbes-Boyle disputes within contemporary debates over the role of intellectuals in public life and the problems of social order and assent in Restoration England. In a new introduction, the authors describe how science and its social context were understood when this book was first published, and how the study of the history of science has changed since then. "Shapin and Schaffer work out the implications of these debates [between Hobbes and Boyle] for the history of science with great skill of interpretation and exposition. They use their findings and their analysis to give an explanation of the experimental enterprise in general, which, although it is not philosophical in nature, always takes philosophy most seriously. This is simply one of the most original, enjoyable and important books published in the history of science in recent years."---Owen Hannaway, Technology and Culture "If any proof of the intellectual buoyancy or intrinsic worth of the history and philosophy for science was needed, nothing better could be provided than this study by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer. . . . Their findings suggest the futility of wrenching science from its ideological context, and not only with respect to the seventeenth century; they also detect parallels with the crisis of confidence affecting contemporary science."---Charles Webster, The Times Literary Supplement "Praise for Princeton's previous editions: "Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer have ventured beyond ordinary history of science or history of ideas to produce a novel 'exercise in the sociology of scientific knowledge.' . . . a historical study rich in new interpretations and notable for the use of sources of a kind not hitherto fully exploited by scholars.""---Clive Holmes, American Historical Review "[T]he most influential text in our field since Thomas Kuhn'sStructure of Scientific Revolutio

An authoritative English translation of one of the most important works in the history of the novel Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795–1796), Goethe's second novel, is a foundational work in the history of the genre-perhaps the first Bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story focusing on the growth and self-realization of the main character. The story centers on Wilhelm, a young man living in the mid-1700s who strives to break free from the restrictive bourgeois world of his upbringing and seek fulfillment as an actor and playwright. Goethe's novel had a huge impact on the Romantics. Hegel, Schelling, Novalis, and Schopenhauer considered it one of the most important novels yet written. Schlegel famously called it one of the "three tendencies of the age," along with the French Revolution and the philosophy of Fichte. And Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann set poems from the novel to music. It also had a major influence on nineteenth-century British writers, including Thomas Carlyle, who was its first English translator, and George Eliot. Drawn from Princeton's authoritative collected works of Goethe, and featuring a new introduction by David Wellbery, this is the definitive English version of a landmark of world literature. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was one of the greatest artists of the German Romantic period. He was a poet, playwright, novelist, and natural philosopher. David E. Wellbery is the LeRoy T. and Margaret Deffenbaugh Carlson University Professor in the Department of Germanic Studies and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

Georges Lefebvre (1874–1959) was one of the most important twentieth-century historians of the French Revolution. His books include The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France (Princeton). R. R. Palmer (1909–2002) was professor emeritus of history at Yale University and a guest scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Timothy Tackett is professor emeritus of history at the University of California, Irvine. The classic book that restored the voices of ordinary people to our understanding of the French Revolution The Coming of the French Revolution remains essential reading for anyone interested in the origins of this great turning point in the formation of the modern world. First published in 1939 on the eve of the Second World War and suppressed by the Vichy government, this classic work explains what happened in France in 1789, the first year of the French Revolution. Georges Lefebvre wrote history "from below"-a Marxist approach-and in this book he places the peasantry at the center of his analysis, emphasizing the class struggles in France and the significant role they played in the coming of the revolution. Eloquently translated by the historian R. R. Palmer and featuring an introduction by Timothy Tackett that provides a concise intellectual biography of Lefebvre and a critical appraisal of the book, this Princeton Classics edition offers perennial insights into democracy, dictatorship, and insurrection. "Simply the best introduction to the study of the French Revolution available anywhere."-The Nation "A pleasure to read. . . . Lefebvre sets forth clearly the many causes of that insurrection and explains the influences exerted by the various classes and factions-the nobles and the clergy, on the one side, and the bourgeoisie and the peasantry on the other."-The New Yorker "Much more than a history of 1789. . . . {A} synthesis, conveying a philosophy of the Revolution as a whole, such as could be written only by a seasoned scholar."-American Historical Review

Richard Rorty (1931-2007) was a prolific philosopher and public intellectual who, throughout his illustrious career, taught at Princeton, the University of Virginia, and, until his death, Stanford University. When it first appeared in 1979, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature hit the philosophical world like a bombshell. In it, Richard Rorty argued that, beginning in the seventeenth century, philosophers developed an unhealthy obsession with the notion of representation: comparing the mind to a mirror that reflects reality. Rorty's book is a powerful critique of this imagery and the tradition of thought that it spawned. Today, the book remains a must-read and stands as a classic of twentieth-century philosophy. Its influence on the academy, both within philosophy and across a wide array of disciplines, continues unabated. This edition includes new essays by philosopher Michael Williams and literary scholar David Bromwich, as well as Rorty's previously unpublished essay "The Philosopher as Expert." "This is an ambitious and important book. Ambitious because it attempts to place the main concerns and discussions of contemporary philosophy within a historical perspective; important because this is all too rarely attempted within our present philosophical culture, and almost never done this well."---Charles Taylor, Times Literary Supplement "It is going to be a long time before a better book of its kind appears."---Alasdair MacIntyre, London Review of Books "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature brings to light the deep sense of crisis within the profession of academic philosophy. . . . Rorty's provocative and profound meditations impel philosophers to examine the problematic status of their discipline--only to discover that modern European philosophy has come to an end."---Cornel West, Union Seminary Quarterly Review

"One of the world's most widely read social scientists" (New York Times) offers his most personal and accessible book-a celebration of how ordinary people can resist oppression and injustice James Scott taught us what's wrong with seeing like a state. Now, in his most accessible and personal book to date, the acclaimed social scientist makes the case for seeing like an anarchist. Inspired by the core anarchist faith in the possibilities of voluntary cooperation without hierarchy, Two Cheers for Anarchism is an engaging, high-spirited, and often very funny defense of an anarchist way of seeing-one that provides a unique and powerful perspective on everything from everyday social and political interactions to mass protests and revolutions. Through a wide-ranging series of memorable anecdotes and examples, the book describes an anarchist sensibility that celebrates the local knowledge, common sense, and creativity of ordinary people. The result is a kind of handbook on constructive anarchism that challenges us to radically reconsider the value of hierarchy in public and private life, from schools and workplaces to retirement homes and government itself. Beginning with what Scott calls "the law of anarchist calisthenics," an argument for law-breaking inspired by an East German pedestrian crossing, each chapter opens with a story that captures an essential anarchist truth. In the course of telling these stories, Scott touches on a wide variety of subjects: public disorder and riots, desertion, poaching, vernacular knowledge, assembly-line production, globalization, the petty bourgeoisie, school testing, playgrounds, and the practice of historical explanation. Far from a dogmatic manifesto, Two Cheers for Anarchism celebrates the anarchist confidence in the inventiveness and judgment of people who are free to exercise their creative and moral capacities. James C. Scott (1936–2024) was the Sterling Professor of Political Science, professor of anthropology, and codirector of the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University. His books include Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed; Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts; and most recently, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. "James Scott is one of the great political thinkers of our time. No one else has the same ability to pursue a simple, surprising idea, kindly but relentlessly, until the entire world looks different. In this book, he also demonstrates a skill shared by the greatest radical thinkers: to reveal positions we've been taught to think of as extremism to be emanations of simple human decency and common sense."-David Graeber, author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years "Building on the insights of his masterful Seeing Like a State, James Scott has written a powerful and important argument for social organization that resists the twin poles of Big Corporations and Big Governments. In an age increasingly shaped by decentralized, bottom-up networks, Two Cheers for Anarchism gives timely new life to a rich tradition of political thought."-Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation and Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age "I am a big fan of James Scott. In this highly readable and thought-provoking book, he reveals the meaning of his 'anarchist' sensibility through a series of wonderful personal stories, staking out an important position and defending it in a variety of contexts, from urban planning to school evaluation. I don't know of anyone else who has defined this viewpoint so successfully."-Francis Fukuyama, author of The Origins of Political Order "The ambition of this book is compelling and contagious. Combining the populist rhetoric of Thomas Paine with the ferocious satire of Jonathan Swift, James Scott m

Erich Auerbach (1892–1957) was Sterling Professor of Romance Languages at Yale University. He is widely recognized as one of the foundational figures of comparative literature. Edward W. Said (1935–2003) was professor of literature at Columbia University and the author of Orientalism. The classic book that has taught generations how to read Western literature More than half a century after its translation into English, Erich Auerbach's Mimesis remains a masterpiece of literary criticism. A brilliant display of erudition, wit, and wisdom, his exploration of how great European writers from Homer to Virginia Woolf depict reality has taught generations how to read Western literature. A German Jew who was forced out of his professorship at the University of Marburg in 1935, Auerbach left for Turkey, where he taught in Istanbul. There he wrote Mimesis, publishing it in German after the war. Displaced as he was, Auerbach produced a work of great erudition that contains no footnotes, basing his arguments instead on searching, illuminating readings of key passages from his primary texts. His aim was to show how, from antiquity to modernity, literature progresses toward ever more naturalistic and democratic forms of representation. Ranging over works in Greek, Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and English, Auerbach uses his remarkable skills in philology and comparative literature to present an optimistic view of Western history and culture and to refute any narrow form of nationalism or chauvinism. This expanded Princeton Classics edition of Mimesis includes a substantial introduction by Edward Said as well as an essay in which Auerbach responds to his critics. "The compass and the richness of the book can hardly be exaggerated. This is true too of the originality of Mr. Auerbach's critical method which is at once encyclopedic and microscopic, combining the disciplines of philology, literary criticism, and history." "The greatest single work of literary criticism of the 20th century. . . . So suggestive, so rich in understanding and insight, so useful in teaching one how to reach more deeply and appreciatively is the book that it is difficult to believe that anyone will ever again have the intellectual resources to write another book about literature anywhere near as powerful. Written while the Nazis were marching across Europe, Mimesis is a strong reminder of the glory of Western literature, and by extension of Western civilization, and of what is at stake in the battle against those who would simplify, politicize, or otherwise degrade it."---Joseph Epstein, Weekly Standard "One of the great works of literary scholarship. . . . Auerbach's method . . . is to fasten with fastidious sensitivity on some stray phrase or passage in order to unpack from it a wealth of historical insight. It is his combination of scholarly erudition and critical astuteness which is most remarkable."---Terry Eagleton, London Review of Books "Written with the authority that comes from deep learning and full of information worth knowing. Princeton's 50th anniversary edition of Mimesis has an introduction by the late literary and cultural critic Edward Said that by itself is worth the price of the book. It's the only preface I know of that I wish were longer, serving as both an analysis of Auerbach and a ramework placing him in his scholarly and historical context. . . . Princeton's reissue of Mimesis is both timely and symbolic."---Guy Davenport, Los Angeles Times Book Review "One of the most important and readable books in literary criticism. . . . The author, beginning with Homer and the Bible, traces the imitation of life in literature through the ages . . .touching upon every major literary figure in western culture on the way." "[Mimesis] offers not just an eminent reading of the Western canon, but a mighty lesson on how to write. . . . I don't think a more significant or useful book of criticism has been written in the half-century si

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) was University Professor at the University of Toronto, where he was also professor of English at Victoria College. His books include Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton). David Damrosch is the Ernest Bernbaum Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature and director of the Institute for World Literature at Harvard University. A landmark work of literary criticism Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism is the magnum opus of one of the most important and influential literary theorists of the twentieth century. Breaking with the practice of close reading of individual texts, Frye seeks to describe a common basis for understanding the full range of literary forms by examining archetypes, genres, poetic language, and the relations among the text, the reader, and society. Using a dazzling array of examples, he argues that understanding "the structure of literature as a total form" also allows us to see the profoundly liberating effect literature can have. "Brilliant. . . . Frye has wit, style, audacity, immense learning, {and} a gift for opening up new and unexpected perspectives in the study of literature."-The Nation "Does literary criticism need a conceptual universe of its own? Professor Frye has written a brilliantly suggestive and encyclopedically erudite book to prove that it does; and he has done his impressive best to provide a framework for this universe. His book is a signal achievement."-Hudson Review "Simply overpowering in the originality of its main concepts, and dazzling in the brilliance of its applications of them. Here is a book fundamental enough to be entitled Principia Critica."-Commonweal "The book is continuously informed by original and incisive thought, by fine perception, and by striking observations upon literature in general and upon particular works."-Modern Language Review

Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966) was a film critic and independent sociologist and theorist. He is the author of The Mass Ornament and Theory of Film (Princeton). Leonardo Quaresima is professor of film history and criticism and director of cinema studies at the University of Udine. An essential work of the cinematic history of the Weimar Republic by a leading figure of film criticism First published in 1947, From Caligari to Hitler remains an undisputed landmark study of the rich cinematic history of the Weimar Republic. Prominent film critic Siegfried Kracauer examines German society from 1921 to 1933, in light of such movies as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, M, Metropolis, and The Blue Angel. He explores the connections among film aesthetics, the prevailing psychological state of Germans in the Weimar era, and the evolving social and political reality of the time. Kracauer makes a startling (and still controversial) claim: films as popular art provide insight into the unconscious motivations and fantasies of a nation. With a critical introduction by Leonardo Quaresima which provides context for Kracauer's scholarship and his contributions to film studies, this Princeton Classics edition makes an influential work available to new generations of cinema enthusiasts. "The thesis of this unusually interesting book is that the German films of the twenties were filled with premonitions of the German totalitarianism of the thirties."-Nation "One of the great works of film history, this look at early German cinema, first published in 1947, is still a must-have for cineastes and scholars alike."-H. J. Kirchhoff, Toronto Globe and Mail "The book is an invaluable guide to a golden period of cinema."-Christopher Wood, Times

Kenneth Pomeranz is University Professor of History at the University of Chicago. His books include The Making of a Hinterland and The World That Trade Created. A landmark comparative history of Europe and China that examines why the Industrial Revolution emerged in the West The Great Divergence sheds light on one of the great questions of history: Why did sustained industrial growth begin in Northwest Europe? Historian Kenneth Pomeranz shows that as recently as 1750, life expectancy, consumption, and product and factor markets were comparable in Europe and East Asia. Moreover, key regions in China and Japan were no worse off ecologically than those in Western Europe, with each region facing corresponding shortages of land-intensive products. Pomeranz's comparative lens reveals the two critical factors resulting in Europe's nineteenth-century divergence-the fortunate location of coal and access to trade with the New World. As East Asia's economy stagnated, Europe narrowly escaped the same fate largely due to favorable resource stocks from underground and overseas. This Princeton Classics edition includes a preface from the author and makes a powerful historical work available to new readers. "A profoundly thought-provoking book."-Jack Goody, Times Higher Education Supplement "The biggest and most important contribution to our new understanding of the causes and mechanisms that brought about the great divergence between the West and the rest."-Andre Gunder Frank, Journal of Asian Studies "So rich that fresh insights emerge from virtually every page."-Robert B. Marks, American Historical Review "Exhaustively researched and brilliantly argued."-Edward R. Slack Jr., Journal of World History

"Martha C. Nussbaum, Recipient of the 2012 Prince of Asturias Award for Social Sciences" Martha C. Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the Law School and in the Philosophy Department at the University of Chicago. She is the author of many books, including Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton). The Epicureans, Skeptics, and Stoics practiced philosophy not as a detached intellectual discipline but as a worldly art of grappling with issues of daily and urgent human significance. In this classic work, Martha Nussbaum maintains that these Hellenistic schools have been unjustly neglected in recent philosophic accounts of what the classical "tradition" has to offer. By examining texts of philosophers such as Epicurus, Lucretius, and Seneca, she recovers a valuable source for current moral and political thought and encourages us to reconsider philosophical argument as a technique through which to improve lives. Written for general readers and specialists, The Therapy of Desire addresses compelling issues ranging from the psychology of human passion through rhetoric to the role of philosophy in public and private life. "Nussbaum writes as an advocate [of the Hellenistic philosophers], though not an uncritical one, for even while she admires the seriousness and subtlety with which these philosophers analyze the passions, she allows that there is an unresolvable conflict between the detachment and the intense engagement entailed by their philosophies. The sense that these philosophers still matter, that we can wrangle with them and learn from them, is invigorating."---Richard Jenkyns, New York Times Book Review "Few modern books have done as much as this one promises to do in raising the profile of Hellenistic philosophy. It is constantly gripping and absorbing, written with rare eloquence and containing long stretches of almost lyrical intensity. A literary as well as a philosophical tour de force."---David Sedley, Times Literary Supplement "By turns wise and witty, silly and Socratic, critical and compassionate, Nussbaum proves to be an extraordinarily addictive literary companion…. This is a book to live with."---Peter Green, New Republic "[T]his is a wonderful book, of interest to scholars of ancient philosophy, but also to those interested in medical philosophy and philosophy of mind. It would also be of great interest to those interested in the conception of philosophy as therapy that has grown from studies on Wittgenstein. I can heartily recommend it."---Michael Gillan Peckitt, Metapsychology Online Reviews

From one of the great modern writers, the acclaimed lectures, in which he draws on a lifetime of experience to take the measure of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets "W. H. Auden, poet and critic, will conduct a course on Shakespeare at the New School for Social Research beginning Wednesday. Mr. Auden... proposes to read all Shakespeare's plays in chronological order." So, the New York Times reported on September 27, 1946, giving notice of a rare opportunity to hear one of the century's great poets discuss at length one of the greatest writers of all time. Reconstructed by Arthur Kirsch, these lectures offer remarkable insights into Shakespeare's plays and sonnets while also adding immeasurably to our understanding of Auden.

George F. Kennan (1904–2005) was an American diplomat and historian. After retiring from the State Department, he joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Frank Costigliola is a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Connecticut. His books include Kennan: A Life between Worlds (Princeton) and The Kennan Diaries. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Bancroft Prize, and the Parkman Prize From acclaimed diplomat and historian George Kennan, a landmark history of the crucial months in 1917–1918 that forged the pattern of Soviet-American relations When the Bolsheviks seized power in November 1917, American diplomats in St. Petersburg and Moscow were thrown into a bewildering situation. Should the new regime be recognized? What was its true nature? And was there any way to keep Russia fighting against Germany in the Great War? In vivid detail, George Kennan's classic history tells the gripping story of the Americans' furious, and ultimately failed, efforts to strike a deal to keep the Soviets in the war-and how these events set the pattern of future relations between the two emerging superpowers. In a new foreword, Kennan biographer Frank Costigliola puts the book in the context of its Cold War publication and Kennan's life. "Kennan is a poet as well as a philosopher. The Russia of 1917 comes alive under his persuasive touches."---Harrison E. Salisbury, New York Times "Reads like a first-rate historical novel. . . . A remarkable performance."---Bertram D. Wolfe, New York Herald Tribune "Remarkably lucid and comprehensive. With substantial literary skill, {Kennan} has brought the whole somber picture marvelously to life." "A work of great scholarship and perception. . . . So tangled a diplomatic story has never been more clearly told." "This is live history, resurrected from the dead past by a man with profound understanding of the practical and theoretical side of world diplomacy."---Earl H. Voss, Washington Star "Kennan has produced not only a unique diplomatic history, but an exciting piece of literature in which all the personalities come to life." "A book of the first importance. . . . Brilliant."---Robert Blake, The Spectator "Kennan's carefully documented book contains brilliant pen-portraits of the American diplomats and would-be diplomats as well as of the Bolshevik leaders. . . . It abounds in dramatic episodes. . . . Offers many vital lessons for the present and the future."---Ernest S. Pisko, Christian Science Monitor "Kennan's book is both an outstanding literary achievement and a major contribution to the history of Soviet-American relations."---Michael Karpovich, American Political Science Review "As a careful and thoughtful examination of a fateful period in human history and of the reaction of the United States to an overwhelming social phenomenon, this book has a substantial and a lasting value."---Dexter Perkins, American Historical Review "A work of the greatest possible interest."---Max Beloff, Russian Review

Judith Herrin is professor emeritus in the Department of Classics at King's College London. Her books include Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe; Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire; Unrivalled Influence: Women and Empire in Byzantium; Margins and Metropolis: Authority across the Byzantine Empire; and Women in Purple: Rulers of Medieval Byzantium (all Princeton). She lives in Oxford, England. A groundbreaking history of how the Christian "West" emerged from the ancient Mediterranean world In this acclaimed history of Early Christendom, Judith Herrin shows how-from the sack of Rome in 410 to the coronation of Charlemagne in 800-the Christian "West" grew out of an ancient Mediterranean world divided between the Roman west, the Byzantine east, and the Muslim south. Demonstrating that religion was the period's defining force, she reveals how the clash over graven images, banned by Islam, both provoked iconoclasm in Constantinople and generated a distinct western commitment to Christian pictorial narrative. In a new preface, Herrin discusses the book's origins, reception, and influence. "A brilliant overview of how the legacy of the Roman empire continued to shape the Mediterranean world."---Rowan Williams, New Humanist "It will no longer be possible to hop from pagan antiquity to Carolingian Europe as if nothing had happened in between. Judith Herrin has laid her sheet of paper over the map of that 'dark' age and rubbed and rubbed until the rich web of connections and cracks has shown through."---Marina Warner, The Independent "An ambitious, learned, lucid, and instructive book."---Alexander Murray, Times Literary Supplement "Herrin's scholarship is unerring, her scope is wide and her style fluent. . . . The treatment of the so-called iconoclastic controversy, the dispute over the veneration of images in Christian worship which convulsed the Byzantine world in the eighth century, is sparkling. . . . Debate about where modern Europe came from . . . will be enriched by this civilized and accomplished book." "Herrin follows some magnificent themes with the lucid dispassion of a good detective."---Thomas D'Evelyn, Christian Science Monitor "It is {the} binding together of distant past and immediate present which makes Judith Herrin's scholarship so exciting: she can convince the reader that the roots of Western distinctiveness really do lead all the way to forgotten episcopal meetings in small towns in Asia Minor in the fourth century."---Michael Ignatieff, The Observer "A learned, challenging, and gracefully written interpretation of the transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages."---Robert L. Wilken, Commonweal "A serious and powerful book. . . . A grand synthesis on a scale few people would dare now to attempt, ranging across diverse societies with considerable assurance."---Christopher J. Wickham, International History Review

Walter A. Kaufmann (1921-1980) was professor of philosophy at Princeton University and a world-renowned scholar and translator of Nietzsche. This classic is the benchmark against which all modern books about Nietzsche are measured. When Walter Kaufmann wrote it in the immediate aftermath of World War II, most scholars outside Germany viewed Nietzsche as part madman, part proto-Nazi, and almost wholly unphilosophical. Kaufmann rehabilitated Nietzsche nearly single-handedly, presenting his works as one of the great achievements of Western philosophy. Responding to the powerful myths and countermyths that had sprung up around Nietzsche, Kaufmann offered a patient, evenhanded account of his life and works, and of the uses and abuses to which subsequent generations had put his ideas. Without ignoring or downplaying the ugliness of many of Nietzsche's proclamations, he set them in the context of his work as a whole and of the counterexamples yielded by a responsible reading of his books. More positively, he presented Nietzsche's ideas about power as one of the great accomplishments of modern philosophy, arguing that his conception of the "will to power" was not a crude apology for ruthless self-assertion but must be linked to Nietzsche's equally profound ideas about sublimation. He also presented Nietzsche as a pioneer of modern psychology and argued that a key to understanding his overall philosophy is to see it as a reaction against Christianity. Many scholars in the past half century have taken issue with some of Kaufmann's interpretations, but the book ranks as one of the most influential accounts ever written of any major Western thinker. Featuring a new foreword by Alexander Nehamas, this Princeton Classics edition of Nietzsche introduces a new generation of readers to one the most influential accounts ever written of any major Western thinker. "Illuminating." "Mr. Kaufmann has produced what may be called the definitive study of Nietzsche's life and thought-an informed, scholarly, and lustrous work."