Robert A. Ferguson investigates the nature of loneliness in American fiction, from its mythological beginnings in Rip Van Winkle to the postmodern terrors of 9/11. At issue is the dark side of a trumpeted American individualism. The theme is a vital one because a greater percentage of people live alone today than at any other time in U.S. history.

The many isolated characters in American fiction, Ferguson says, appeal to us through inward claims of identity when pitted against the social priorities of a consensual culture. They indicate how we might talk to ourselves when the same pressures come our way. In fiction, more visibly than in life, defining moments turn on the clarity of an inner conversation.

Alone in America tests the inner conversations that work and sometimes fail. It examines the typical elements and moments that force us toward a solitary state—failure, betrayal, change, defeat, breakdown, fear, difference, age, and loss—in their ascending power over us. It underlines the evolving answers that famous figures in literature have given in response. Figures like Mark Twain’s Huck Finn and Toni Morrison’s Sethe and Paul D., or Louisa May Alcott’s Jo March and Marilynne Robinson’s John Ames, carve out their own possibilities against ruthless situations that hold them in place. Instead of trusting to often superficial social remedies, or taking thin sustenance from the philosophy of self-reliance, Ferguson says we can learn from our fiction how to live alone.

An Open Letters Monthly Best Nonfiction Book of the Year

America’s criminal justice system is broken. The United States punishes at a higher per capita rate than any other country in the world. In the last twenty years, incarceration rates have risen 500 percent. Sentences are harsh, prisons are overcrowded, life inside is dangerous, and rehabilitation programs are ineffective. Looking not only to court records but to works of philosophy, history, and literature for illumination, Robert Ferguson, a distinguished law professor, diagnoses all parts of a now massive, out-of-control punishment regime.

“If I had won the $400 million Powerball lottery last week I swear I would have ordered a copy for every member of Congress, every judge in America, every prosecutor, and every state prison official and lawmaker who controls the life of even one of the millions of inmates who exist today, many in inhumane and deplorable conditions, in our nation’s prisons.”
—Andrew Cohen, The Atlantic

“Inferno is a passionate, wide-ranging effort to understand and challenge…our heavy reliance on imprisonment. It is an important book, especially for those (like me) who are inclined towards avoidance and tragic complacency…[Ferguson’s] book is too balanced and thoughtful to be disregarded.”
—Robert F. Nagel, Weekly Standard

The role of religion in early American literature has been endlessly studied; the role of the law has been virtually ignored. Robert A. Ferguson’s book seeks to correct this imbalance.

With the Revolution, Ferguson demonstrates, the lawyer replaced the clergyman as the dominant intellectual force in the new nation. Lawyers wrote the first important plays, novels, and poems; as gentlemen of letters they controlled many of the journals and literary societies; and their education in the law led to a controlling aesthetic that shaped both the civic and the imaginative literature of the early republic. An awareness of this aesthetic enables us to see works as diverse as Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia and Irving’s burlesque History of New York as unified texts, products of the legal mind of the time.

The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the great political orations were written by lawyers, and so too were the literary works of Trumbull, Tyler, Brackenridge, Charles Brockden Brown, William Cullen Bryant, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., and a dozen other important writers. To recover the original meaning and context of these writings is to gain new understanding of a whole era of American culture.

The nexus of law and letters persisted for more than a half-century. Ferguson explores a range of factors that contributed to its gradual dissolution: the yielding of neoclassicism to romanticism; the changing role of the writer; the shift in the lawyer’s stance from generalist to specialist and from ideological spokesman to tactician of compromise; the onslaught of Jacksonian democracy and the problems of a country torn by sectional strife. At the same time, he demonstrates continuities with the American Renaissance. And in Abraham Lincoln he sees a memorable late flowering of the earlier tradition.

Reading the Early Republic focuses attention on the forgotten dynamism of thought in the founding era. In every case, the documents, novels, pamphlets, sermons, journals, and slave narratives of the early American nation are richer and more intricate than modern readers have perceived.

Rebellion, slavery, and treason--the mingled stories of the Revolution--still haunt national thought. Robert Ferguson shows that the legacy that made the country remains the idea of what it is still trying to become. He cuts through the pervading nostalgia about national beginnings to recapture the manic-depressive tones of its first expression. He also has much to say about the reconfiguration of charity in American life, the vital role of the classical ideal in projecting an unthinkable continental republic, the first manipulations of the independent American woman, and the troubled integration of civic and commercial understandings in the original claims of prosperity as national virtue.

Reading the Early Republic uses the living textual tradition against history to prove its case. The first formative writings are more than sacred artifacts. They remain the touchstones of the durable promise and the problems in republican thought

An Entrepreneur Best Book of the Year

Facebook makes us lonely. Selfies breed narcissism. On Twitter, hostility reigns. Pundits and psychologists warn that digital technologies substantially alter our emotional states, but in this lively investigation of changing feelings about technology, we learn that the gadgets we use don’t just affect how we feel—they can profoundly change our sense of self. When we say we’re bored, we don’t mean the same thing as a Victorian dandy. Could it be that political punditry has helped shape a new kind of anger? Luke Fernandez and Susan Matt take us back in time to consider how our feelings of loneliness, boredom, vanity, and anger have evolved in tandem with new technologies.

“Technologies have been shaping [our] emotional culture for more than a century, argue computer scientist Luke Fernandez and historian Susan Matt in this original study. Marshalling archival sources and interviews, they trace how norms (say, around loneliness) have shifted with technological change.”
—Nature

“A powerful story of how new forms of technology are continually integrated into the human experience.”
—Publishers Weekly

First, there is a soft rustle in the underbrush, then a low-slung, utterly bizarre-looking insectivore dashes in front of Eladio Fernández. With a reflexive click of digital shutter, he's captured the reclusive (Solenodon paradoxus--a living fossil. A Dominican-based conservationist and photographer, Fernandez is documenting the efforts of a distinguished team of international scientists as they unravel the workings of evolution being played out on the island of Hispaniola.

A short flight from the Florida coast, Hispaniola offers unique opportunities, not just to photographers like Fernández, but to evolutionary biologists as well. At 40 million years, Hispaniola is far older than the Galápagos. Its considerable age, along with a diversity of habitats--from mountains and cloud forests to savannahs and tropical lowlands--makes this island one of the most spectacular, if poorly understood, troves of biota on the planet. The extraordinary richness of species, much of it endangered and yet to be described, is showcased here in nearly 400 spectacular photographs. The photos are accompanied by essays--in both English and Spanish--that make known the Hispaniolan fungi, plants, and animals by the experts who know them best.

Insights gained from Hispaniola's unique flora and fauna, from its rare orchids to its stunningly beautiful bird life, may enrich our understanding of other, more complex, living systems worldwide. What Fernández captures here so vividly is not just the amazing variety of living creatures that have erupted in evolutionary isolation, but the urgency of scientists racing to give that variety a name before it vanishes.

Momentous changes swept Spain in the fifteenth century. A royal marriage united Castile and Aragon, its two largest kingdoms. The last Muslim emirate on the Iberian Peninsula fell to Spanish Catholic armies. And conquests in the Americas were turning Spain into a great empire. Yet few in this period of flourishing Spanish power could define “Spain” concretely, or say with any confidence who were Spaniards and who were not. Speaking of Spain offers an analysis of the cultural and political forces that transformed Spain’s diverse peoples and polities into a unified nation.

Antonio Feros traces evolving ideas of Spanish nationhood and Spanishness in the discourses of educated elites, who debated whether the union of Spain’s kingdoms created a single fatherland (patria) or whether Spain remained a dynastic monarchy comprised of separate nations. If a unified Spain was emerging, was it a pluralistic nation, or did “Spain” represent the imposition of the dominant Castilian culture over the rest? The presence of large communities of individuals with Muslim and Jewish ancestors and the colonization of the New World brought issues of race to the fore as well. A nascent civic concept of Spanish identity clashed with a racialist understanding that Spaniards were necessarily of pure blood and “white,” unlike converted Jews and Muslims, Amerindians, and Africans.

Gradually Spaniards settled the most intractable of these disputes. By the time the liberal Constitution of Cádiz (1812) was ratified, consensus held that almost all people born in Spain’s territories, whatever their ethnicity, were Spanish.

Liberal arts colleges represent a tiny portion of the higher education market—no more than 2 percent of enrollees. Yet they produce a stunningly large percentage of America’s leaders in virtually every field of endeavor. The educational experience they offer—small classes led by professors devoted to teaching and mentoring, in a community dedicated to learning—has been a uniquely American higher education ideal.

Liberal Arts at the Brink is a wake-up call for everyone who values liberal arts education. A former college president trained in law and economics, Ferrall shows how a spiraling demand for career-related education has pressured liberal arts colleges to become vocational, distorting their mission and core values. The relentless competition among them to attract the “best” students has driven down tuition revenues while driving up operating expenses to levels the colleges cannot cover. The weakest are being forced to sell out to vocational for-profit universities or close their doors. The handful of wealthy elite colleges risk becoming mere dispensers of employment and professional school credentials. The rest face the prospect of moving away from liberal arts and toward vocational education in order to survive.

Writing in a personable, witty style, Ferrall tackles the host of threats and challenges liberal arts colleges now confront. Despite these daunting realities, he makes a spirited case for the unique benefits of the education they offer—to students and the nation. He urges liberal arts colleges to stop going it alone and instead band together to promote their mission and ensure their future.

Ding Ling is China’s foremost woman writer, and one of the great survivors in modern Chinese literary history. Iconoclast, feminist, and political activist, Ding Ling began her writing in the late 1920s as a member of the May Fourth generation and continued to write after the Communist Party had established control over all literary activities. She has survived to practice her art through the physical dangers of war, imprisonment, and persecution by two governments.

Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker examines Ding Ling’s writings from the startling early stories about young women undergoing crises of love, sex, and identity to her novel on land reform, The Sun Shines on the Sanggan River, which won the 1951 Stalin prize for literature. The unique interest of Ding Ling’s writing lies in the response and resistance to political pressure that is revealed in the sequence of the works. The formal aspects of her fiction, as it undergoes distinctive phases of development, exemplify in precise ways the effects of ideological change on narrative practice. As much as the momentous events of her life, the literary works she produced dramatize the succession of creative dilemmas confronting the modern Chinese writer.

The examination of Ding Ling’s life and works raises pressing questions about the writer’s role and the validity of literature and its hopes for survival in a world of radical political change.

In a work of sweep and ambition, James Fichter explores how American trade proved pivotal to the evolution of capitalism in the United States and helped to shape the course of the British Empire.

Before the American Revolution, colonial merchants were part of a trading network that spanned the globe. After 1783, U.S. merchants began trading in the East Indies independently, creating a new class of investor-capitalists and the first generation of American millionaires. Such wealth was startling in a country where, a generation earlier, the most prosperous Americans had been Southern planters. This mercantile elite brought its experience and affluence to other sectors of the economy, helping to concentrate capital and create wealth, and paving the way for the modern business corporation.

Conducted on free trade principles, American trade in Asia was so extensive that it undermined the monopoly of the British East India Company and forced Britain to open its own free trade to Asia. The United States and the British Empire thus converged around shared, Anglo-American free-trade ideals and financial capitalism in Asia. American traders also provided a vital link to the Atlantic world for Dutch Java and French Mauritius, and were at the vanguard of Western contact with Polynesia and the Pacific Northwest.

Based on an impressive array of sources from Europe, Asia, Africa, and the United States, this pathbreaking book revolutionizes our understanding of the early American economy in a global context and the relationship between the young nation and its former colonial master.

Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus, was largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato. The publication of his Latin translations of the dialogues in 1484 was an intellectual event of the first magnitude, making the Platonic canon accessible to western Europe after the passing of a millennium and establishing Plato as an authority for Renaissance thought.

This volume contains Ficino’s extended analysis and commentary on the Phaedrus, which he explicates as a meditation on “beauty in all its forms” and a sublime work of theology. In the commentary on the Ion, Ficino explores a poetics of divine inspiration that leads to the Neoplatonist portrayal of the soul as a rhapsode whose song is an ascent into the mind of God. Both works bear witness to Ficino’s attempt to revive a Christian Platonism and what might be called an Orphic Christianity.

The Platonic Theology is a visionary work and the philosophical masterpiece of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus who was largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato. A student of the Neoplatonic schools of Plotinus and Proclus, he was committed to reconciling Platonism with Christianity, in the hope that such a reconciliation would initiate a spiritual revival and return of the golden age. His Platonic evangelizing was eminently successful and widely influential, and his Platonic Theology, translated into English for the first time in this edition, is one of the keys to understanding the art, thought, culture, and spirituality of the Renaissance.

This is the fifth of a projected six volumes.

The Platonic Theology is a visionary work and the philosophical masterpiece of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus who was largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato. A student of the Neoplatonic schools of Plotinus and Proclus, he was committed to reconciling Platonism with Christianity, in the hope that such a reconciliation would initiate a spiritual revival and return of the golden age. His Platonic evangelizing was eminently successful and widely influential, and his Platonic Theology, translated into English for the first time in this edition, is one of the keys to understanding the art, thought, culture, and spirituality of the Renaissance.

This sixth and final volume of the I Tatti Renaissance Library edition includes comprehensive indexes to the whole work.

The Platonic Theology is a visionary work and the philosophical masterpiece of Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus who was largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato.

A student of the Neoplatonic schools of Plotinus and Proclus, he was committed to reconciling Platonism with Christianity, in the hope that such a reconciliation would initiate a spiritual revival and return of the golden age. His Platonic evangelizing was eminently successful and widely influential, and his Platonic Theology, translated into English for the first time in this edition, is one of the keys to understanding the art, thought, culture, and spirituality of the Renaissance.

The Platonic Theology is a visionary work and the philosophical masterpiece of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus who was largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato.

A student of the Neoplatonic schools of Plotinus and Proclus, he was committed to reconciling Platonism with Christianity, in the hope that such a reconciliation would initiate a spiritual revival and return of the golden age. His Platonic evangelizing was eminently successful and widely influential, and his Platonic Theology, translated into English for the first time in this edition, is one of the keys to understanding the art, thought, culture, and spirituality of the Renaissance.

The Platonic Theology is a visionary work and the philosophical masterpiece of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus who was largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato.

A student of the Neoplatonic schools of Plotinus and Proclus, he was committed to reconciling Platonism with Christianity, in the hope that such a reconciliation would initiate a spiritual revival and return of the golden age. His Platonic evangelizing was eminently successful and widely influential, and his Platonic Theology, translated into English for the first time in this edition, is one of the keys to understanding the art, thought, culture, and spirituality of the Renaissance.

Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus, was largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato. Ficino’s commentaries on Plato remained the standard guide to the Greek philosopher’s works for centuries. Vanhaelen’s new translation of Ficino’s vast commentary on the Parmenides makes this monument of Renaissance metaphysics accessible to the modern student of philosophy.

The volume contains the first critical edition of the Latin text, an ample introduction, and extensive notes.

Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus, was largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato. Ficino’s commentaries on Plato remained the standard guide to the Greek philosopher’s works for centuries. Vanhaelen’s new translation of Ficino’s vast commentary on the Parmenides makes this monument of Renaissance metaphysics accessible to the modern student of philosophy.

The volume contains the first critical edition of the Latin text, an ample introduction, and extensive notes.

With an Expanded Appendix on the Current Legal Status of Surrogacy Arrangements

A practice known since Biblical times, surrogate motherhood has only recently leaped to prominence as a way of providing babies for childless couples—and leaped to notoriety through the dramatic case of Baby M. Contract surrogacy is officially little more than ten years old, but by 1986 five hundred babies had been born to mothers who gave them up to sperm donor fathers for a fee, and the practice is growing rapidly. Martha Field examines the myriad legal complexities that today enmesh surrogate motherhood, and also looks beyond existing legal rules to ask what society wants from surrogacy.

A man’s desire to be a “biological” parent even when his wife is infertile—the father’s wife usually adopts the child—has led to this new kind of family, and modern technology could further extend surrogacy’s appeal by making gestational surrogates available to couples who provide both egg and sperm. But is surrogacy a form of babyselling? Is the practice a private matter covered by contract law, or does adoption law govern? Is it good or bad social and public policy to leave surrogacy unregulated? Should the law allow, encourage, discourage, or prohibit surrogate motherhood? Ultimately the answers will depend on what the American public wants.

In the difficult process of sorting out such vexing questions, Martha Field has written a landmark book. Showing that the problem is rather too much applicable law than too little, she discusses contract law and constitutional law, custody and adoption law, and the rights of biological fathers as well as the laws governing sperm donation. Competing values are involved all along the legal and social spectrum. Field suggests that a federal prohibition would be most effective if banning surrogacy is the aim, but federal prohibition might not be chosen for a variety of reasons: a preference for regulating surrogacy instead of driving it underground; a preference for allowing regulation and variation by state; or a respect for the interests of people who want to enter surrogacy arrangements. Since the law can support a wide variety of positions, Field offers one that seems best to reconcile the competing values at stake. Whether or not paid surrogacy is made illegal, she suggests that a surrogate mother retain the option of abiding by or canceling the contract up to the time she freely gives the child to the adopting couple. And if she cancels the contract, she should be entitled to custody without having to prove in court that she would be a better parent than the father.

The countries of Central America, afflicted for many years by civil strife and economic stagnation, are entering a new era of peace, democracy, and economic development. Now, more than ever, it is necessary for reforms in the legal system to successfully support these changes.

This volume examines two fields of law in which reforms are especially crucial: the improvement of the judicial systems and other mechanisms for resolving noncriminal disputes, and modernization of the laws governing both tangible and "intellectual" property. Among the specific topics addressed in the volume are the debate over "oralidad;" the problem of interlocutory appeals; nonjudicial procedures for resolving disputes (negotiation, mediation, conciliation, and arbitration); land and trademark registration systems; land reform in Nicaragua; the management of genetic resources; online legal databases; and legal education.

Engaging in sex, becoming parents, raising children: these are among the most personal decisions we make, and for people with mental retardation, these decisions are consistently challenged, regulated, and outlawed. This book is a comprehensive study of the American legal doctrines and social policies, past and present, that have governed procreation and parenting by persons with mental retardation. It argues persuasively that people with retardation should have legal authority to make their own decisions.

Despite the progress of the normalization movement, which has moved so many people with mental retardation into the mainstream since the 1960s, negative myths about reproduction and child rearing among this population persist. Martha Field and Valerie Sanchez trace these prejudices to the eugenics movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They show how misperceptions have led to inconsistent and discriminatory outcomes when third parties seek to make birth control or parenting decisions for people with mental retardation. They also explore the effect of these decisions on those they purport to protect. Detailed, thorough, and just, their book is a sustained argument for reform of the legal practices and social policies it describes.

Precious oil and export markets, wars in Lebanon and the Persian Gulf, peace talks at the White House, terrorist eruptions: more now than ever, Arab affairs are the West's affair. And yet as we find ourselves increasingly enmeshed in its politics and economics, the Middle East remains a mystery to most of us, a world of dimly understood connections and impenetrable complexities. The Arab world at last becomes accessible in this book. The only study to include developments since the Gulf War and the historic pact between Israel and the PLO, Inside the Arab World gives us a complete and detailed picture of the region as it is today, as well as a clear sense of how Arab affairs have evolved and where they may lead.

Despite its abundance of oil, the Arab world has failed to produce a single successful economy. Michael Field, a recognized expert and longtime reporter on the Arab states, ably explores the cultural, political, and geographic reasons for this failure. Ranging from Algeria to the Gulf states to Egypt and Syria, he considers the fragmentation of society, the people's tolerance of bad government, corruption, and the deadening economic effect of Arab socialism. But he also shows how the region--influenced partly by exposure to Western media, partly by reforms imposed by creditors--is changing now, taking its first cautious steps toward democracy, whose opportunities so far have been most firmly grasped by Islamic fundamentalists.

Timely, thorough, and highly readable, this book offers much-needed insight into the Arab world as its politics and policies increasingly engage our own.

Until very recently, almost all books on infancy assumed basic infant immaturity. Remarkably, as Tiffany Field shows in her survey of recent research, investigators are discovering that infants possess sophisticated perceptual skills, such as hearing, even before birth. Newborns can sense touch and motion, discriminate tastes and smells, recognize their mother's voice, and imitate facial expressions. In fact, the newborn is an active learner, looking, reaching, sucking, and grimacing from its first moments in its new environment.

Field provides a readable account of our current knowledge about infant development. She looks at the emergence of sensorimotor and cognitive skills, which play an important role in social and emotional development in the months following birth as the infant experiences the world. In a chapter with important implications for working mothers, Field reviews the literature on infants in nursery and daycare programs, countering negative assessments with studies that show an enhancement of infants' social interaction in good care settings. In the concluding chapter, she pays particular attention to infants at risk because of disease (including AIDS), maternal drug use, prematurity, or maternal depression, and describes possible intervention strategies. The bibliography provides an invaluable summary of significant primary reference papers for professional researchers, students, and parents.

Despite declining stocks worldwide and increasing health risks, artisanal whaling remains a cultural practice tied to nature’s rhythms. The Wake of the Whale presents the art, history, and challenge of whaling in the Caribbean and North Atlantic, based on a decade of award-winning fieldwork.

Sightings of pilot whales in the frigid Nordic waters have drawn residents of the Faroe Islands to their boats and beaches for nearly a thousand years. Down in the tropics, around the islands of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, artisanal whaling is a younger trade, shaped by the legacies of slavery and colonialism but no less important to the local population. Each culture, Russell Fielding shows, has developed a distinct approach to whaling that preserves key traditions while adapting to threats of scarcity, the requirements of regulation, and a growing awareness of the humane treatment of animals.

Yet these strategies struggle to account for the risks of regularly eating meat contaminated with methylmercury and other environmental pollutants introduced from abroad. Fielding considers how these and other factors may change whaling cultures forever, perhaps even bringing an end to this way of life.

A rare mix of scientific and social insight, The Wake of the Whale raises compelling questions about the place of cultural traditions in the contemporary world and the sacrifices we must make for sustainability.

Publication of this book was supported, in part, by a grant from Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.

After World War II, American organizations launched efforts to improve the lives of foreign children, from war orphans in Europe and Japan to impoverished youth in the developing world. Providing material aid, education, and emotional support, these programs had a deep humanitarian underpinning. But they were also political projects. Sara Fieldston’s comprehensive account Raising the World shows that the influence of child welfare agencies around the globe contributed to the United States’ expanding hegemony. These organizations filtered American power through the prism of familial love and shaped perceptions of the United States as the benevolent parent in a family of nations.

The American Friends Service Committee, Foster Parents’ Plan, and Christian Children’s Fund, among others, sent experts abroad to build nursery schools and orphanages and to instruct parents in modern theories of child rearing and personality development. Back home, thousands of others “sponsored” overseas children by sending money and exchanging often-intimate letters. Although driven by sincere impulses and sometimes fostering durable friendships, such efforts doubled as a form of social engineering. Americans believed that child rearing could prevent the rise of future dictators, curb the appeal of communism, and facilitate economic development around the world.

By the 1970s, child welfare agencies had to adjust to a new world in which American power was increasingly suspect. But even as volunteers reconsidered the project of reshaping foreign societies, a perceived universality of children’s needs continued to justify intervention by Americans into young lives across the globe.

Surface Structure provides a complete and up-to-date exposition of a major variant of the Chomskian theory of language: the so-called Revised Extended Standard Theory. Robert Fiengo presents the theory in a clear and succinct way and shows how many of the leading ideas in the theory can be deepened and strengthened. It is Fiengo's central thesis that there is a syntactic level—surface structure—which constitutes the interface between syntactic, lexical, morphological and semantic components of the grammar. This thesis is defended across a broad range of problems in English grammar, resulting in a significant increase in the empirical coverage of the theory.

Although not a polemical work, Fiengo's book addresses many of the current controversies in linguistics and presents a rationale for guiding choices among competing theories. At a time when linguistic theories appear to be diverging in an explosive fashion, this lucid and current discussion is precisely what is needed.

Renowned as a great scholar, teacher, and legal historian, Frederic William Maitland (1850-1906) advanced the cause of legal history, opposing the idea that legal history was law and not history, yet believing in the advantage of legal training.

He was Downing Professor of Law at Cambridge, helped to found the Selden Society, and himself edited Henry de Bracton's Notebook and four Year Books of Edward II. With Sir Frederick Pollock he wrote the brilliant work that is still a standard, The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I. He edited Memoranda de Parliamento, and wrote Domesday Book and Beyond, Township and Borough, and Roman Canon Law as well as many papers on legal history and law. His lectures on Equity, on The Forms of Action at Common Law, and on Constitutional History of England were published after his death.

C. H. S. Fifoot has written this biography of Maitland with care and devotion in a style that is lucid and eloquent. He traces the origin and development of Maitland's works, using them to reveal the man himself and his qualities of mind and spirit. Mr. Fifoot places his subject in the context not only of his age, but also of his family and friends. He has drawn on Maitland's letters as well as unpublished letters of his friends, private papers, manuscripts, and recollections, much of which would otherwise have perished. The many quotations of Maitland he has incorporated are delightful and revealing.

Francesco Filelfo (1398–1481), one of the great scholar-poets of the Italian Renaissance, was the principal humanist working in Lombardy in the middle of the Quattrocento and served as court poet to the Visconti and Sforza dukes of Milan. His long life saw him as busy with politics, diplomacy, and intrigue as with literature and scholarship, leaving him very often on the run from rival factions—and even from hired assassins. The first Latin poet of the Renaissance to explore the expressive potential of Horatian meters, Filelfo adapted the traditions of Augustan literature to address personal and political concerns in his own day.

The Odes, completed in the mid-1450s, constitute the first complete cycle of Horatian odes since classical antiquity and are a major literary achievement. Their themes include war, just rule, love, exile, patronage, and friendship as well as topical subjects like the plague’s grim effects on Milan.

This volume is the first publication of the Latin text since the fifteenth century and the first translation into English.

In this thoughtful book, Gary Fine explores how Americans attempt to give meaning to the natural world that surrounds them. Although "nature" has often been treated as an unproblematic reality, Fine suggests that the meanings we assign to the natural environment are culturally grounded. In other words, there is no nature separate from culture. He calls this process of cultural construction and interpretation, "naturework." Of course, there is no denying the biological reality of trees, mountains, earthquakes, and hurricanes, but, he argues, they must be interpreted to be made meaningful. Fine supports this claim by examining the fascinating world of mushrooming.

Based on three years of field research with mushroomers at local and national forays, Morel Tales highlights the extensive range of meanings that mushrooms have for mushroomers. Fine details how mushroomers talk about their finds--turning their experiences into "fish stories" (the one that got away), war stories, and treasure tales; how mushroomers routinely joke about dying from or killing others with misidentified mushrooms, and how this dark humor contributes to the sense of community among collectors. He also describes the sometimes friendly, sometimes tense relations between amateur mushroom collectors and professional mycologists. Fine extends his argument to show that the elaboration of cultural meanings found among mushroom collectors is equally applicable to birders, butterfly collectors, rock hounds, and other naturalists.

An esteemed teacher offers a major reassessment of the history of Greece from prehistoric times to the rise of Alexander. This is a work of prodigious scholarship written in grand style.

John Fine surveys the archaeological work that has revealed so much about the civilization of Crete and Mycenaean Greece, and discusses the age of colonization during which Greek colonies were established from the Crimea to the Nile, from the Caucasus to Spain. Analyzing social and economic developments, as well as foreign and inter-city affairs, he assesses the history, culture, and democracy of Athens, and Sparta’s institutions and military exploits; recounts the Greeks’ relations and then war with the Persian empire; details alliances, struggles, and the varying fortunes of the Greek city-states; and relates the rise of Macedon. Fine treats the Greeks’ story in the context of events elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean. Throughout he indicates the nature of the evidence on which our present knowledge is based, masterfully explaining the problems and pitfalls in interpreting ancient accounts. The Ancient Greeks is a splendid narrative history and a refreshing reinterpretation that will please students of ancient history, and everyone interested in early civilizations.

The menorah, the seven-branched candelabrum, has traversed millennia as a living symbol of Judaism and the Jewish people. Naturally, it did not pass through the ages unaltered. The Menorah explores the cultural and intellectual history of the Western world’s oldest continuously used religious symbol. This meticulously researched yet deeply personal history explains how the menorah illuminates the great changes and continuities in Jewish culture, from biblical times to modern Israel.

Though the golden seven-branched menorahs of Moses and of the Jerusalem Temple are artifacts lost to history, the best-known menorah image survives on the Arch of Titus in Rome. Commemorating the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, the arch reliefs depict the spoils of the Temple, the menorah chief among them, as they appeared in Titus’s great triumphal parade in 71 CE. Steven Fine recounts how, in 2012, his team discovered the original yellow ochre paint that colored the menorah—an event that inspired his search for the history of this rich symbol from ancient Israel through classical history, the Middle Ages, and on to our own tumultuous times.

Surveying artifacts and literary sources spanning three thousand years—from the Torah and the ruins of Rome to yesterday’s news—Fine presents the menorah as a source of fascination and illumination for Jews, Samaritans, Christians, and even Freemasons. A symbol for the divine, for continuity, emancipation, national liberation, and redemption, the menorah features prominently on Israel’s state seal and continues to inspire and challenge in surprising ways.

For its size, the larynx is the most complex and versatile mechanical device in the body. In this remarkable book, a distinguished medical illustrator and a world authority on laryngeal biomechanics collaborate to provide both an atlas and a treatise on the behavior of the larynx. In separate chapters, the authors consider the functions of the larynx—as safeguard for the free passage of air, to protect the airway from invasion, as a plug that resists expiration during effort, and as the instrument of speech and song. They replace the traditional view of the larynx as a sphincter with a more accurate model. The laryngeal tissues are seen as folding and unfolding in response to respiratory excursion of the trachea, action of intrinsic and extrinsic laryngeal muscles, the respiratory air current, and the elastic recoil of ligaments, membranes, and articular capsules.

The illustrations include unretouched xrays, halftone sketches, structural drawings, and diagrams; together they present as complete a picture as possible of the larynx in all its various functional states. Innovative and systematic, the work forms the basis for planning radical and reconstructive surgery, quantitative approaches in voice therapy, treatment of laryngospasm in anesthesia without use of relaxants, and design of an artificial larynx.

"The goal of my teaching has always been, and remains, to train analysts."
--Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI, 209

Arguably the most profound psychoanalytic thinker since Freud, and deeply influential in many fields, Jacques Lacan often seems opaque to those he most wanted to reach. These are the readers Bruce Fink addresses in this clear and practical account of Lacan's highly original approach to therapy. Written by a clinician for clinicians, Fink's Introduction is an invaluable guide to Lacanian psychoanalysis, how it's done, and how it differs from other forms of therapy. While elucidating many of Lacan's theoretical notions, the book does so from the perspective of the practitioner faced with the pressing questions of diagnosis, what therapeutic stance to adopt, how to involve the patient, and how to bring about change.

Fink provides a comprehensive overview of Lacanian analysis, explaining the analyst's aims and interventions at each point in the treatment. He uses four case studies to elucidate Lacan's unique structural approach to diagnosis. These cases, taking up both theoretical and clinical issues in Lacan's views of psychosis, perversion, and neurosis, highlight the very different approaches to treatment that different situations demand.

How to lead the people and be one of them? What's a democratic intellectual to do? This longstanding dilemma for the progressive intellectual, how to bridge the world of educated opinion and that of the working masses, is the focus of Leon Fink's penetrating book, the first social history of the progressive thinker caught in the middle of American political culture.

In a series of vivid portraits, Fink investigates the means and methods of intellectual activists in the first part of the twentieth century--how they served, observed, and made their own history. In the stories of, among others, John R. Commons, Charles McCarthy, William English Walling, Anna Strunsky Walling, A. Philip Randolph, W. Jett Lauck, and Wil Lou Gray, he creates a panorama of reform of unusual power. Issues as broad as the cult of leadership and as specific as the Wisconsin school of labor history lead us into the heart of the dilemma of the progressive intellectual in our age.

The problem, as Fink describes it, is twofold: Could people prevail in a land of burgeoning capitalism and concentrated power? And should the people prevail? This book shows us Socialists and Progressives and, later, New Dealers grappling with these questions as they tried to redress the new inequities of their day--and as they confronted the immense frustrations of moving the masses. Fink's graphic depiction of intellectuals' labors in the face of capitalist democracy's challenges dramatizes a time in our past--and at the same time speaks eloquently to our own.

For the first time in our history, U.S. prisons house over a million inmates, enough to populate a city larger than San Francisco. Building prisons is the new growth industry, as the American public reacts to a perceived increase in violence and politicians take a hard line toward crime. But this eagerness to construct more prisons raises basic questions about what the community wants and will tolerate and what the Supreme Court will sanction.

In this timely book, Norman Finkel looks at the relationship between the “law on the books,” as set down in the Constitution and developed in cases and decisions, and what he calls “commonsense justice,” the ordinary citizen’s notions of what is just and fair. Law is an essentially human endeavor, a collection of psychological theories about why people think, feel, and behave as they do, and when and why we should find some of them blameworthy and punishable. But is it independent of community sentiment, as some would contend? Or, as Finkel suggests, do juries bring the community’s judgment to bear on the moral blameworthiness of the defendant? When jurors decide that the law is unfair, or the punishment inappropriate for a particular defendant, they have sometimes nullified the law.

Nullification represents the jury’s desire not to defeat but “to perfect and complete” the law. It is the “no confidence” vote of commonsense justice refusing to follow the path the law has marked out—and pointing to a new path based on what seem to be more just grounds. Finkel brings to life the story behind the jury and judicial decisions, interweaving anecdotes, case law, and social science research to present a balanced and comprehensive view of important legal and social policy issues.

The three most important Supreme Court Justices before the Civil War—Chief Justices John Marshall and Roger B. Taney and Associate Justice Joseph Story—upheld the institution of slavery in ruling after ruling. These opinions cast a shadow over the Court and the legacies of these men, but historians have rarely delved deeply into the personal and political ideas and motivations they held. In Supreme Injustice, the distinguished legal historian Paul Finkelman establishes an authoritative account of each justice’s proslavery position, the reasoning behind his opposition to black freedom, and the incentives created by circumstances in his private life.

Finkelman uses census data and other sources to reveal that Justice Marshall aggressively bought and sold slaves throughout his lifetime—a fact that biographers have ignored. Justice Story never owned slaves and condemned slavery while riding circuit, and yet on the high court he remained silent on slave trade cases and ruled against blacks who sued for freedom. Although Justice Taney freed many of his own slaves, he zealously and consistently opposed black freedom, arguing in Dred Scott that free blacks had no Constitutional rights and that slave owners could move slaves into the Western territories. Finkelman situates this infamous holding within a solid record of support for slavery and hostility to free blacks.

Supreme Injustice boldly documents the entanglements that alienated three major justices from America’s founding ideals and embedded racism ever deeper in American civic life.

This is the long-awaited work on Homer's Odyssey by one of our foremost teachers and scholars of the classics--John H. Finley, Jr. Already, generations of students at Harvard have benefited from his knowledge and understanding of Homer's words and world. Now his thoughts on the Odyssey are woven together in this remarkable volume.

Finley begins by arguing the unity of design in the Odyssey, and shows the connection between the actions of three main characters: Telemachus' maturity brings Penelope to her long-delayed decision for remarriage, which, by producing the bow as marriage-test, gives the unknown Odysseus his means of success against the suitors.

Finley also suggests that the poem is a kind of half-divine comedy. About an older man's glad return, it contrasts to the Iliad's story of young man's death far from home. It is a comedy to the Iliad's tragedy and, like Shakespeare's Tempest, it brings the absent king to knowledge which, though initially unwelcome, proves his and others' happiness.

Throughout his book, Finley applies a lifetime's learning to a work that is universally recognized as one of the highest achievements of our civilization. At a time when Homer is in danger of being swallowed by specialists, it is important to recognize and uphold the poet's basic concern for life and myth and legend. Such sympathy combined with knowledge is Finley's fine achievement.

The early-twentieth-century essayist Zhu Ziqing once wrote that he had only to mention the name of his hometown of Yangzhou to someone in Beijing and the person would respond, “A fine place! A fine place!” Yangzhou was indeed one of the great cities of late imperial China, and its name carries rich historical and cultural resonances. Even today Yangzhou continues to evoke images of artists, men of letters, great merchant families, scenic waterways, an urban environment of considerable grace and charm, and a history imbued with color and romance.

This book is in some ways a biography of a city that acquired a personality, even a gender, and became an actor in its own history. Yangzhou invites attention because its place in China’s cultural iconography tells us not only of one city’s vicissitudes and fortunes but also of changes in the geography of the Chinese imagination. The author examines the city’s place in the history of the late imperial era and of the meanings that accrued to Yangzhou over time. She argues that the actual construction of the city—its academies of learning, its philanthropic institutions, its gardens, its teahouses, and its brothels—underpinned the construction of a certain idea of Yangzhou.

During the 1991 Gulf War, pundits and experts scrambled unsuccessfully to explain Iraq's “claim” to Kuwait. In a lucid and measured account of a complex historical and geographic drama that culminated in Operation Desert Storm, David Finnie elucidates the long Kuwaiti-Iraqi border dispute and lays Saddam Hussein's dubious claim to rest. He also raises larger questions about European colonialism and about the creation of new nation-states in the Middle East in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Finnie vividly portrays how arbitrary the drawing of frontiers can be, and how they come to serve internal, regional, and international rivalries and ambitions. This history begins in the eighteenth century, when Kuwait was first settled by nomads from the Arabian desert. Finnie describes the country's growing prosperity under a merchant oligarchy, then shows how the Kuwaitis, seeking British protection from the sprawling Ottoman Empire, came to serve England's imperial strategy. He details the ways in which Britain parlayed its mandatory control of Iraq and its protectorate over Kuwait to curb the larger nation's ambitions and to ensure Kuwait's independence under British auspices.

A fresh look at British diplomatic documents reveals how Whitehall covered its tracks, heading off the Iraqis, obfuscating League of Nations proceedings, and confounding scholars and researchers down to the present day. Pursuing his story through Britain's withdrawal from the Persian Gulf and Iraq's 1963 recognition of Kuwait's boundaries, Finnie examines the U.N. post-war measures to secure the frontier in the face of Iraq's continuing pressure for better access to Gulf waters.

Arguably no other nineteenth-century German composer was as literate or as finely attuned to setting verse as Robert Schumann. Jon W. Finson challenges long-standing assumptions about Schumann's Lieder, engaging traditionally held interpretations. He argues against the belief that the "Year of Song" simply reflects Schumann's personal life. Finson also devotes attention to the form and metric structure of German poetry that is almost entirely new to the discussion of Schumann's songs.

Arranged in part thematically, rather than merely by strict compositional chronology, this book speaks to the heart of Schumann's music. Finson's sustained attention to performance, such as questions of whether two singers might divide performance of cycles or whether miscellanies form coherent entities, allows the reader to engage Schumann's songs in novel ways.

Finson brings original research and the most recent scholarship to the musically literate public and the expert alike. This represents the definitive work on Schumann's songs and the standard reference for any Schumann enthusiast.

Defining the proper female body, seeking elective surgery for beauty, enjoying lavish spa treatments, and combating impotence might seem like today’s celebrity infatuations. However, these preoccupations were very much alive in the early modern period. Valeria Finucci recounts the story of a well-known patron of arts and music in Renaissance Italy, Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga of Mantua (1562–1612), to examine the culture, fears, and captivations of his times. Using four notorious moments in Vincenzo’s life, Finucci explores changing concepts of sexuality, reproduction, beauty, and aging.

The first was Vincenzo’s inability to consummate his earliest marriage and subsequent medical inquiry, which elucidates new concepts of female anatomy. Second, Vincenzo’s interactions with Bolognese doctor Gaspare Tagliacozzi, the “father of plastic surgery,” illuminate contemporary fascinations with elective procedures. Vincenzo’s use of thermal spas explores the proliferation of holistic, noninvasive therapies to manage pain, detoxify, and rehabilitate what the medicine of the time could not address. And finally, Vincenzo’s search for a cure for impotence later in life analyzes masculinity and aging.

By examining letters, doctors’ advice, reports, receipts, and travelogues, together with (and against) medical, herbal, theological, even legal publications of the period, Finucci describes an early modern cultural history of the pathology of human reproduction, the physiology of aging, and the science of rejuvenation as they affected a prince with a large ego and an even larger purse. In doing so, she deftly marries salacious tales with historical analysis to tell a broader story of Italian Renaissance cultural adjustments and obsessions.

The surprising finding of this book is that, contrary to conventional wisdom, global income inequality is decreasing. Critics of globalization and others maintain that the spread of consumer capitalism is dramatically polarizing the worldwide distribution of income. But as the demographer Glenn Firebaugh carefully shows, income inequality for the world peaked in the late twentieth century and is now heading downward because of declining income inequality across nations. Furthermore, as income inequality declines across nations, it is rising within nations (though not as rapidly as it is declining across nations). Firebaugh claims that this historic transition represents a new geography of global income inequality in the twenty-first century.

This book documents the new geography, describes its causes, and explains why other analysts have missed one of the defining features of our era—a transition in inequality that is reducing the importance of where a person is born in determining his or her future well-being.

Just as investors want the companies they hold equity in to do well, homeowners have a financial interest in the success of their communities. If neighborhood schools are good, if property taxes and crime rates are low, then the value of the homeowner’s principal asset—his home—will rise. Thus, as William Fischel shows, homeowners become watchful citizens of local government, not merely to improve their quality of life, but also to counteract the risk to their largest asset, a risk that cannot be diversified. Meanwhile, their vigilance promotes a municipal governance that provides services more efficiently than do the state or national government.

Fischel has coined the portmanteau word “homevoter” to crystallize the connection between homeownership and political involvement. The link neatly explains several vexing puzzles, such as why displacement of local taxation by state funds reduces school quality and why local governments are more likely to be efficient providers of environmental amenities. The Homevoter Hypothesis thereby makes a strong case for decentralization of the fiscal and regulatory functions of government.

Are rent controls and zoning regulations unconstitutional? Should the Supreme Court strike down the Endangered Species Act when its administration interferes with the use of private property? These questions are currently debated under the doctrine of regulatory takings, and William Fischel’s book offers a new perspective on the issue.

Regulatory Takings argues that the issue is not so much about the details of property law as it is about the fairness of politics. The book employs jurisprudential theories, economic analysis, historical investigation, and political science to show why local land use regulations, such as zoning and rent control, deserve a higher degree of judicial scrutiny than national regulations. Unlike other books on this topic, Regulatory Takings goes beyond case law to buttress its arguments. Its reality checks range from reviews of statistical evidence to local inquiries about famous takings cases such as Pennsylvania Coal v. Mahon and Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Commission. The gap between legal theory and on-the-ground practice is one reason that Fischel investigates alternative means of protecting property rights.

Local governments are often deterred from unfairly regulating portable assets by their owners’ threat of “exit” from the jurisdiction. State and federal government regulations are disciplined by property-owner coalitions whose “voice” is clearly audible in the statehouses and in Congress.

Constitutional courts need to preserve their resources for use in areas in which politics is loaded against the property owner. Regulatory Takings advances an economic standard to decide when a local regulation crosses the border from legitimate police power to a taking that requires just compensation for owners who are adversely affected.

You're young, ambitious, entering the field of your dreams; you're on your own, the competition is fierce--and then you see your chance: the big story, the big role, the big discovery. But you'll have to cut a few corners, bend the rules, cheat a bit. What choices will you make?

After studying more than a hundred young people launching their careers, these longtime researchers of "good work"--work that is both skillful and honorable--find unsettling answers. Although young workers know what it takes to do good work, they don't always feel they can follow the ethical route. "Later, when I'm successful," is their implicit promise.

Making Good explores the choices confronting young workers who join the ranks of three dynamic professions--journalism, science, and acting--and looks at how the novices navigate moral dilemmas posed by a demanding, frequently lonely, professional life. The authors also uncover striking comparisons between these young professionals and the veterans in their fields--most notably, older workers recall inspiring models and mentors, while today's beginners see themselves as on their own. With extensive insights into how young workers view their respective domains, the nature of their ambitions, the sacrifices they are willing to make, and the lines they are prepared to cross, this study will prove instructive to young employees and employers alike, as well as to those who wish to understand the shifting moral and social character of the working world.

Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin, first published in 1967, set a new standard for Milton criticism and established its author as one of the world's preeminent Milton scholars. The lifelong engagement begun in that work culminates in this book, the magnum opus of a formidable critic and the definitive statement on Milton for our time.

How Milton works "from the inside out" is the foremost concern of Fish's book, which explores the radical effect of Milton's theological convictions on his poetry and prose. For Milton the value of a poem or of any other production derives from the inner worth of its author and not from any external measure of excellence or heroism. Milton's aesthetic, says Fish, is an "aesthetic of testimony": every action, whether verbal or physical, is or should be the action of holding fast to a single saving commitment against the allure of plot, narrative, representation, signs, drama--anything that might be construed as an illegitimate supplement to divine truth. Much of the energy of Milton's writing, according to Fish, comes from the effort to maintain his faith against these temptations, temptations which in any other aesthetic would be seen as the very essence of poetic value.

Encountering the great poet on his own terms, engaging his equally distinguished admirers and detractors, this book moves a 300-year debate about the significance of Milton's verse to a new level.

Stanley Fish is one of America’s most stimulating literary theorists. In this book, he undertakes a profound reexamination of some of criticism’s most basic assumptions. He penetrates to the core of the modern debate about interpretation, explodes numerous misleading formulations, and offers a stunning proposal for a new way of thinking about the way we read.

Fish begins by examining the relation between a reader and a text, arguing against the formalist belief that the text alone is the basic, knowable, neutral, and unchanging component of literary experience. But in arguing for the right of the reader to interpret and in effect create the literary work, he skillfully avoids the old trap of subjectivity. To claim that each reader essentially participates in the making of a poem or novel is not, he shows, an invitation to unchecked subjectivity and to the endless proliferation of competing interpretations. For each reader approaches a literary work not as an isolated individual but as part of a community of readers. “Indeed,” he writes, “it is interpretive communities, rather than either the text or reader, that produce meanings.”

The book is developmental, not static. Fish at all times reveals the evolutionary aspect of his work—the manner in which he has assumed new positions, altered them, and then moved on. Previously published essays are introduced by headnotes which relate them to the central notion of interpretive communities as it emerges in the final chapters. In the course of refining his theory, Fish includes rather than excludes the thinking of other critics and shows how often they agree with him, even when he and they may appear to be most dramatically at odds. Engaging, lucid, provocative, this book will immediately find its place among the seminal works of modern literary criticism.

The discipline of literary criticism is strictly defined, and the most pressing issues of our time—racism, violence against women and homosexuals, cultural imperialism, and the like—are located outside its domain. In Professional Correctness, Stanley Fish raises a provocative challenge to those who try to turn literary studies into an instrument of political change, arguing that when literary critics try to influence society at large by addressing social and political issues, they cease to be literary critics at all.

Anyone interested in the debate over the place of cultural studies in the field of literary criticism, or the more general question of whether academics can become the "public intellectuals" many aspire to be, needs to read Fish's powerful and unconventional argument for restoring discipline to the academy.

In 1967 the world of Milton studies was divided into two armed camps: one proclaiming (in the tradition of Blake and Shelley) that Milton was of the devil's party with or without knowing it, the other proclaiming (in the tradition of Addison and C. S. Lewis) that the poet's sympathies are obviously with God and the angels loyal to him.

The achievement of Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin was to reconcile the two camps by subsuming their claims in a single overarching thesis: Paradise Lost is a poem about how its readers came to be the way they are--that is, fallen--and the poem's lesson is proven on a reader's impulse every time he or she finds a devilish action attractive or a godly action dismaying.

Fish's argument reshaped the face of Milton studies; thirty years later the issues raised in Surprised by Sin continue to set the agenda and drive debate.

Stanley Fish is an equal opportunity antagonist. A theorist who has taken on theorists, an academician who has riled the academy, a legal scholar and political pundit who has ruffled feathers left and right, Fish here turns with customary gusto to the trouble with principle. Specifically, Fish has a quarrel with neutral principles. The trouble? They operate by sacrificing everything people care about to their own purity. And they are deployed with equal highmindedness and equally absurd results by liberals and conservatives alike.

In this bracing book, Fish argues that there is no realm of higher order impartiality--no neutral or fair territory on which to stake a claim--and that those who invoke one are always making a rhetorical and political gesture. In the end, it is history and context, the very substance against which a purportedly abstract principle defines itself, that determines a principle's content and power. In the course of making this argument, Fish takes up questions about academic freedom and hate speech, affirmative action and multiculturalism, the boundaries between church and state, and much more. Sparing no one, he shows how our notions of intellectual and religious liberty--cherished by those at both ends of the political spectrum--are artifacts of the very partisan politics they supposedly transcend. The Trouble with Principle offers a provocative challenge to the debates of our day that no intellectually honest citizen can afford to ignore.

Exegesis--interpretation and explanation of sacred texts--is the quintessence of rabbinic thought. Through such means and methods, the written words of Hebrew Scripture have been extended since antiquity, and given new voices for new times. In this lucid and often poetic book, Michael Fishbane delineates the connections between biblical interpretation and Jewish religious thought.

How can a canon be open to new meanings, given that it is believed to be immutable? Fishbane discusses the nature and rationale of this interpretative process in a series of studies on ancient Jewish speculative theology. Focusing on questions often pondered in Midrash, he shows how religious ideas are generated or justified by exegesis. He also explores the role exegesis plays in liturgy and ritual. A striking example is the transfer of speculative interpretations into meditation in prayer. Cultivation of the ability to perceive many implicit meanings in a text or religious practice can become a way of living--as Fishbane shows in explaining how such notions as joy or spiritual meditations on death can be idealized and the ideal transmitted through theological interpretation. The Exegetical Imagination is a collection of interrelated essays that together offer new and profound understanding of scriptural interpretation and its central role in Judaism.

In 2014, Russia illegally annexed Crimea, bolstered a separatist conflict in the Donbas region, and attacked Ukraine with its regular army and special forces. In each instance of Russian aggression, the U.S. response has often been criticized as inadequate, insufficient, or hesitant.

The Moscow Factor: U.S. Policy toward Sovereign Ukraine and the Kremlin is a unique study that examines four key Ukraine-related policy decisions across two Republican and two Democratic U.S. administrations. Eugene M. Fishel asks whether, how, and under what circumstances Washington has considered Ukraine’s status as a sovereign nation in its decision-making regarding relations with Moscow.

This study situates the stance of the United States toward Ukraine in the broader context of international relations. It fills an important lacuna in existing scholarship and policy discourse by focusing on the complex trilateral—rather than simply bilateral—dynamics between the United States, Ukraine, and Russia from 1991 to 2016. This book brings together for the first time documentary evidence and declassified materials dealing with policy deliberation, retrospective articles authored by former policymakers, and formal memoirs by erstwhile senior officials. The study is also supplemented by open-ended interviews with former and returning officials.

In this bold reinterpretation of American culture, Philip Fisher describes generational life as a series of renewed acts of immigration into a new world. Along with the actual flood of immigrants, technological change brings about an immigration of objects and systems, ways of life and techniques for the distribution of ideas.

A provocative new way of accounting for the spirit of literary tradition, Still the New World makes a persuasive argument against the reduction of literature to identity questions of race, gender, and ethnicity. Ranging from roughly 1850 to 1940, when, Fisher argues, the American cultural and economic system was set in place, the book reconsiders key works in the American canon--from Emerson, Whitman, and Melville, to Twain, James, Howells, Dos Passos, and Nathanael West, with insights into such artists as Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins. With striking clarity, Fisher shows how these artists created and recreated a democratic poetics marked by a rivalry between abstraction, regionalism, and varieties of realism--and in doing so, defined American culture as an ongoing process of creative destruction.

Why pause and study this particular painting among so many others ranged on a gallery wall? Wonder, which Descartes called the first of the passions, is at play; it couples surprise with a wish to know more, the pleasurable promise that what is novel or rare may become familiar. This is a book about the aesthetics of wonder, about wonder as it figures in our relation to the visual world and to rare or new experiences.

In three instructive instances--a pair of paintings by Cy Twombly, the famous problem of doubling the area of a square, and the history of attempts to explain rainbows--Philip Fisher examines the experience of wonder as it draws together pleasure, thinking, and the aesthetic features of thought. Through these examples he places wonder in relation to the ordinary and the everyday as well as to its opposite, fear. The remarkable story of how rainbows came to be explained, fraught with errors, half-knowledge, and incomplete understanding, suggests that certain knowledge cannot be what we expect when wonder engages us. Instead, Fisher argues, a detailed familiarity, similar to knowing our way around a building or a painting, is the ultimate meeting point for aesthetic and scientific encounters with novelty, rare experiences, and the genuinely new.

Conflict is a growth industry, as a glance at the daily paper or the nightly news tells us. Trade wars, global warming, ethnic strife, refugee crises--as the world draws closer together on a thousand fronts, trouble erupts, clashes occur, and new problems arise. What's wrong, and what can be done about it? This cogent book offers a clear approach for dealing with conflicting interests of any kind.

Roger Fisher, the world-renowned master of negotiation, with two of his leading colleagues--Elizabeth Kopelman and Andrea Kupfer Schneider--provides a step-by-step process for dealing with the persistent and complex disputes that mark our changing, often dangerous world. Instead of simply asking why things work--or don't--the authors ask: how can we affect the way things work? They break conflicts into manageable components and advance a process for problemsolving. Arguing that we need to move beyond oneshot "solutions" toward a constructive way of dealing with differences, they lay out tools for conflict analysis and practical applications for those tools in the international arena.

The authors also show that tactics which successfully influence an adversary are equally applicable to the task of persuading an employer, a community official, or a business associate. Originally drafted as a handbook for the diplomats and senior officials advised by Fisher and his colleagues, this succinct, lucid, and effective book is the primer about the new paradigm in conflict management.

“Eminently readable, and anybody who cares about the future of American democracy in these perilous times can only hope that it will be widely read and carefully considered.”
—James Pope, Washington Post

“Fishkin and Forbath’s accessible work serves as both history lesson and political playbook, offering the Left an underutilized—and perhaps counterintuitive—tool in the present-day fight against social and economic injustice: the Constitution.”
—Benjamin Morse, Jacobin

“Aims to recover the Constitution’s pivotal role in shaping claims of justice and equality…in engaging, imaginative prose that makes even the present court’s capture by the ideological right a compelling platform for a revived social-democratic constitutional politics.”
—New Republic

Oligarchy is a threat to the American republic. When too much economic and political power is concentrated in too few hands, we risk losing the “republican form of government” the Constitution requires. Today, courts enforce the Constitution as if it had almost nothing to say about this threat. But as this revolutionary retelling of constitutional history shows, a commitment to prevent oligarchy once stood at the center of a robust tradition in American political and constitutional thought.

Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath demonstrate that reformers, legislators, and even judges working in this “democracy-of-opportunity” tradition understood that the Constitution imposes a duty on legislatures to thwart oligarchy and promote a broad distribution of wealth and political power. These ideas led Jacksonians to fight special economic privileges for the few, Populists to try to break up monopoly power, and Progressives to battle for the constitutional right to form a union.

But today, as we enter a new Gilded Age, this tradition in progressive American economic and political thought lies dormant. The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution begins the work of recovering it and exploring its profound implications for our deeply unequal society and badly damaged democracy.

The Battle for Children links two major areas of historical inquiry: crime and delinquency with war and social change. In a study based on impressive archival research, Sarah Fishman reveals the impact of the Vichy regime on one of history’s most silent groups—children—and offers enlightening new information about the Vichy administration.

Fishman examines how French children experienced the events of war and the German occupation, demonstrating that economic deprivation, not family dislocation, sharply drove up juvenile crime rates. Wartime circumstances led authorities to view delinquent minors as victims, and provided the opportunity for reformers in psychiatry, social work, and law to fundamentally transform France’s punitive juvenile justice system into a profoundly therapeutic one. Vichy-era legislation thus formed the foundation of the modern juvenile justice system in France, which rarely incarcerates delinquent youth.

In her examination of the critical but unexpected role the war and the authoritarian Vichy regime played in the transformation of France’s juvenile courts and institutions, Fishman has enriched our knowledge of daily life in France during World War II, refined our understanding of Vichy’s place in the historical development of France, and provided valuable insights into contemporary debates on juvenile justice.

Required to sign away their legal rights as authors as a condition of employment, professional writers may earn a tidy living for their work, but they seldom own their writing. Writing for Hire traces the history of labor relations that defined authorship in film, TV, and advertising in the mid-twentieth century. Catherine L. Fisk examines why strikingly different norms of attribution emerged in these overlapping industries, and she shows how unionizing enabled Hollywood writers to win many authorial rights, while Madison Avenue writers achieved no equivalent recognition.

In the 1930s, the practice of employing teams of writers to create copyrighted works became widespread in film studios, radio networks, and ad agencies. Sometimes Hollywood and Madison Avenue employed the same people. Yet the two industries diverged in a crucial way in the 1930s, when screenwriters formed the Writers Guild to represent them in collective negotiations with media companies. Writers Guild members believed they shared the same status as literary authors and fought to have their names attached to their work. They gained binding legal norms relating to ownership and public recognition—norms that eventually carried over into the professional culture of TV production.

In advertising, by contrast, no formal norms of public attribution developed. Although some ad writers chafed at their anonymity, their nonunion workplace provided no institutional framework to channel their demands for change. Instead, many rationalized their invisibility as creative workers by embracing a self-conception as well-compensated professionals devoted to the interests of clients.

How free is the speech of someone who can't be heard? Not very--and this, Owen Fiss suggests, is where the First Amendment comes in. In this book, a marvel of conciseness and eloquence, Fiss reframes the debate over free speech to reflect the First Amendment's role in ensuring public debate that is, in Justice William Brennan's words, truly "uninhibited, robust, and wide-open."

Hate speech, pornography, campaign spending, funding for the arts: the heated, often overheated, struggle over these issues generally pits liberty, as embodied in the First Amendment, against equality, as in the Fourteenth. Fiss presents a democratic view of the First Amendment that transcends this opposition. If equal participation is a precondition of free and open public debate, then the First Amendment encompasses the values of both equality and liberty.

By examining the silencing effects of speech--its power to overwhelm and intimidate the underfunded, underrepresented, or disadvantaged voice--Fiss shows how restrictions on political expenditures, hate speech, and pornography can be defended in terms of the First Amendment, not despite it. Similarly, when the state requires the media to air voices of opposition, or funds art that presents controversial or challenging points of view, it is doing its constitutional part to protect democratic self-rule from the aggregations of private power that threaten it.

Where most liberal accounts cast the state as the enemy of freedom and the First Amendment as a restraint, this one reminds us that the state can also be the friend of freedom, protecting and fostering speech that might otherwise die unheard, depriving our democracy of the full range and richness of its expression.

Pillars of Justice explores the purpose and possibilities of life in the law through moving accounts of thirteen lawyers who shaped the legal world during the past half century.

Some, such as Thurgood Marshall, were Supreme Court Justices. Others, like John Doar and Burke Marshall, set the civil rights policies of the federal government during the 1960s. Some, including Harry Kalven and Catharine MacKinnon, have taught at the greatest law schools of the nation and nourished the liberalism rooted in the civil rights era. Jurists from abroad—Aharon Barak, for example—were responsible for the rise of the human rights movement that today carries the burden of advancing liberal values. These lawyers came from diverse backgrounds and held various political views. What unites them is a deep, abiding commitment to Brown v. Board of Education as an exceptional moment in the life of the law—a willingness to move mountains, if need be, to ensure that we are living up to our best selves. In tracing how these lawyers over a period of fifty years used the Brown ruling and its spirit as a beacon to guide their endeavors, this history tells the epic story of the liberal tradition in the law.

For Owen Fiss, one of the country’s leading constitutional theorists, the people described were mentors, colleagues, friends. In his portraits, Fiss tries to identify the unique qualities of mind and character that made these individuals so important to the institutions and legal principles they served.

J. Lesley Fitton traces this exciting tale of scholarly discovery and weaves it into an engaging, in-depth portrait of Greek Bronze Age civilizations, from their dawning on the Cycladic Isles in the third millennium B.C. to their later flowering in Minoan Crete and then in the Mycenaean centers and finally to their mysterious disappearance in the twelfth century B.C. The result is an elegant assimilation of vast historical detail and a well-illustrated tour of the art and artifacts, the grand palaces and tombs, the mythical heroes and Trojan treasures that form at least one cradle of our own civilization.

Fitton begins with the early finds of travelers, advances in geology, and research into Homer's identity. She vividly recreates the heroic age of the first archaeological excavations, particularly Heinrich Schliemann's fascinating work at Troy and Mycenae, and Arthur Evans's pioneering excavation and restoration of the Palace of Minos on Crete. The persistent search for signs of writing among Bronze Age Greeks culminates in Fitton's description of the 1952 deciphering of the earliest script used to write Greek. And as her account extends into the present, it encompasses the important contributions of the archaeologists Alan Wace and Carl Blegen, the War's impact on research, and a concise summation of current scholarly trends.

Culling the Masses questions the widely held view that in the long run democracy and racism cannot coexist. David Scott FitzGerald and David Cook-Martín show that democracies were the first countries in the Americas to select immigrants by race, and undemocratic states the first to outlaw discrimination. Through analysis of legal records from twenty-two countries between 1790 and 2010, the authors present a history of the rise and fall of racial selection in the Western Hemisphere.

The United States led the way in using legal means to exclude “inferior” ethnic groups. Starting in 1790, Congress began passing nationality and immigration laws that prevented Africans and Asians from becoming citizens, on the grounds that they were inherently incapable of self-government. Similar policies were soon adopted by the self-governing colonies and dominions of the British Empire, eventually spreading across Latin America as well.

Undemocratic regimes in Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Cuba reversed their discriminatory laws in the 1930s and 1940s, decades ahead of the United States and Canada. The conventional claim that racism and democracy are antithetical—because democracy depends on ideals of equality and fairness, which are incompatible with the notion of racial inferiority—cannot explain why liberal democracies were leaders in promoting racist policies and laggards in eliminating them. Ultimately, the authors argue, the changed racial geopolitics of World War II and the Cold War was necessary to convince North American countries to reform their immigration and citizenship laws.

Cannibals All! got more attention in William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator than any other book in the history of that abolitionist journal. And Lincoln is said to have been more angered by George Fitzhugh than by any other pro-slavery writer, yet he unconsciously paraphrased Cannibals All! in his House Divided speech.

Fitzhugh was provocative because of his stinging attack on free society, laissez-faire economy, and wage slavery, along with their philosophical underpinnings. He used socialist doctrine to defend slavery and drew upon the same evidence Marx used in his indictment of capitalism. Socialism, he held, was only “the new fashionable name for slavery,” though slavery was far more humane and responsible, “the best and most common form of socialism.”

His most effective testimony was furnished by the abolitionists themselves. He combed the diatribes of their friends, the reformers, transcendentalists, and utopians, against the social evils of the North. “Why all this,” he asked, “except that free society is a failure?”

The trouble all started, according to Fitzhugh, with John Locke, “a presumptuous charlatan,” and with the heresies of the Enlightenment. In the great Lockean consensus that makes up American thought from Benjamin Franklin to Franklin Roosevelt, Fitzhugh therefore stands out as a lone dissenter who makes the conventional polarities between Jefferson and Hamilton, or Hoover and Roosevelt, seem insignificant. Beside him Taylor, Randolph, and Calhoun blend inconspicuously into the American consensus, all being apostles of John Locke in some degree. An intellectual tradition that suffers from uniformity—even if it is virtuous, liberal conformity—could stand a bit of contrast, and George Fitzhugh can supply more of it than any other American thinker.

In The Highest Glass Ceiling, best-selling historian Ellen Fitzpatrick tells the story of three remarkable women who set their sights on the American presidency. Victoria Woodhull (1872), Margaret Chase Smith (1964), and Shirley Chisholm (1972) each challenged persistent barriers confronted by women presidential candidates. Their quest illuminates today’s political landscape, showing that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign belongs to a much longer, arduous, and dramatic journey.

The tale begins during Reconstruction when the radical Woodhull became the first woman to seek the presidency. Although women could not yet vote, Woodhull boldly staked her claim to the White House, believing she might thereby advance women’s equality. Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith came into political office through the “widow’s mandate.” Among the most admired women in public life when she launched her 1964 campaign, she soon confronted prejudice that she was too old (at 66) and too female to be a creditable presidential candidate. She nonetheless became the first woman to have her name placed in nomination for President by a major party. Democratic Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm ignored what some openly described as the twin disqualifications of race and gender in her spirited 1972 presidential campaign. She ran all the way to the Democratic convention, inspiring diverse followers and angering opponents, including members of the Nixon administration who sought to derail her candidacy.

As The Highest Glass Ceiling reveals, women’s pursuit of the Oval Office, then and now, has involved myriad forms of influence, opposition, and intrigue.

Enthusiasts and critics both have looked to the political upheavals of the 1960s to explain recent transformations in historical study. But how new, in fact, are our contemporary approaches to the study and writing of American history? This question lies at the heart of History's Memory, Ellen Fitzpatrick's sweeping study of the past century of American historical writing.

Through careful examination of hundreds of historical essays and books, Fitzpatrick has uncovered striking continuities in the writing of American history. The contributions of earlier scholars, some of them outside the mainstream of the historical profession, reveal that interest in the history of women, African Americans, Native Americans, and the working class has been long-standing. Whether in the Progressive era's attention to issues of class, or in the renewed concern with Native Americans in the 1930s and 1940s, Fitzpatrick demonstrates that over the past century historians have frequently grappled with issues that we think of today as innovative.

This reinterpretation of a century of American historical writing challenges the notion that the politics of the recent past alone explains the politics of history. Fitzpatrick offers a wise historical perspective on today's heated debates, and reclaims the long line of historians who tilled the rich and diverse soil of our past.

The larger-than-life story of Bernarr Macfadden, a bodybuilder who turned his obsession with muscles, celebrity, and confession into a publishing empire that transformed global media.

In True Story, Shanon Fitzpatrick tells the unlikely story of an orphan from the Ozarks who became one of history’s most powerful media moguls. Born in 1868 in Mill Spring, Missouri, Bernarr Macfadden turned to bodybuilding to transform himself from a sickly “boy” into a creature of masculine perfection. He then channeled his passion into the magazine Physical Culture, capitalizing on the wider turn-of-the-century mania for fitness. Macfadden Publications soon become a pioneer in mass media, helping to inaugurate our sensational, confessional, and body-obsessed global marketplace.

With publications like True Story, a magazine purportedly written and edited by its own readers, as well as scores of romance, crime, and fan magazines, Macfadden specialized in titles that targeted women, immigrants, and the working class. Although derided as pulp by critics of the time, Macfadden’s publications were not merely profitable. They were also influential. They championed reader engagement and interactivity long before these were buzzwords in the media industry, breaking down barriers between producers and consumers of culture. At the same time, Macfadden Publications inspired key elements of modern media strategy by privileging rapid production of new content and equally rapid disintegration and reconfiguration of properties in the face of shifting market conditions.

No less than the kings of Hollywood and Madison Avenue, Macfadden was a crucial player in shaping American consumer culture and selling it to the world at large. Though the Macfadden media empire is overlooked today, its legacies are everywhere, from true-crime journalism to celebrity gossip rags and fifteen-minute abs.

Did barristers as a professional group support the French Revolution, or were they most often “in flight from politics”? A close inquiry into the Order of Barristers at Paris—the largest and most important in France, with over six hundred members in 1789—reveals that the vast majority within the Order did not support the Revolution. Unsympathetic to the ideal of the nation asserted by the National Assembly, most members of the Order instead remained loyal to the traditional corporate paradigm that the National Assembly had specifically repudiated. Dismayed by the abolition of their Order, they were disillusioned with the Revolution even before the advent of the Terror, which, along with the arbitrariness of the Directory, deepened their disaffection. The manner in which Bonaparte ultimately restored the Order in 1811 completed their alienation from the Revolution and, as a result, they warmly welcomed the return of the Bourbons in 1814.

This investigation not only revises what historians have long thought of the attitude of barristers toward the French Revolution, but also offers insights into the corporate character of Old Regime society and how the Revolution affected it. Fitzsimmons’s study suggests that many propertied commoners during the Revolution were not politically engaged, that they were not necessarily associated with a party or cause simply because of their place within a set of social relationships. Most of the barristers to the Parlement simply reacted timidly to events and yearned for an ideal that was irretrievably lost, tending to view the Revolution more in terms of an end than of a beginning.

Long ignored by historians and repudiated in their time, practitioners of private law opened the way toward Japan’s legal modernity. From the seventeenth to the turn of the twentieth century, lawyers and their predecessors changed society in ways that first samurai and then the state could not. During the Edo period (1600–1868), they worked from the shadows to bend the shogun’s law to suit the market needs of merchants and the justice concerns of peasants. Over the course of the nineteenth century, legal practitioners changed law from a tool for rule into a new epistemology and laid the foundation for parliamentary politics during the Meiji era (1868–1912).

This social and political history argues that legal modernity sprouted from indigenous roots and helped delineate a budding nation’s public and private spheres. Tracing the transition of law regimes from Edo to Meiji, Darryl E. Flaherty shows how the legal profession emerged as a force for change in modern Japan and highlights its lasting contributions in founding private universities, political parties, and a national association of lawyers that contributed to legal reform during the twentieth century.

Most teenagers are too young to vote and are off the radar of political scientists. Teenage Citizens looks beyond the electoral game to consider the question of how this overlooked segment of our citizenry understands political topics. Bridging psychology and political science, Constance Flanagan argues that civic identities form during adolescence and are rooted in teens’ everyday lives—in their experiences as members of schools and community-based organizations and in their exercise of voice, collective action, and responsibility in those settings. This is the phase of life when political ideas are born.

Through voices from a wide range of social classes and ethnic backgrounds in the United States and five other countries, we learn how teenagers form ideas about democracy, inequality, laws, ethnic identity, the social contract, and the ties that bind members of a polity together. Flanagan’s twenty-five years of research show how teens’ personal and family values accord with their political views. When their families emphasize social responsibility—for people in need and for the common good—and perform service to the community, teens’ ideas about democracy and the social contract highlight principles of tolerance, social inclusion, and equality. When families discount social responsibility relative to other values, teens’ ideas about democracy focus on their rights as individuals.

At a time when opportunities for youth are shrinking, Constance Flanagan helps us understand how young people come to envisage the world of politics and civic engagement, and how their own political identities take form.

Our early ancestors lived in small groups and worked actively to preserve social equality. As they created larger societies, however, inequality rose, and by 2500 bce truly egalitarian societies were on the wane. In The Creation of Inequality, Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus demonstrate that this development was not simply the result of population increase, food surplus, or the accumulation of valuables. Instead, inequality resulted from conscious manipulation of the unique social logic that lies at the core of every human group.

A few societies allowed talented and ambitious individuals to rise in prestige while still preventing them from becoming a hereditary elite. But many others made high rank hereditary, by manipulating debts, genealogies, and sacred lore. At certain moments in history, intense competition among leaders of high rank gave rise to despotic kingdoms and empires in the Near East, Egypt, Africa, Mexico, Peru, and the Pacific.

Drawing on their vast knowledge of both living and prehistoric social groups, Flannery and Marcus describe the changes in logic that create larger and more hierarchical societies, and they argue persuasively that many kinds of inequality can be overcome by reversing these changes, rather than by violence.

The surprising claim of this book is that dwelling on loss is not necessarily depressing. Instead, Jonathan Flatley argues, embracing melancholy can be a road back to contact with others and can lead people to productively remap their relationship to the world around them. Flatley demonstrates that a seemingly disparate set of modernist writers and thinkers showed how aesthetic activity can give us the means to comprehend and change our relation to loss.

The texts at the center of Flatley’s analysis—Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, and Andrei Platonov’s Chevengur—share with Freud an interest in understanding the depressing effects of difficult losses and with Walter Benjamin the hope that loss itself could become a means of connection and the basis for social transformation. For Du Bois, Platonov, and James, the focus on melancholy illuminates both the historical origins of subjective emotional life and a heretofore unarticulated community of melancholics. The affective maps they produce make possible the conversion of a depressive melancholia into a way to be interested in the world.

A scholar of law and religion uncovers a surprising origin story behind the idea of the separation of powers.

The separation of powers is a bedrock of modern constitutionalism, but striking antecedents were developed centuries earlier, by Jewish scholars and rabbis of antiquity. Attending carefully to their seminal works and the historical milieu, David Flatto shows how a foundation of democratic rule was contemplated and justified long before liberal democracy was born.

During the formative Second Temple and early rabbinic eras (the fourth century BCE to the third century CE), Jewish thinkers had to confront the nature of legal authority from the standpoint of the disempowered. Jews struggled against the idea that a legal authority stemming from God could reside in the hands of an imperious ruler (even a hypothetical Judaic monarch). Instead scholars and rabbis argued that such authority lay with independent courts and the law itself. Over time, they proposed various permutations of this ideal. Many of these envisioned distinct juridical and political powers, with a supreme law demarcating the respective jurisdictions of each sphere. Flatto explores key Second Temple and rabbinic writings—the Qumran scrolls; the philosophy and history of Philo and Josephus; the Mishnah, Tosefta, Midrash, and Talmud—to uncover these transformative notions of governance.

The Crown and the Courts argues that by proclaiming the supremacy of law in the absence of power, postbiblical thinkers emphasized the centrality of law in the people’s covenant with God, helping to revitalize Jewish life and establish allegiance to legal order. These scholars proved not only creative but also prescient. Their profound ideas about the autonomy of law reverberate to this day.

Having been acquitted of the charge of “outrage of public morals and religion” brought against him upon the publication Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert found himself, in 1857, a celebrity and one of the most admired literary men of his day.

Francis Steegmuller’s volume of Flaubert’s letters from the years culminating in that triumph was hailed by the New York Times as “brilliantly edited and annotated…a splendid, intimate account of the development of a writer who changed the nature of the novel.” It went on to garner widespread critical acclaim and to win an American Book Award for Translation.

Now, in the second volume, we see Flaubert in the years of his fame—the years in which he wrote Salammbô, L’Éducation sentimentale, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, Three Tales, and the unfinished Bouvard and Pecuchet. In writing the novels, Flaubert followed his precept, “An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere,” but in these letters of his maturity he gives full scope to his feelings and expresses forceful opinions on matters public and private.

We see Flaubert traveling to Tunisia to document the exotic Salammbô, then calling on his own memories and those of his friends to bring to life the Revolution of 1848 and the loves of his hero Frederic Moreau in the pages of L’Éducation sentimentale, which many today consider his greatest novel. Flaubert is taken up by the Second Empire Court of Napoleon III and Eugenie, and becomes a lifelong friend of Princess Mathilde Bonaparte. But the most powerful feminine presence in this volume is the warm, sympathetic George Sand, with whom he maintains a fascinating correspondence for more than ten years. This dialogue on life, letters, and politics between the “two troubadours,” as they called themselves, reveals both of them at their idiosyncratic best.

The deaths of Flaubert’s mother, of his closest friend and mentor, Louis Bouilhet, and of Théophile Gautier, Sainte-Beuve, and other intimates, and Flaubert’s financial ruin at the hands of his beloved niece Caroline and her rapacious husband, make a somber story of the post war years. Despite these and other losses, Flaubert’s last years are brightened by the affection of Guy de Maupassant, Zola, and other younger writers.

Together with Francis Steegmuller’s masterly connecting narrative and essential annotation, these letters, most of which appear here in English for the first time, constitute an intimate and engrossing new biography of the great master of the modern novel.