logo for Harvard University Press
Reluctant Icon
Gladstone, Bulgaria, and the Working Classes, 1856–1878
Ann Pottinger Saab
Harvard University Press, 1991

Support of the Ottoman Empire was official British policy for some forty years following the Crimean War. A widespread and astonishing confidence prevailed in England: whatever past and continuing deficiencies might exist, the Ottoman Porte, as the government of the Empire was known in Europe, was determined to westernize and in fact was becoming more British every day. But reports of a series of alleged massacres by the Turks against their Bulgarian subjects scandalized Britain in 1876, igniting a firestorm of protest that shook the nation. Reluctant Icon tells the story of one of the most relentless social crusades of the Victorian era. Under the leadership of former prime minister William Ewart Gladstone, a loose coalition of Nonconformists, Radicals, and High Churchmen created a climate of indignation over the massacres that was strong enough to call into question the Disraeli government’s policy toward the Near East.

This absorbing analysis by Ann Pottinger Saab draws on contemporary newspaper accounts, parliamentary petitions, and the diaries and personal papers of Gladstone to recreate a pivotal episode in late nineteenth-century British history. Saab provides an informative historical backdrop to her study by tracing the multiple sources of strain in British–Ottoman relations that existed before the massacres. She then examines Gladstone’s evolving role as public idol and backstage adviser to a coterie of special groups that became bonded to him by a shared moral vision and a sense of continuing emergency. Through the lens of the Bulgarian agitation, Gladstone emerges as a man motivated more by his own complex emotional and political drives than by opportunism, a somewhat different picture from that presented by earlier historians. The heart of the book is Saab’s richly detailed exploration of the nascence and maturation of the militant, extra-parliamentary, multi-class protest movement itself, which mobilized the anger of groups previously outside politics such as newly enfranchised working men.

Reluctant Icon yields new insights on Gladstone, on the language of Victorian social protest, and on a national protest movement remarkable as much for its cohesiveness and longevity as for its fervor. It will be welcome reading for all those with an abiding interest in the Victorian age and especially for scholars and students of social, religious, and diplomatic history.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Legacies of Childhood
Growing up Chinese in a Time of Crisis
John L. Saari
Harvard University Press, 1990
Jon L. Saari defines the generation of educated Chinese born around the turn of the century as "the last to have the world of Confucian learning etched into their memories as schoolboys, yet the first as a group to confront the intrusive Western world." The legacies of growing up in a changing environment deeply affected this generation's responses to the further changes in the world they confronted as adults. In the collapse of the Ch'ing dynasty and the chaos of the early twentieth century, traditional ideas of the self, the nature of relationships in society, and ethical behavior had to be reexamined and redefined. To reconstruct what those who lived through and shaped this extraordinary period felt, needed, thought, and became as children and adults, Saari draws on autobiographical writings and his own interviews among the elderly on Taiwan and Hong Kong. He interprets this material within its Chinese context but brings Western sociological, anthropological, and psychological insights to bear on it.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Life of Saint Peter of Atroa
Athanasios Sabas
Harvard University Press, 2024

An authoritative new Greek edition and English translation of the life of a notable Byzantine monastic leader.

Saint Peter of Atroa (773–837 CE) was a Byzantine monastic leader, remembered primarily as cofounder and abbot of the influential monastery of Saint Zachariah at Atroa, below the holy mountain of Olympos in Bithynia. Peter sought to live in tranquility and solitude, traveling to the various monasteries he established in northwestern Asia Minor and occasionally joining other notable monastic figures. However, his resistance to the Iconoclast policies of imperial regimes in Constantinople during the first half of the ninth century led to his persecution and the temporary dispersal of his communities. Although he was evidently regarded with suspicion by some of his contemporaries, he gained a reputation as a miracle worker and his tomb became the site of a healing cult in the years after his death.

The Life of Saint Peter of Atroa was written by the saint’s disciple Sabas, also the biographer for Peter’s contemporary and friend Saint Ioannikios, and it survives in two manuscript versions. This volume represents an entirely new edition of the Greek text, establishing the version previously regarded as secondary as the more important of the two, and making the Life accessible to English readers for the first time.

[more]

front cover of Outbreak Culture
Outbreak Culture
The Ebola Crisis and the Next Epidemic
Pardis Sabeti
Harvard University Press, 2018

An award-winning genetic researcher who helped contain the Ebola outbreak and a prize-winning journalist reveal what it will take to prevent the next pandemic from spiraling out of control.

As we saw with our response to Ebola and Zika—and are seeing now with the disastrous early handling of the coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak—a lack of preparedness, delays in action, and large-scale system-wide problems with the distribution of critical medical resources can result in lost lives.

Outbreak Culture examines each phase of the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa—one of the largest and deadliest epidemics to date—and identifies factors that prevented key information from reaching physicians. Drawing insights from clinical workers, data collectors, organizational experts, and public health researchers, Pardis Sabeti and Lara Salahi expose a fractured system that failed to gather and share knowledge of the virus and ensure timely containment. The authors describe how much more could have been done by global medical and political organizations to safeguard the well-being of caregivers, patients, and communities affected by this devastating outbreak and they outline changes that are urgently needed to ensure a more effective coordinated response to the next epidemic.

Secrecy, competition, and poor coordination plague nearly every major public health crisis—and we are seeing their deadly consequences play out again. A work of fearless integrity and unassailable authority, Outbreak Culture seeks to change the culture of responders.

[more]

front cover of Outbreak Culture
Outbreak Culture
The Ebola Crisis and the Next Epidemic, With a New Preface and Epilogue
Pardis Sabeti
Harvard University Press, 2021

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year

“A critical, poignant postmortem of the epidemic.”
Washington Post

“Forceful and instructive…Sabeti and Salahi uncover competition, sabotage, fear, blame, and disorganization bordering on chaos, features that are seen in just about any lethal epidemic.”
—Paul Farmer, cofounder of Partners in Health

“The central theme of the book…is that common threads of dysfunction run through responses to epidemics…The power of Outbreak Culture is its universality.”
Nature

“Sabeti and Salahi present a wealth of evidence supporting the imperative that outbreak response must operate in a coordinated, real-time manner.”
Science

As we saw with the Ebola outbreak—and the disastrous early handling of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic—a lack of preparedness, delays, and system-wide problems with the distribution of critical medical supplies can have deadly consequences. Yet after every outbreak, the systems put in place to coordinate emergency responses are generally dismantled.

One of America’s top biomedical researchers, Dr. Pardis Sabeti, and her Pulitzer Prize–winning collaborator, Lara Salahi, argue that these problems are built into the ecosystem of our emergency responses. With an understanding of the path of disease and insight into political psychology, they show how secrecy, competition, and poor coordination plague nearly every major public health crisis and reveal how much more could be done to safeguard the well-being of caregivers, patients, and vulnerable communities. A work of fearless integrity and unassailable authority, Outbreak Culture seeks to ensure that we make some urgently needed changes before the next pandemic.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
English Romanticism and the French Tradition
Margery Sabin
Harvard University Press, 1976

There are separate languages to be understood in the writings of French and English Romantics, Margery Sabin tells us. Instead of minimizing the importance of national characteristics, as comparatistes frequently do, she demonstrates that national traditions of thought and language have a determining influence throughout the Romantic period. In tracking the differing courses pursued by the best French and English writers of the period, she shows that the idea of the transcendental imagination never took hold among the French-Romantics; that Wordsworth's ideal of the marriage between mind and nature did not inform the vision of the French, who were preoccupied with the isolated human spirit thrown back on its own resources of conscience or faith.

A detailed and far-ranging comparison of Rousseau's Confessions and Wordsworth's Prelude establishes her provocative argument. The idea gains force from the wealth of examples that follow. Sabin examines Wordsworth, Coleridge, and George Eliot as representative of varieties of English Romanticism in the genres of lyric poetry, critical theory, and the novel. Contrasts between these writers and Hugo, Baudelaire, and Flaubert offer new and more precise ways of understanding both Romanticism and later departures from it. Her sensitive readings of Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Addison, Samuel Johnson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Hardy, Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and others yield further evidence. This fresh critical perspective will generate further thought about major writers and about national differences in literature.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Virtues of Hypocrisy
An Essay on Toleration
Andrew Sabl
Harvard University Press

front cover of The Real World Guide to Psychotherapy Practice
The Real World Guide to Psychotherapy Practice
Alex N. Sabo
Harvard University Press, 2000
“All of us who have long done this work can look back at those happy times when the patient’s gain has also been, in part, our own. Thereby an extraordinary joy enters the work, for both parties, through this making of lives. Can there be better work to do in the world?”—from the Epilogue by Leston HavensManaged care has radically reshaped health care in the United States, and private long-term psychotherapy is increasingly a thing of the past. The corporatization of mental health care often puts therapists in professional quandaries. How can they do the therapeutic work they were trained to do with clients whom they may barely know, whose care is intruded upon by managed care administrators? With unrelenting pressure to substitute medications for therapy and standardized behavior protocols for individualized approaches, what becomes of the therapist–client relationship?Unflinchingly honest, The Real World Guide to Psychotherapy Practice offers both compelling stories and practical advice on maintaining one’s therapeutic integrity in the managed care era. Resisting a one-size-fits-all approach, the authors focus on the principles of forming relationships with patients, and especially patients likely to be under-served (e.g., the uninsured poor) or difficult to treat.The Real World Guide to Psychotherapy Practice gives voice to therapists’ frustrations with the administrative constraints under which they work. But it accepts the reality and offers guidance and inspiration to committed therapists everywhere.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Popular Entertainment, Class, and Politics in Munich, 1900–1923
Robert Eben Sackett
Harvard University Press, 1982

From the turn of the century until 1923, the year of the National Socialist putsch, popular entertainment in Munich reflected the sentiments and ideas of its largely middle-class audience. While industrialization, rapid urbanization, World War I, and the German Revolution of 1918–19 created an atmosphere of turbulent change, performances on Munich's popular stages gave voice to the continuity of several basic attitudes: patriotism; nostalgia for a preindustrial, rural community; hostility toward Jews; and increasing anxiety over social status. In songs, monologues, skits, and one-act plays, popular entertainers articulated views common to Munich's traditional middle class of tradesmen and shopkeepers and its “new” or white-collar middle class of clerks and minor officials. Folksingers Karl Valentin and Weiss Ferdl serve as examples of this relationship between politics and culture. They shared their audience's class background and sympathies, and in the cabarets and music halls their songs dealt with vexed social and political issues.

This intriguing book in cultural history adds to our understanding of social conditions preparing the way for political change. A model case study, it explores the roots of Nazism in a large urban setting.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Rivāyat-i Hēmīt-i Ašawahistān
A Study in Zoroastrian Law
Nezhat Safa-Isfehani
Harvard University Press, 1980

The present work is the only complete translation into English of a Middle Persian text written about 955 A.D. which tells us about the legal problems of Zoroastrians living in Iran under Muslim rule. The form of the book is a series of dogmatic questions and answers which present a kind of compilation of Zoroastrian religious, social, and civil laws. The dialogue comprises some of the rules and institutions which grew out of and were intimately connected with the Zoroastrian religion that dominated Persian life and thought during the Sasanian era and also the period immediately following the advent of Islam.

Nezhat Safa-Isfehani has carefully compared other juridical works in Pahlavi with the present text and has taken into account studies on the present Rivāyat made by other scholars.

[more]

front cover of Why the Garden Club Couldn't Save Youngstown
Why the Garden Club Couldn't Save Youngstown
The Transformation of the Rust Belt
Sean Safford
Harvard University Press, 2009
In this book, Sean Safford compares the recent history of Allentown, Pennsylvania, with that of Youngstown, Ohio. Allentown has seen a noticeable rebound over the course of the past twenty years. Facing a collapse of its steel-making firms, its economy has reinvented itself by transforming existing companies, building an entrepreneurial sector, and attracting inward investment. Youngstown was similar to Allentown in its industrial history, the composition of its labor force, and other important variables, and yet instead of adapting in the face of acute economic crisis, it fell into a mean race to the bottom.Challenging various theoretical perspectives on regional socioeconomic change, Why the Garden Club Couldn’t Save Youngstown argues that the structure of social networks among the cities’ economic, political, and civic leaders account for the divergent trajectories of post-industrial regions. It offers a probing historical explanation for the decline, fall, and unlikely rejuvenation of the Rust Belt. Emphasizing the power of social networks to shape action, determine access to and control over information and resources, define the contexts in which problems are viewed, and enable collective action in the face of externally generated crises, this book points toward present-day policy prescriptions for the ongoing plight of mature industrial regions in the U.S. and abroad.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Hasidism
Continuity or Innovation?
Bezalel Safran
Harvard University Press, 1988
This volume is a major reassessment of scholarly commonplaces about the origins and nature of early Hasidism, the mystical movement which engulfed east European Jewry in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Through the use of divergent methodologies—historical reconstruction, literary analysis, philological examination—four distinguished scholars contribute new research to what has been a most popular concern of Jewish historical study. Shmuel Etinger, Emanuel Etkes, Jacob Hisdai, and Bezalel Safran explore such provocative questions as: Was there indeed a Sabbatian influence on Hasidism? How real was the opposition of the Mitnagdim? How original were Hasidic ideas?
[more]

front cover of Wandering Soul
Wandering Soul
The Dybbuk’s Creator, S. An-sky
Gabriella Safran
Harvard University Press, 2010

The man who would become S. An-sky—ethnographer, war correspondent, author of the best-known Yiddish play, The Dybbuk—was born Shloyme-Zanvl Rapoport in 1863, in Russia’s Pale of Settlement. His journey from the streets of Vitebsk to the center of modern Yiddish and Hebrew theater, by way of St. Petersburg, Paris, and war-torn Austria-Hungry, was both extraordinary and in some ways typical: Marc Chagall, another child of Vitebsk, would make a similar transit a generation later. Like Chagall, An-sky was loyal to multiple, conflicting Jewish, Russian, and European identities. And like Chagall, An-sky made his physical and cultural transience manifest as he drew on Jewish folk culture to create art that defied nationality.

Leaving Vitebsk at seventeen, An-sky forged a number of apparently contradictory paths. A witness to peasant poverty, pogroms, and war, he tried to rescue the vestiges of disappearing communities even while fighting for reform. A loner addicted to reinventing himself—at times a Russian laborer, a radical orator, a Jewish activist, an ethnographer of Hasidism, a wartime relief worker—An-sky saw himself as a savior of the people’s culture and its artifacts. What united the disparate strands of his life was his eagerness to speak to and for as many people as possible, regardless of their language or national origin.

In this first full-length biography in English, Gabriella Safran, using Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew, and French sources, recreates this neglected protean figure who, with his passions, struggles, and art, anticipated the complicated identities of the European Jews who would follow him.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Egypt in Search of Political Community
An Analysis of the Intellectual and Political Evolution of Egypt, 1804-1952
Nadav Safran
Harvard University Press
A book about Egypt's search for a secure place in the modern world, including many problems common to her sister Arab and Muslim countries, and, by extension, to all newly developed countries. Mr. Safran combines the approach of the "Islamist," immersed in the culture he examines, with that of the modern social scientist. Sympathetic to Egypt, he is objective in his belief that Egypt's troubles are the inescapable result of transforming one of the oldest civilizations into an integral part of the modern world.
[more]

front cover of Israel, the Embattled Ally
Israel, the Embattled Ally
With a New Preface and a Postscript by the Author
Nadav Safran
Harvard University Press, 1978

Through thirty turbulent years, the United States has been deeply enmeshed in Israel's destiny. Seldom in the history of international relations has such a world power been involved so intensely for so long with such a small power. How this phenomenon came to pass and how it will affect the future are explained in this compelling history of Israel and its relations with the United States—from the 1947 United Nations resolution through Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy to Carter's peace campaign.

To form the backdrop for this extraordinary relationship, Nadav Safran paints a detailed portrait of the historical forces that combined to create the Jewish state. He unfolds panel after panel of Israeli life—its physical environment, people, economy, politics, and religion. He examines Israel's responses to the many security crises it has faced since becoming a nation, and presents a clear and thorough exposition of its defense strategy and descriptions of all its wars.

Safran then presents his brilliant analysis of Israel and America in international politics. Cutting through the tangle of the Arab–Israeli conflict, the East–West struggle, the disagreement among Western powers, the conflicts within and among the Arab states, and the impact of special interest groups in the United States on its foreign policy, Safran deftly pursues fluctuations in the American–Israeli relationship as it moved from simple friendship to an alliance of friends. A concluding chapter recapitulates the highlights of that evolution and projects its relevance for the future of the Middle East and American–Israeli relations.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Saudi Arabia
The Ceaseless Quest for Security
Nadav Safran
Harvard University Press, 1985

logo for Harvard University Press
The United States and Israel
Nadav Safran
Harvard University Press

logo for Harvard University Press
Martin Heidegger
Between Good and Evil
Rüdiger Safranski
Harvard University Press, 1998

One of the century’s greatest philosophers, without whom there would be no Sartre, no Foucault, no Frankfurt School, Martin Heidegger was also a man of great failures and flaws, a Faustus who made a pact with the devil of his time, Adolf Hitler. The story of Heidegger’s life and philosophy, a quintessentially German story in which good and evil, brilliance and blindness are inextricably entwined and the passions and disasters of a whole century come into play, is told in this brilliant biography.

Heidegger grew up in Catholic Germany where, for a chance at pursuing a life of learning, he pledged himself to the priesthood. Soon he turned apostate and sought a university position, which set him on the path to becoming the star of German philosophy in the 1920s. Rüdiger Safranski chronicles Heidegger’s rise along with the thought he honed on the way, with its debt to Heraclitus, Plato, and Kant, and its tragic susceptibility to the conservatism that emerged out of the nightmare of Germany’s loss in World War I. A chronicle of ideas and of personal commitments and betrayals, Safranski’s biography combines clear accounts of the philosophy that won Heidegger eternal renown with the fascinating details of the loves and lapses that tripped up this powerful intellectual.

The best intellectual biography of Heidegger ever written and a best-seller in Germany, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil does not shy away from full coverage of Heidegger’s shameful transformation into a propagandist for the National Socialist regime; nor does it allow this aspect of his career to obscure his accomplishments. Written by a master of Heidegger’s philosophy, the book is one of the best introductions to the thought and to the life and times of the greatest German philosopher of the century.

[more]

front cover of Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy
Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy
Rüdiger Safranski
Harvard University Press, 1990

This richly detailed biography of a key figure in nineteenth-century philosophy pays equal attention to the life and to the work of Arthur Schopenhauer. Rüdiger Safranski places this visionary skeptic in the context of his philosophical predecessors and contemporaries Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel—and explores the sources of his profound alienation from their “secularized religion of reason.” He also provides a narrative of Schopenhauer’s personal and family life that reads like a Romantic novel: the struggle to break free from a domineering father, the attempt to come to terms with his mother’s literary and social success (she was a well-known writer and a member of Goethe’s Weimar circle), the loneliness and despair when his major philosophical work, The World as Will and Representation, was ignored by the academy. Along the way Safranski portrays the rich culture of Goethe’s Weimar, Hegel’s Berlin, and other centers of German literary and intellectual life.

When Schopenhauer first proposed his philosophy of “weeping and gnashing of teeth,” during the heady “wild years” of Romantic idealism, it found few followers. After the disillusionments and failures of 1848, his work was rediscovered by philosophers and literary figures. Writers from Nietzsche to Samuel Beckett have responded to Schopenhauer’s refusal to seek salvation through history.

The first biography of Schopenhauer to appear in English in this century, Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy succeeds in bringing to life an intriguing figure in philosophy and the intellectual battles of his time, whose consequences still shape our world.

[more]

front cover of United States v. Apple
United States v. Apple
Competition in America
Chris Sagers
Harvard University Press, 2019

One of the most-followed antitrust cases of recent times—United States v. Apple—reveals an often-missed truth: what Americans most fear is competition itself.

In 2012 the Department of Justice accused Apple and five book publishers of conspiring to fix ebook prices. The evidence overwhelmingly showed an unadorned price-fixing conspiracy that cost consumers hundreds of millions of dollars. Yet before, during, and after the trial millions of Americans sided with the defendants. Pundits on the left and right condemned the government for its decision to sue, decrying Amazon’s market share, railing against a new high-tech economy, and rallying to defend beloved authors and publishers. For many, Amazon was the one that should have been put on trial. But why? One fact went unrecognized and unreckoned with: in practice, Americans have long been ambivalent about competition.

Chris Sagers, a renowned antitrust expert, meticulously pulls apart the misunderstandings and exaggerations that industries as diverse as mom-and-pop grocers and producers of cast-iron sewer pipes have cited to justify colluding to forestall competition. In each of these cases, antitrust law, a time-honored vehicle to promote competition, is put on the defensive. Herein lies the real insight of United States v. Apple. If we desire competition as a policy, we must make peace with its sometimes rough consequences. As bruising as markets in their ordinary operation often seem, letting market forces play out has almost always benefited the consumer. United States v. Apple shows why supporting cases that protect price competition, even when doing so hurts some of us, is crucial if antitrust law is to protect and maintain markets.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Forest Rites
The War of the Demoiselles in Nineteenth-Century France
Peter Sahlins
Harvard University Press, 1994

In May 1829, strange reports surfaced from the Ariège department in the French Pyrenees, describing male peasants, bizarrely dressed in women’s clothes, gathering in the forests at night to chase away state guards and charcoal-makers. This was the raucous War of the Demoiselles, a protest against the national French Forest Code of 1827, which restricted peasants’ rights to use state and private forests.

Peter Sahlins unravels the fascinating story of this celebrated popular uprising, and in his telling captures the cultural, historical, and political currents that swept the countryside during France’s July 1830 Revolution. Sahlins explains how and why the Ariège peasants drew on the practices and rituals of folk culture, as well as on a revolutionary tradition, to defend their inherited rights to the forest. To explore these rights and their expression, he delves into the history of forest management, of peasant conflicts with the state, and of popular culture—particularly the disputed history of Carnival and of local rituals of justice.

Sahlins also sheds new light on the French revolutionary tradition and the “Three Glorious Days” of July 1830. The drama and symbolism of the War of the Demoiselles have inspired nearly a dozen plays, novels, films, and even a comic book. Using the concepts of anthropology and cultural studies as transport, Sahlins moves from this rich event to the wider worlds of peasant society in France. Focusing on the years from 1829 to 1832 but drawing on sources since the sixteenth century, his book should captivate social, cultural, and political historians of both early modern and modern Europe.

[more]

front cover of From Rebel to Ruler
From Rebel to Ruler
One Hundred Years of the Chinese Communist Party
Tony Saich
Harvard University Press, 2021

A Project Syndicate Best Read of the Year

On the centennial of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, the definitive history of how Mao and his successors overcame incredible odds to gain and keep power.

Mao Zedong and the twelve other young men who founded the Chinese Communist Party in 1921 could hardly have imagined that less than thirty years later they would be rulers. On its hundredth anniversary, the party remains in command, leading a nation primed for global dominance.

Tony Saich tells the authoritative, comprehensive story of the Chinese Communist Party—its rise to power against incredible odds, its struggle to consolidate rule and overcome self-inflicted disasters, and its thriving amid other communist parties’ collapse. Saich argues that the brutal Japanese invasion in the 1930s actually helped the party. As the Communists retreated into the countryside, they established themselves as the populist, grassroots alternative to the Nationalists, gaining the support they would need to triumph in the civil war. Once in power, however, the Communists faced the difficult task of learning how to rule. Saich examines the devastating economic consequences of Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the political chaos of the Cultural Revolution, as well as the party’s rebound under Deng Xiaoping’s reforms.

Leninist systems are thought to be rigid, yet the Chinese Communist Party has proved adaptable. From Rebel to Ruler shows that the party owes its endurance to its flexibility. But is it nimble enough to realize Xi Jinping’s “China Dream”? Challenges are multiplying, as the growing middle class makes new demands on the state and the ideological retreat from communism draws the party further from its revolutionary roots. The legacy of the party may be secure, but its future is anything but guaranteed.

[more]

front cover of From Rebel to Ruler
From Rebel to Ruler
One Hundred Years of the Chinese Communist Party
Tony Saich
Harvard University Press

“The definitive, candid, and absorbing history of a political organization…A vital account, based on magnificent research, that shows the party as a colossal, relentless, and enduring machine.”—Jane Perlez, former Beijing Bureau Chief, New York Times

“If you were to travel back in time to 1921 and predict that the Communist Party of China would rule over the world’s second-largest economy 100 years later, no one would believe you. In this definitive primer, Tony Saich explains how the impossible came true.”—Yuen Yuen Ang, Project Syndicate

“An extremely lucid, insightful history of the Chinese Communist Party. Saich’s readable narrative takes the CCP from its origins as a tiny group of revolutionaries…to the powerful, repressive rulers of a world power today.”—James Mann, author of The China Fantasy

Mao Zedong and the twelve young men who founded the Chinese Communist Party in 1921 could hardly have imagined that less than thirty years later, they would rule China. Over a century later the party remains in command, leading a nation primed for global dominance.

From Rebel to Ruler is a landmark history of the Chinese Communist Party—its rise against incredible odds, its struggle to consolidate power and overcome self-inflicted disasters, and its ability to thrive long after the collapse of the Soviet Union and dissolution of other communist parties. Leninist systems are thought to be rigid, yet the Chinese Communist Party has proved adaptable. Tony Saich shows that the party owes its endurance to its flexibility. But is it nimble enough to realize Xi Jinping’s “China Dream”? Challenges are multiplying, as a restless middle class makes new demands and the party strays ever further from its revolutionary roots.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays
Edward W. Said
Harvard University Press

With their powerful blend of political and aesthetic concerns, Edward W. Said's writings have transformed the field of literary studies. This long-awaited collection of literary and cultural essays, the first since Harvard University Press published The World, the Text, and the Critic in 1983, reconfirms what no one can doubt--that Said is the most impressive, consequential, and elegant critic of our time--and offers further evidence of how much the fully engaged critical mind can contribute to the reservoir of value, thought, and action essential to our lives and our culture.

As in the title essay, the widely admired "Reflections on Exile," the fact of his own exile and the fate of the Palestinians have given both form and the force of intimacy to the questions Said has pursued. Taken together, these essays--from the famous to those that will surprise even Said's most assiduous followers--afford rare insight into the formation of a critic and the development of an intellectual vocation. Said's topics are many and diverse, from the movie heroics of Tarzan to the machismo of Ernest Hemingway to the shades of difference that divide Alexandria and Cairo. He offers major reconsiderations of writers and artists such as George Orwell, Giambattista Vico, Georg Lukacs, R. P. Blackmur, E. M. Cioran, Naguib Mahfouz, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, Walter Lippman, Samuel Huntington, Antonio Gramsci, and Raymond Williams. Invigorating, edifying, acutely attentive to the vying pressures of personal and historical experience, his book is a source of immeasurable intellectual delight.

[more]

front cover of The World, the Text, and the Critic
The World, the Text, and the Critic
Edward W. Said
Harvard University Press, 1983

This extraordinarily wide-ranging work represents a new departure for contemporary literary theory. Author of Beginnings and the controversial Orientalism, Edward Said demonstrates that modern critical discourse has been impressively strengthened by the writings of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, for example, and by such influences as Marxism, structuralism, linguistics, and psychoanalysis. He argues, however, that the various methods and schools have had a crippling effect through their tendency to force works of literature to meet the requirements of a theory or system, ignoring the complex affiliations binding the texts to the world.

The critic must maintain a distance both from critical systems and from the dogmas and orthodoxies of the dominant culture, Said contends. He advocates freedom of consciousness and responsiveness to history, to the exigencies of the text, to political, social, and human values, to the heterogeneity of human experience. These characteristics are brilliantly exemplified in his own analyses of individual authors and works.

Combining the principles and practice of criticism, the book offers illuminating investigations of a number of writers—Swift, Conrad, Lukács, Renan, and many others—and of concepts such as repetition, originality, worldliness, and the roles of audiences, authors, and speakers. It asks daring questions, investigates problems of urgent significance, and gives a subtle yet powerful new meaning to the enterprise of criticism in modern society.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Detective Fiction and the Rise of the Japanese Novel, 1880–1930
Satoru Saito
Harvard University Press, 2012

In Detective Fiction and the Rise of the Japanese Novel, Satoru Saito sheds light on the deep structural and conceptual similarities between detective fiction and the novel in prewar Japan. Arguing that the interactions between the two genres were not marginal occurrences but instead critical moments of literary engagement, Saito demonstrates how detective fiction provided Japanese authors with the necessary frameworks through which to examine and critique the nature and implications of Japan’s literary formations and its modernizing society.

Through a series of close readings of literary texts by canonical writers of Japanese literature and detective fiction, including Tsubouchi Shoyo, Natsume Soseki, Shimazaki Toson, Sato Haruo, Kuroiwa Ruiko, and Edogawa Ranpo, Saito explores how the detective story functioned to mediate the tenuous relationships between literature and society as well as between subject and authority that made literary texts significant as political acts. By foregrounding the often implicit and contradictory strategies of literary texts—choice of narrative forms, symbolic mappings, and intertextual evocations among others—this study examines in detail the intricate interactions between detective fiction and the novel that shaped the development of modern Japanese literature.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Recontextualizing Texts
Narrative Performance in Modern Japanese Fiction
Atsuko Sakaki
Harvard University Press, 1999
Offering the first systematic examination of five modern Japanese fictional narratives, all of them available in English translations, Atsuko Sakaki explores Natsume Sōseki’s Kokoro and Kusamakura (The Three-Cornered World); Ibuse Masuji’s Kuroi ame (Black Rain); Mori Ōgai’s Gan (Wild Geese); and Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s Manji (Quicksand). Her close reading of each text reveals a hitherto unexplored area of communication between narrator and audience, as well as between “implied author” and “implied reader.” By using this approach, the author situates each of these works not in its historical, cultural, or economic contexts but in the situation the text itself produces.
[more]

front cover of The Uses of Oppression
The Uses of Oppression
The Ottoman Empire through Its Greek Newspapers, 1830–1862
Marina Sakali
Harvard University Press
During the middle decades of the nineteenth century, a generation of Ottoman Greeks was caught up in radical social and political changes, including the period of reforms known as Tanzimat. The Ottoman Greek press was both a product and an agent of these changes. The Uses of Oppression follows the development of the Ottoman Greek press from its birth in 1830 until 1862, employing the vivid reflections of its editors, correspondents, advertisers, commentators, and readers as a lens through which to view the everyday lives of this generation of Ottoman Greeks—their social aspirations, their reactions to political events, their reception of Western-style norms, and other contemporary issues.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Closer to Home
English Writers and Places, 1780–1830
Roger Sale
Harvard University Press, 1986

Roger Sale invites us to look afresh at five English authors: Jane Austen, Wordsworth, and—famous in their time but half forgotten today—George Crabbe, William Cobbett, and John Clare. The five differ greatly in style, tone, temper, subject, and genre. What they have in common is the importance they attach to place: not the generalized places of Renaissance literature, nor the pictorially composed scenery of the landscape poets, but specific localities that have a profound effect on their own lives or those of their characters.

Sale is a perceptive critic, with the gift of empathy. We are caught up in his account of Crabbe's Peter Grimes, condemned to his ghastly mudflats and marshes, projecting onto the river the emblems of his guilt. So too with Clare's evocations of his beloved countryside as it once had been but was no more, and Cobbett's shrewd perceptions of rural life; with Wordsworth's creation of two distinct Lake Districts, the one of his maturity and the one of his haunted childhood; with Austen's heroines achieving freedom by accepting the challenge of living in their confined space.

The distinctive qualities of each of these writers and their places are conveyed with imaginative sympathy. To read these chapters is to come to know, or know better, five writers worth knowing. And to go with Sale to Crabbe's Aldeburgh, Austen's Mansfield and Highbury, Cobbett's rural routes, Clare's Helpston, and Wordsworth's Lakes region is to experience these special places as well. It is a rewarding excursion.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Fairy Tales and After
From Snow White to E. B. White
Roger Sale
Harvard University Press

Roger Sale invites us to discover anew some of the great works of children's literature, works that have been read and loved but seldom given the benefit of serious literary assessment. It takes a critic of special gifts—receptiveness, discrimination, clarity of perception, independence of judgment—to discuss these books as illuminatingly as Sale does.

This is not a survey but a very personal book: Sale writes about stories and books with which he feels an imaginative sympathy. As it happens, they include a great many of the classic children's texts, works as disparate as “Beauty and the Beast” and Alice, The Wind in the Willows and Babar, “The Snow Queen” and Peter Rabbit, the Jungle Book and the Oz books. He conveys a fresh sense of what is special and memorable about each of them.

While avoiding conventional literary history, he sketches the circumstances of the author's life when they provide insight into the works. Unlike Bettelheim and others, Sale is not concerned with the “uses” of children's literature. He writes for adults, with the conviction that adults can find delight in these books. Many already do, and perhaps with his stimulus, many more will.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Scarcity by Design
The Legacy of New York City’s Housing Policies
Peter D. Salins
Harvard University Press, 1992

No American metropolis has intervened in its housing market quite as aggressively as New York since World War II—and yet none is as burdened by the scarcity, poor quality, uneven distribution, and high cost of its rental housing stock. Why, after half a century of rent control, public housing programs, tax abatement, and land use regulation, is it so difficult for thousands of New Yorkers to find, rent, and maintain decent apartments?

Addressing issues that are hotly debated in the Big Apple and other cities across the nation, Peter Salins and Gerard Mildner analyze New York's policies and assess their largely detrimental effects on housing quality and availability. They show how programs that were instituted for the benefit of both investors and the poor—by directly and indirectly subsidizing housing construction and by capping rents—have instead caused misallocation of housing, exacerbated tensions between tenants and landlords, progressively stifled private investment, and resulted in building deterioration and abandonment.

Scarcity by Design is an object lesson in what governments should not do if they wish to improve housing and maintain communities. It also makes a strong case for a highly controversial solution: arguing from a free-market perspective, Salins and Mildner clearly demonstrate how transition to a fully deregulated and subsidized housing market would alleviate the social and economic woes of New York's tenants. They present deregulation as the essential stimulus of housing production, fair pricing, and good maintenance. The authors' crisply written analysis of New York's housing problems and their proposed solutions will enlighten citizens, city managers, investors, builders, and urban planners, and should spark discussions in academic as well as professional circles.

[more]

front cover of Speaking for Others
Speaking for Others
The Ethics of Informal Political Representation
Wendy Salkin
Harvard University Press, 2024

A political philosopher dissects the duties and dilemmas of the unelected spokesperson, from Martin Luther King, Jr., to Greta Thunberg.

Political representation is typically assumed to be the purview of formal institutions and elected officials. But many of the people who represent us are not senators or city councilors—think of Martin Luther King, Jr., or Malala Yousafzai or even a neighbor who speaks up at a school board meeting. Informal political representatives are in fact ubiquitous, often powerful, and some bear enormous responsibility. In Speaking for Others, political philosopher Wendy Salkin develops the first systematic conceptual and moral analysis of informal political representation.

Salkin argues that informal representation can be a political lifeline, particularly for oppressed and marginalized groups that are denied representation in formal political institutions. Yet informal political representatives exert outsized influence over the ways these groups’ interests are understood by the public, without the represented having much recourse to hold them accountable. And many informal political representatives are selected not by the groups they represent but by outsiders, sticking these groups with representatives they would not choose but cannot shake. The role of informal political representatives is therefore fraught with moral questions. What exactly are their duties and to whom are they owed? Should they be members of the groups they represent? When is informal representation permissible and when is it best avoided?

Informal political representation is taking place all around us. In fact, you yourself may be an informal political representative without knowing it. Speaking for Others explores the tensions central to this pervasive yet underexamined practice, bringing light to both its perils and its promise.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Fragments of the Histories. Letters to Caesar
John T. Sallust
Harvard University Press, 2015

Chronicles of a Caesarean partisan.

Sallust, Gaius Sallustius Crispus (86–35 BC), a Sabine from Amiternum, acted as tribune against Cicero and Milo in 52, joined Caesar after being expelled from the Senate in 50, was restored to the Senate by Caesar and took part in his African campaign as praetor in 46, and was then appointed governor of New Africa (Numidia). Upon his return to Rome he narrowly escaped conviction for malfeasance in office, retired from public life, and took up historiography. Sallust’s last work, the annalistic Histories in five books, is much more expansive than his monographs on Catiline and Jugurtha (LCL 116), treating the whole of Roman history at home and abroad in the post-Sullan age. Although fragmentary, it provides invaluable information and insight about a crucial period of history spanning the period from 78 to around 67 BC.

Although Sallust is decidedly unsubtle and partisan in analyzing people and events, his works are important and significantly influenced later historians, notably Tacitus. Taking Thucydides as his model but building on Roman stylistic and rhetorical traditions, Sallust achieved a distinctive style, concentrated and arresting; lively characterizations, especially in the speeches; and skill at using particular episodes to illustrate large general themes.

For this volume, which completes the Loeb Classical Library edition of Sallust’s works, John T. Ramsey has freshly edited the Histories and the two pseudo-Sallustian Letters to Caesar, supplying ample annotation.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
War with Catiline. War with Jugurtha. Selections from the Histories. Doubtful Works
J. C. Sallust
Harvard University Press

Sallust, Gaius Sallustius Crispus (86-35 BCE) of Amiternum, after a wild youth became a supporter of Julius Caesar. He was tribune in 53; expelled from the Senate in 50; was quaestor in 49, praetor in 46. He saw Caesar triumph in Africa and became governor of Numidia, which he oppressed. Later in Rome he laid out famous gardens, retired from public life, and wrote a monograph on Catiline's conspiracy and one on the war with Jugurtha (both extant), and a history of Rome 78-67 BCE (little survives).

Though biased, Sallust's extant work is valuable. It shows lively characterisation (in speeches after Thucydides's manner) and attempts to explain the meaning of events. The work on Catiline has been called a study in social pathology. Sallust's style anticipates that of the early Empire.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The War with Catiline. The War with Jugurtha
J. C. Sallust
Harvard University Press, 2013

Two military monographs.

Sallust, Gaius Sallustius Crispus (86–35 BC), a Sabine from Amiternum, acted against Cicero and Milo as tribune in 52, joined Caesar after being expelled from the Senate in 50, was restored to the Senate by Caesar and took part in his African campaign as praetor in 46, and was then appointed governor of New Africa (Numidia). Upon his return to Rome he narrowly escaped conviction for malfeasance in office, retired from public life, and took up historiography. Sallust’s two extant monographs take as their theme the moral and political decline of Rome, one on the conspiracy of Catiline and the other on the war with Jugurtha.

Although Sallust is decidedly unsubtle and partisan in analyzing people and events, his works are important and significantly influenced later historians, notably Tacitus. Taking Thucydides as his model but building on Roman stylistic and rhetorical traditions, Sallust achieved a distinctive style, concentrated and arresting; lively characterizations, especially in the speeches; and skill at using particular episodes to illustrate large general themes.

For this edition, Rolfe’s text and translation of the Catiline and Jugurtha have been thoroughly revised in line with the most recent scholarship.

[more]

front cover of True American
True American
Language, Identity, and the Education of Immigrant Children
Rosemary C. Salomone
Harvard University Press, 2010

How can schools meet the needs of an increasingly diverse population of newcomers? Do bilingual programs help children transition into American life, or do they keep them in a linguistic ghetto? Are immigrants who maintain their native language uninterested in being American, or are they committed to changing what it means to be American?

In this ambitious book, Rosemary Salomone uses the heated debate over how best to educate immigrant children as a way to explore what national identity means in an age of globalization, transnationalism, and dual citizenship. She demolishes popular myths—that bilingualism impedes academic success, that English is under threat in contemporary America, that immigrants are reluctant to learn English, or that the ancestors of today’s assimilated Americans had all to gain and nothing to lose in abandoning their family language.

She lucidly reveals the little-known legislative history of bilingual education, its dizzying range of meanings in different schools, districts, and states, and the difficulty in proving or disproving whether it works—or defining it as a legal right.

In eye-opening comparisons, Salomone suggests that the simultaneous spread of English and the push toward multilingualism in western Europe offer economic and political advantages from which the U.S. could learn. She argues eloquently that multilingualism can and should be part of a meaningful education and responsible national citizenship in a globalized world.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Innovation Corrupted
The Origins and Legacy of Enron's Collapse
Malcolm S. Salter
Harvard University Press, 2008

Although much has already been written about the rise and fall of Enron, four important questions remain unanswered: What management behavior and practices led Enron down the path from truly innovative to fraudulent management? How could Enron’s board of directors have failed to detect the business, ethical, and legal risks embedded in the company’s aggressive financial strategies and accounting practices? Why did Enron’s external watchdogs—security analysts, credit-rating agencies, and regulatory agencies—fail to bark? What actions can prevent Enron-type breakdowns in the future? Innovation Corrupted addresses each of these questions.

In contrast to the time-line narratives of previous books on Enron that offer interesting but largely unsystematic insight into individual actions and organizational processes, Innovation Corrupted pursues a more methodical analysis of the causes and lessons of Enron’s collapse. Based upon newly available sources, Salter identifies the social pathologies and administrative failures that fostered the company’s ethical drift and inhibited the board of directors from exercising effective governance and control. Salter also goes beyond the work of previous books by proposing practical recommendations for preventing future Enron-type disasters. These prescriptions relate to board oversight, financial incentives for executives, and, most importantly, the maintenance of ethical discipline when operating in the murky borderlands of the law. It was in this shadowed space that Enron’s senior executives lost their way.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Political Writings
Coluccio Salutati
Harvard University Press, 2014
Coluccio Salutati (1332–1406) was chancellor of the Florentine Republic (1375–1406) and the leader of the humanist movement in Italy in the generation after Petrarch and Boccaccio. As such, he was among the first humanists to apply his Classical learning to political theory and his rhetorical skills to the defense of republican liberty. This volume contains a new English version of Salutati’s important treatise On Tyranny, Antonio Loschi’s Invective against the Florentines, which provoked Salutati’s long Reply to a Slanderous Detractor, and a selection of Salutati’s state letters written for the Florentine Republic. Most of the texts are here critically edited and translated into English for the first time.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
On the World and Religious Life
Coluccio Salutati
Harvard University Press, 2014
On the World and Religious Life (c. 1381) is the first surviving treatise of Coluccio Salutati (1332–1406), chancellor of the Florentine Republic (1375–1406) and the leader of the humanist movement in Italy in the generation after Petrarch and Boccaccio. The work was written for a lawyer who had left secular life to enter the Camaldulensian monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli, located in the heart of Florence. The new monk prevailed on Salutati to write a treatise encouraging him to persevere in the religious life. His request led to this wide-ranging reflection on humanity’s misuse of God’s creation and the need to orient human life in accordance with a proper hierarchy of values. This work is here translated into English for the first time.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Living Standards in Latin American History
Height, Welfare, and Development, 1750–2000
Ricardo D. Salvatore
Harvard University Press, 2010

Latin America’s widespread poverty and multi-dimensioned inequalities have long perplexed and provoked observers. Until recently, economic historians could not contribute much to the discussion of living standards and inequality, because quantitative evidence for earlier eras was lacking. Since the 1990s, historians, economists, and other social scientists have sought to document and analyze the historical roots of Latin America’s relatively high inequality and persistent poverty.

This edited volume with eight compelling chapters by preeminent economists and social scientists brings together some of the most important results of this work: scholarly efforts to measure and explain changes in Latin American living standards as far back as the colonial era. The recent work has focused on physical welfare, often referred to as “biological” well-being. Much of it uses novel measures, such as data on the heights or stature of children and adults (a measure of net nutrition) and the Human Development Index (HDI). Other work brings to the discussion new and more reliable measurements that can be used for comparing countries, often with unexpected and startling results.

[more]

front cover of Under the Starry Flag
Under the Starry Flag
How a Band of Irish Americans Joined the Fenian Revolt and Sparked a Crisis over Citizenship
Lucy E. Salyer
Harvard University Press, 2018

Winner of the Myrna F. Bernath Book Award

“A stunning accomplishment…As the Trump administration works to expatriate naturalized U.S. citizens, understanding the history of individual rights and state power at the heart of Under the Starry Flag could not be more important.”
Passport

“A brilliant piece of historical writing as well as a real page-turner. Salyer seamlessly integrates analysis of big, complicated historical questions—allegiance, naturalization, citizenship, politics, diplomacy, race, and gender—into a gripping narrative.”
—Kevin Kenny, author of The American Irish

In 1867 forty Irish American freedom fighters, outfitted with guns and ammunition, sailed to Ireland to join the effort to end British rule. They were arrested for treason as soon as they landed. The Fenians, as they were called, claimed to be American citizens, but British authorities insisted that they remained British subjects. Following the Civil War, the Fenian crisis dramatized the question of whether citizenship should be considered an inalienable right.

This gripping legal saga, a prelude to today’s immigration battles, raises important questions about immigration, citizenship, and who deserves to be protected by the law.

[more]

front cover of The Making of a Christian Aristocracy
The Making of a Christian Aristocracy
Social and Religious Change in the Western Roman Empire
Michele Renee Salzman
Harvard University Press, 2002

What did it take to cause the Roman aristocracy to turn to Christianity, changing centuries-old beliefs and religious traditions? Michele Salzman takes a fresh approach to this much-debated question. Focusing on a sampling of individual aristocratic men and women as well as on writings and archeological evidence, she brings new understanding to the process by which pagan aristocrats became Christian, and Christianity became aristocratic.

Roman aristocrats would seem to be unlikely candidates for conversion to Christianity. Pagan and civic traditions were deeply entrenched among the educated and politically well-connected. Indeed, men who held state offices often were also esteemed priests in the pagan state cults: these priesthoods were traditionally sought as a way to reinforce one’s social position. Moreover, a religion whose texts taught love for one’s neighbor and humility, with strictures on wealth and notions of equality, would not have obvious appeal for those at the top of a hierarchical society. Yet somehow in the course of the fourth and early fifth centuries Christianity and the Roman aristocracy met and merged.

Examining the world of the ruling class—its institutions and resources, its values and style of life—Salzman paints a fascinating picture, especially of aristocratic women. Her study yields new insight into the religious revolution that transformed the late Roman Empire.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Marked
Living the Transformation of Crime, Punishment, and Inequality in America
Robert J. Sampson
Harvard University Press

front cover of Crime in the Making
Crime in the Making
Pathways and Turning Points through Life
Robert J. Sampson
Harvard University Press, 1993
This new explanation of crime over the life course provides an important foundation for rethinking contemporary theory and criminal justice policy. It is based on the reanalysis of a classic set of data: Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency, Sheldon and Eleanor Gluecks’ mid-twentieth-century study of 500 delinquents and 500 nondelinquents from childhood to adulthood. Several years ago, Robert Sampson and John Laub dusted off sixty cartons of the Gleucks’ data that had been stored in the basement of the Harvard Law School. After a lengthy process of recoding and reanalyzing these data, they developed and tested a theory of informal social control that acknowledges the importance of childhood behavior but rejects the implication that adult social factors have little relevance.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Bernard Berenson
The Making of a Connoisseur
Ernest Samuels
Harvard University Press, 1979

Critic, arbiter of taste, renowned authority on Renaissance painting, and oracle to millionaire art collectors, Bernard Berenson was the most formidable presence in the Anglo-American art world for more than thirty years. His Villa I Tatti near Florence was a magnet for European and American intellectuals; he was able to say, late in life, that most of the Italian paintings that had come to the United States had “my visa on their passport.” Twenty years after his death he remains a paradoxical figure—fit challenge for a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer.

The story of the making of the connoisseur spans four decades, from Berenson’s childhood in Lithuania and in an immigrant enclave in Boston to the triumphant tour of the United States that confirmed his international reputation. Ernest Samuels interweaves with great skill the many threads of the narrative. No less fascinating than Berenson’s own development, and the accidents that shaped his career, are his relations with an extraordinary cast of characters whose lives impinged on his—among them George Santayana, William James, Bertrand Russell, Logan Pearsall Smith, Norman and Hutchins Hapgood, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, the Michael Fields, Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, Roger Fry, and, most notably, the fabled Mrs. Jack Gardner. His relationship with Mary Smith Costelloe, who left her husband and children for him and eventually became his wife, was so close that the book is almost as much her story as his.

Drawing on the thousands of letters B.B. and Mary wrote and the diaries she kept, Samuels is able to convey Berenson’s thoughts and impressions as well as the outward events of these crucial years of his life. He blends sympathy and irony in his many-faceted portrayal of a complex man and a remarkable career. It is a compelling book.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Bernard Berenson
The Making of a Legend
Ernest Samuels
Harvard University Press, 1987

Controversy swirls around Bernard Berenson today as it did in his middle years, before and between two world wars. Who was this man, this supreme connoisseur of Italian Renaissance painting? How did he support his elegant estate near Florence, his Villa I Tatti? What exactly were his relations with the art dealer Joseph Duveen? What part did his wife, Mary, play in his scholarly work and professional career? The answers are to be found in the day-to-day record of his life as he lived it—as reported at first hand in his and Mary’s letters and diaries and reflected in the countless personal and business letters they received. His is one of the most fully documented lives of this century. Ernest Samuels, having spent twenty years studying the thousands of letters and other manuscripts, presents his story in absorbing detail.

Berenson helped Isabella Stewart Gardner build her great collection and performed similar though lesser services for other wealthy Americans. It was merely an avocation and a useful source of income; his vocation was scholarship. But after 1904, when the book opens, his expertise was in ever-greater demand: a purchaser’s only assurance of the authorship of an Italian painting was the opinion of an expert, and in this field Berenson was preeminent. Increasingly he was drawn into the lucrative world of the art dealers; inevitably Joseph Duveen found it essential to enlist his services, at first ad hoc, then by contractual agreement. Samuels charts the course of Berenson’s long association with Duveen Brothers, detailing the financial arrangements, the humdrum chores and major contested attributions, the periodic clashes between the stubborn scholar and the arrogant entrepreneur.

The portrayal of Berenson’s relationship with Mary is especially intriguing: a union of opposites in all but brains and wit, bonded—despite love affairs, jealousies, recriminations—no longer by passion but by shared concerns. Impinging on their lives are those of a huge circle of friends and acquaintances in America and the beau monde of Europe. Both as biography and as a chapter of social and cultural history, it is a compelling book.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Henry Adams
Ernest Samuels
Harvard University Press

Henry Adams sought, late in life, to thwart prospective biographers by writing his own biography. Published soon after his death in 1918, The Education of Henry Adams was rightly greeted as a masterpiece. Not until thirty years later, with the appearance of the first volume of Ernest Samuels’s biography, did it become apparent how much the story had been colored by Adams’s singular philosophy of history and how great was the disparity between the protagonist of the Education and Adams as he actually was. Upon its completion in 1964, Samuels’s life of Henry Adams was hailed as “one of the great biographical achievements of our time”; its laurels included a Pulitzer Prize.

Ernest Samuels has now distilled his ample narrative into a single absorbing volume. We see Adams as a lively undergraduate, in contrast to the jaded young man of the Education; as budding writer, newspaper correspondent, eager participant in political maneuverings in Washington and at the American embassy in London; as teacher at Harvard and editor of the North American Review; settled in Washington, as scholar, biographer, historian, novelist; as insatiable traveler; as friend and adviser to statesmen; as elderly cosmopolite spending half of each year abroad; and always as witty chronicler of the social scene and trenchant commentator on the events of his time. We are drawn into the personal drama of Adams’s middle years: his married life with Clover; the halcyon period in Washington in the early 1880s, catastrophically terminated by Clover’s depression and suicide; his growing passion for Elizabeth Cameron; and his flight to the South Seas. Throughout the book we follow the genesis and progress of his writings, from his muck-raking journalism in President Grant’s Washington, through the social and political criticism of his novels, his biographies, and his great History, to the classic Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, the daring theories of the Education, and his last essays.

Few biographies have so broad a canvas—sixty years of American political, social, and intellectual life, from the pre–Civil War years to the First World War. And few offer so revealing a portrait of a complex human being and an extraordinary career.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Henry Adams
The Major Phase
Ernest Samuels
Harvard University Press

This volume is written on the same comprehensive scale as its predecessors, The Young Henry Adams and Henry Adams: The Middle Years, which the New York Times called “eminently sympathetic, inclusive, sensible and satisfying.” Ernest Samuels' narrative is mainly chronological, showing the growth and maturity of a long, full, and varied career, but the principal focus is on the internal drama of Adams' life and on the expression of his opinions and ideas.

Drawing on a wealth of unpublished material, including correspondence with such figures as John Hay, William and Henry James, Bernard Berenson, and Theodore Roosevelt, the author discerningly records significant moments in Adams' lifelong dialogue in letters with his friends and acquaintances. Particularly illuminating is the series of brilliant and romantic letters Adams wrote to Elizabeth Cameron which go far to correct the dehumanized image implicit in the Education. As before, Samuels maintains an artistic balance between pure biography and literary history and criticism; his definitive study of Adams' life and works adds a major chapter to American intellectual and social history.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Henry Adams
The Middle Years
Ernest Samuels
Harvard University Press

"Education had ended in 1871, life was complete in 1890." With this paradoxical statement from The Education of Henry Adams, Adams apparently dismissed from the record twenty of the most interesting and active years of his career. Those two decades embraced the first great productive season of his literary genius and the most significant years of his emotional life. Opening on the highest note of expectation and closing with his desperate flight to the South Seas in 1890, a divided and lonely figure, that season of fulfillment and inner growth is the subject of this book.

The relationship between Adams' life and writings grew steadily richer as his literary artistry matured, and with that process as his main concern, Mr. Samuels has written a book equally rewarding as a biography and as a critical study. Perhaps the greatest achievement biographically is a definitive and absorbing account of the true relationship between Henry Adams and his wife and an introduction to the grand passion for Elizabeth Cameron which was to affect the rest of his life. The whole intense inner drama of his feelings is really opened up for the first time, as often as possible in his own words, to the tragedy of his wife's suicide, the embittered years of work concluding the great History, and, finally, the escape to the South Seas in an effort to overcome the intolerable intensity of his love for Mrs. Cameron.

Through detailed analyses of Adams' writings, Mr. Samuels shows how all this drama had its counterpoint in his literary activities and eventually became transformed into works of literary art. Equally interesting is the way in which the ideas for his biographical and historical writing emerged from the wide sources of his reading, were tested in the remarkable give and take of hiscircle, and finally adapted to the themes of his writing.

This is the most exhaustive biographical and critical study of Adams' middle years ever made, and probably answers, so far as it is humanly possible, every unanswered question about Adams' life and the writing of his books. From the wealth of family papers deposited with the Massachusetts Historical Society and numerous other sources, Mr. Samuels has unveiled an increasingly complex personality - a brilliant mind in the grip of many prejudices and contradictions, yet one so terrifyingly honest that it more than ever defies explanation in any ordinary terms.

The mass of fresh materials used includes letters from correspondents around the world and admits us to the other side of the enormous dialogue which Adams carried on with the members of his circle. Certain finds have revealed some invaluable sidelights including a striking fragment of Adams' diary for 1888-1889; a sheaf of his sonnets to Elizabeth Cameron, and the unpublished remainder of his letters to his wife. Much untouched material has also come to light in newspapers, magazines, public archives, court records, memoirs, and biographies.

This is the second of three volumes of Mr. Samuels' definitive study of Henry Adams. The other two are The Young Henry Adams and Henry Adams: The Major Phase.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Young Henry Adams
Ernest Samuels
Harvard University Press

logo for Harvard University Press
Foundations of Economic Analysis
Enlarged Edition
Paul Anthony Samuelson
Harvard University Press, 1983
Although his classic work has gone through many reprintings and translations, only now has Paul A. Samuelson added new material to his 1947 treatise. A new introduction portrays the genesis of the book and analyzes how its contributions fit into theoretical developments of the last thirty-five years. A new and lengthy mathematical appendix gives a survey of the following post-1947 breakthroughs in political economy, in relation to the methodology of Foundations: linear programming and comparative statics; nonlinear programming, dynamic and stochastic; modern duality theory; the testable content of the neoclassical money model; probabilistic decision making, with new slants on the dogma of Expected-Utility maximizing; and portfolio and liquidity preference analysis by general methods that transcend mean-variance approximations.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Foundations of Economic Analysis
First Edition
Paul Anthony Samuelson
Harvard University Press
THIS EDITION HAS BEEN REPLACED BY A NEWER EDITION.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Philanthropy and Social Change in Latin America
Cynthia Sanborn
Harvard University Press, 2005

Latin America is a profoundly philanthropic region with deeply rooted traditions of solidarity with the less fortunate. Recently, different forms of philanthropy are emerging in the region, often involving community organization and social change.

This volume brings together groundbreaking perspectives on such diverse themes as corporate philanthropy, immigrant networks, and new grant-making and operating foundations with corporate, family, and community origins.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
House and Home in Modern Japan
Architecture, Domestic Space, and Bourgeois Culture, 1880-1930
Jordan Sand
Harvard University Press, 2003

A house is a site, the bounds and focus of a community. It is also an artifact, a material extension of its occupants’ lives. This book takes the Japanese house in both senses, as site and as artifact, and explores the spaces, commodities, and conceptions of community associated with it in the modern era.

As Japan modernized, the principles that had traditionally related house and family began to break down. Even where the traditional class markers surrounding the house persisted, they became vessels for new meanings, as housing was resituated in a new nexus of relations. The house as artifact and the artifacts it housed were affected in turn. The construction and ornament of houses ceased to be stable indications of their occupants’ social status, the home became a means of personal expression, and the act of dwelling was reconceived in terms of consumption. Amid the breakdown of inherited meanings and the fluidity of modern society, not only did the increased diversity of commodities lead to material elaboration of dwellings, but home itself became an object of special attention, its importance emphasized in writing, invoked in politics, and articulated in architectural design. The aim of this book is to show the features of this culture of the home as it took shape in Japan.

[more]

front cover of Born Losers
Born Losers
A History of Failure in America
Scott A. Sandage
Harvard University Press, 2006

What makes somebody a Loser, a person doomed to unfulfilled dreams and humiliation? Nobody is born to lose, and yet failure embodies our worst fears. The Loser is our national bogeyman, and his history over the past two hundred years reveals the dark side of success, how economic striving reshaped the self and soul of America.

From colonial days to the Columbine tragedy, Scott Sandage explores how failure evolved from a business loss into a personality deficit, from a career setback to a gauge of our self-worth. From hundreds of private diaries, family letters, business records, and even early credit reports, Sandage reconstructs the dramas of real-life Willy Lomans. He unearths their confessions and denials, foolish hopes and lost faith, sticking places and changing times. Dreamers, suckers, and nobodies come to life in the major scenes of American history, like the Civil War and the approach of big business, showing how the national quest for success remade the individual ordeal of failure.

Born Losers is a pioneering work of American cultural history, which connects everyday attitudes and anxieties about failure to lofty ideals of individualism and salesmanship of self. Sandage's storytelling will resonate with all of us as it brings to life forgotten men and women who wrestled with The Loser--the label and the experience--in the days when American capitalism was building a nation of winners.

[more]

front cover of Happiness in Action
Happiness in Action
A Philosopher’s Guide to the Good Life
Adam Adatto Sandel
Harvard University Press, 2022

“Here, at last, is a book about what happiness really means, and why it often eludes us in our stressed-out, always-on lives.”
—Arianna Huffington, Founder and CEO, Thrive


A young philosopher and Guinness World Record holder in pull-ups argues that the key to happiness is not goal-driven striving but forging a life that integrates self-possession, friendship, and engagement with nature.

What is the meaning of the good life? In this strikingly original book, Adam Adatto Sandel draws on ancient and modern thinkers and on two seemingly disparate pursuits of his own, philosophy and fitness, to offer a surprising answer to this age-old human question.

Sandel argues that finding fulfillment is not about attaining happiness, conceived as a state of mind, or even about accomplishing one’s greatest goals. Instead, true happiness comes from immersing oneself in activity that is intrinsically rewarding. The source of meaning, he suggests, derives from the integrity or “wholeness” of self that we forge throughout the journey of life.

At the heart of Sandel’s account of life as a journey are three virtues that get displaced and distorted by our goal-oriented striving: self-possession, friendship, and engagement with nature. Sandel offers illuminating and counterintuitive accounts of these virtues, revealing how they are essential to a happiness that lasts.

To illustrate the struggle of living up to these virtues, Sandel looks to literature, film, and television, and also to his own commitments and adventures. A focal point of his personal narrative is a passion that, at first glance, is as narrow a goal-oriented pursuit as one can imagine: training to set the Guinness World Record for Most Pull-Ups in One Minute. Drawing on his own experiences, Sandel makes philosophy accessible for readers who, in their own infinitely various ways, struggle with the tension between goal-oriented striving and the embrace of life as a journey.

[more]

front cover of The Place of Prejudice
The Place of Prejudice
A Case for Reasoning within the World
Adam Adatto Sandel
Harvard University Press, 2014

Today we associate prejudice with ignorance and bigotry and consider it a source of injustice. So how can prejudice have a legitimate place in moral and political judgment? In this ambitious work, Adam Sandel shows that prejudice, properly understood, is not an unfortunate obstacle to clear thinking but an essential aspect of it. The aspiration to reason without preconceptions, he argues, is misguided.

Ranging across philosophy from Aristotle to Heidegger and Gadamer, Sandel demonstrates that we inherit our "prejudice against prejudice" from the Enlightenment. By detaching reason from habit and common opinion, thinkers such as Bacon, Descartes, and Kant invented prejudice--as we understand it today--as an obstacle to freedom and a failure to think for oneself.

The Place of Prejudice presents a powerful challenge to this picture. The attempt to purge understanding of culture and history leads not to truth, Sandel warns, but to shallowness and confusion. A purely detached notion of reason deprives judgment of all perspective, disparages political rhetoric as mere pandering, and denies us the background knowledge we need to interpret literature, law, and the past. In a clear, eloquent voice, Sandel presents instead a compelling case for reasoning within the world.

[more]

front cover of Shaken Brain
Shaken Brain
The Science, Care, and Treatment of Concussion
Elizabeth Sandel
Harvard University Press, 2020

A physician with thirty-five years of experience treating people with brain injuries shares the latest research on concussions and best practices for care.

The explosion of attention to sports concussions has many of us thinking about the addled brains of our football and hockey heroes. But concussions happen to everyone, not just elite athletes. Children fall from high chairs, drivers and cyclists get into accidents, and workers encounter unexpected obstacles on the job. Concussions are prevalent, occurring even during everyday activities. In fact, in less time than it takes to read this sentence, three Americans will experience a concussion. The global statistics are no less staggering.

Shaken Brain offers expert advice and urgently needed answers. Elizabeth Sandel, MD, is a board-certified physician who has spent more than three decades treating patients with traumatic brain injuries, training clinicians, and conducting research. Here she explains the scientific evidence for what happens to the brain and body after a concussion. And she shares stories from a diverse group of patients, educating readers on prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. Few people understand that what they do in the aftermath of their injury will make a dramatic difference to their future well-being; patient experiences testify to the best practices for concussion sufferers and their caregivers. Dr. Sandel also shows how to evaluate risks before participating in activities and how to use proven safety strategies to mitigate these risks.

Today concussions aren’t just injuries—they’re big news. And, like anything in the news, they’re the subject of much misinformation. Shaken Brain is the resource patients and their families, friends, and caregivers need to understand how concussions occur, what to expect from healthcare providers, and what the long-term consequences may be.

[more]

front cover of The Case against Perfection
The Case against Perfection
Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering
Michael J. Sandel
Harvard University Press, 2007

“Sandel explores a paramount question of our era: how to extend the power and promise of biomedical science to overcome debility without compromising our humanity. His arguments are acute and penetrating, melding sound logic with compassion.”
—Jerome Groopman, author of How Doctors Think


Breakthroughs in genetics present us with a promise and a predicament. The promise is that we will soon be able to treat and prevent a host of debilitating diseases. The predicament is that our newfound genetic knowledge may enable us to manipulate our nature—to enhance our genetic traits and those of our children. Although most people find at least some forms of genetic engineering disquieting, it is not easy to articulate why. What is wrong with re-engineering our nature?

The Case against Perfection explores these and other moral quandaries connected with the quest to perfect ourselves and our children. Michael Sandel argues that the pursuit of perfection is flawed for reasons that go beyond safety and fairness. The drive to enhance human nature through genetic technologies is objectionable because it represents a bid for mastery and dominion that fails to appreciate the gifted character of human powers and achievements. Carrying us beyond familiar terms of political discourse, this book contends that the genetic revolution will change the way philosophers discuss ethics and will force spiritual questions back onto the political agenda.

In order to grapple with the ethics of enhancement, we need to confront questions largely lost from view in the modern world. Since these questions verge on theology, modern philosophers and political theorists tend to shrink from them. But our new powers of biotechnology make these questions unavoidable. Addressing them is the task of this book, by one of America’s preeminent moral and political thinkers.

[more]

front cover of Democracy’s Discontent
Democracy’s Discontent
A New Edition for Our Perilous Times
Michael J. Sandel
Harvard University Press, 2022

A renowned political philosopher updates his classic book on the American political tradition to address the perils democracy confronts today.

The 1990s were a heady time. The Cold War had ended, and America’s version of liberal capitalism seemed triumphant. And yet, amid the peace and prosperity, anxieties about the project of self-government could be glimpsed beneath the surface.

So argued Michael Sandel, in his influential and widely debated book Democracy’s Discontent, published in 1996. The market faith was eroding the common life. A rising sense of disempowerment was likely to provoke backlash, he wrote, from those who would “shore up borders, harden the distinction between insiders and outsiders, and promise a politics to ‘take back our culture and take back our country,’ to ‘restore our sovereignty’ with a vengeance.”

Now, a quarter century later, Sandel updates his classic work for an age when democracy’s discontent has hardened into a country divided against itself. In this new edition, he extends his account of America’s civic struggles from the 1990s to the present. He shows how Democrats and Republicans alike embraced a version of finance-driven globalization that created a society of winners and losers and fueled the toxic politics of our time.

In a work celebrated when first published as “a remarkable fusion of philosophical and historical scholarship” (Alan Brinkley), Sandel recalls moments in the American past when the country found ways to hold economic power to democratic account. To reinvigorate democracy, Sandel argues in a stirring new epilogue, we need to reconfigure the economy and empower citizens as participants in a shared public life.

[more]

front cover of Democracy’s Discontent
Democracy’s Discontent
America in Search of a Public Philosophy
Michael J. Sandel
Harvard University Press, 1996

The defect, Sandel maintains, lies in the impoverished vision of citizenship and community shared by Democrats and Republicans alike. American politics has lost its civic voice, leaving both liberals and conservatives unable to inspire the sense of community and civic engagement that self-government requires.

In search of a public philosophy adequate to our time, Sandel ranges across the American political experience, recalling the arguments of Jefferson and Hamilton, Lincoln and Douglas, Holmes and Brandeis, FDR and Reagan. He relates epic debates over slavery and industrial capitalism to contemporary controversies over the welfare state, religion, abortion, gay rights, and hate speech. Democracy's Discontent provides a new interpretation of the American political and constitutional tradition that offers hope of rejuvenating our civic life.

[more]

front cover of Public Philosophy
Public Philosophy
Essays on Morality in Politics
Michael J. Sandel
Harvard University Press, 2006
In this book, Michael Sandel takes up some of the hotly contested moral and political issues of our time, including affirmative action, assisted suicide, abortion, gay rights, stem cell research, the meaning of toleration and civility, the gap between rich and poor, the role of markets, and the place of religion in public life. He argues that the most prominent ideals in our political life--individual rights and freedom of choice--do not by themselves provide an adequate ethic for a democratic society. Sandel calls for a politics that gives greater emphasis to citizenship, community, and civic virtue, and that grapples more directly with questions of the good life. Liberals often worry that inviting moral and religious argument into the public sphere runs the risk of intolerance and coercion. These essays respond to that concern by showing that substantive moral discourse is not at odds with progressive public purposes, and that a pluralist society need not shrink from engaging the moral and religious convictions that its citizens bring to public life.
[more]

front cover of Encountering China
Encountering China
Michael Sandel and Chinese Philosophy
Michael J. Sandel
Harvard University Press, 2018

In the West, Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel is a thinker of unusual prominence. In China, he’s a phenomenon, greeted by vast crowds. China Daily reports that he has acquired a popularity “usually reserved for Hollywood movie stars.” China Newsweek declared him the “most influential foreign figure” of the year. In Sandel the Chinese have found a guide through the ethical dilemmas created by the nation’s swift embrace of a market economy—a guide whose communitarian ideas resonate with aspects of China’s own rich and ancient philosophical traditions.

Chinese citizens often describe a sense that, in sprinting ahead, they have bounded past whatever barriers once held back the forces of corruption and moral disregard. The market economy has lifted millions from poverty but done little to define ultimate goals for individuals or the nation. Is the market all there is? In this context, Sandel’s charismatic, interactive lecturing style, which roots moral philosophy in real-world scenarios, has found an audience struggling with questions of their responsibility to one another.

Encountering China brings together leading experts in Confucian and Daoist thought to explore the connections and tensions revealed in this unlikely episode of Chinese engagement with the West. The result is a profound examination of diverse ideas about the self, justice, community, gender, and public good. With a foreword by Evan Osnos that considers Sandel’s fame and the state of moral dialogue in China, the book will itself be a major contribution to the debates that Sandel sparks in East and West alike.

[more]

front cover of Moving toward Integration
Moving toward Integration
The Past and Future of Fair Housing
Richard H. Sander
Harvard University Press, 2018

Reducing residential segregation is the best way to reduce racial inequality in the United States. African American employment rates, earnings, test scores, even longevity all improve sharply as residential integration increases. Yet far too many participants in our policy and political conversations have come to believe that the battle to integrate America’s cities cannot be won. Richard Sander, Yana Kucheva, and Jonathan Zasloff write that the pessimism surrounding desegregation in housing arises from an inadequate understanding of how segregation has evolved and how policy interventions have already set many metropolitan areas on the path to integration.

Scholars have debated for decades whether America’s fair housing laws are effective. Moving toward Integration provides the most definitive account to date of how those laws were shaped and implemented and why they had a much larger impact in some parts of the country than others. It uses fresh evidence and better analytic tools to show when factors like exclusionary zoning and income differences between blacks and whites pose substantial obstacles to broad integration, and when they do not.

Through its interdisciplinary approach and use of rich new data sources, Moving toward Integration offers the first comprehensive analysis of American housing segregation. It explains why racial segregation has been resilient even in an increasingly diverse and tolerant society, and it demonstrates how public policy can align with demographic trends to achieve broad housing integration within a generation.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Words Well Put
Visions of Poetic Competence in the Chinese Tradition
Graham Sanders
Harvard University Press, 2006

Many poems in the Chinese tradition come to us embedded in narratives purporting to tell the circumstances of their composition and performance. "Poetic competence" is demonstrated in these narratives through a person's ability to influence the attitudes and behavior of others with poetic discourse. Such competence can be apprehended only in the context of a narrative, which sets forth a representation of the conditions of a poem's production, performance, and reception. These narratives are not so much faithful historical records as ideal accounts of the operation of poetry. Such stories both fulfill and deny wishes for poetry and for the self; it is these wishes that merit our careful attention.

As traced in Words Well Put, the vision of poetic competence evolved for over a millennium from calculated performances of inherited words to sincere passionate outbursts to displays of verbal wit combining calculation with the appearance of spontaneity. By the seventh century, calculation, passion, and wit had converged to produce a multivalent concept of competence as a repertoire of competencies to use as the occasion demanded. This book tells the story of the development of poetic competence to uncover the complexity of the concept and to identify the sources and exemplars of that complexity.

[more]

front cover of Why We Act
Why We Act
Turning Bystanders into Moral Rebels
Catherine A. Sanderson
Harvard University Press, 2020

A Washington Post Book of the Year

“Makes a powerful argument for building, as early as possible, the ability to stand up for what's right in the face of peer pressure, corrupt authority, and even family apathy.”
Psychology Today

Why do so few of us intervene when we’re needed—and what would it take to make us step up? We are bombarded every day by reports of bad behavior, from the school yard to the boardroom to the halls of Congress. It’s tempting to blame bad acts on bad people, but sometimes good people do bad things. A social psychologist who has done pioneering research on student behavior on college campuses, Catherine Sanderson points to many ways in which our faulty assumptions about what other people think can paralyze us. Moral courage, it turns out, is not innate. But you can train yourself to stand up for what you believe in, and even small acts can make a big difference. Inspiring and potentially life transforming, Why We Act reveals that while the urge to do nothing is deeply ingrained, even the most hesitant would-be bystander can learn to be a moral rebel.

“From bullying on the playground to sexual harassment in the workplace, perfectly nice people often do perfectly awful things. But why? In this thoughtful and beautifully written book, Sanderson shows how basic principles of social psychology explain such behavior—and how they can be used to change it. A smart and practical guide to becoming a better and braver version of ourselves.”
—Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness

“Encouraged me to persevere through many moments when it felt far easier to stop trying.”
Washington Post

“Points to steps all of us can take to become ‘moral rebels’ whose voices can change society for the better.”
—Walter V. Robinson, former editor of the Boston Globe’s Spotlight Team

“Sanderson offers sound advice on how we can become better at doing what we know is right.”
—George Conway, cofounder of The Lincoln Project

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Methods of Crop Forecasting
Fred H. Sanderson
Harvard University Press
Fred Sanderson, bringing together heretofore scattered material, gives a summary and critical appraisal of recent advances in the methodology of crop forecasting. Since advance knowledge of probable United States production is essential not only to farmers, dealers, railroads, banks, large consumers, manufacturers, and government agencies, but may well have worldwide repercussions, there is obvious need for a book of this sort.
[more]

front cover of Prospective Longevity
Prospective Longevity
A New Vision of Population Aging
Warren C. Sanderson
Harvard University Press, 2019

From two leading experts, a revolutionary new way to think about and measure aging.

Aging is a complex phenomenon. We usually think of chronological age as a benchmark, but it is actually a backward way of defining lifespan. It tells us how long we’ve lived so far, but what about the rest of our lives?

In this pathbreaking book, Warren C. Sanderson and Sergei Scherbov provide a new way to measure individual and population aging. Instead of counting how many years we’ve lived, we should think about the number of years we have left, our “prospective age.” Two people who share the same chronological age probably have different prospective ages, because one will outlive the other. Combining their forward-thinking measure of our remaining years with other health metrics, Sanderson and Scherbov show how we can generate better demographic estimates, which inform better policies. Measuring prospective age helps make sense of observed patterns of survival, reorients understanding of health in old age, and clarifies the burden of old-age dependency. The metric also brings valuable data to debates over equitable intergenerational pensions.

Sanderson and Scherbov’s pioneering model has already been adopted by the United Nations. Prospective Longevity offers us all an opportunity to rethink aging, so that we can make the right choices for our societal and economic health.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Technique of Child Psychoanalysis
Discussions with Anna Freud
Joseph Sandler
Harvard University Press

This book distills the essence of child psychoanalysis from the practice and thought of its founder Anna Freud, who for over 50 years has been at the forefront of this controversial field. Children are the most refractory of all subjects to treat analytically. Here, for the first time, is a primer on the difficult technique as practiced at the Hampstead Clinic in London, which was founded by Anna Freud and is today the leading child analytic center in the world. She and her colleagues expose their wealth of experience to systematic review, which yields up rich insights not only into child psychoanalysis and psychotherapy but also into basic child development. In addition, their findings have relevance to the understanding of emotional disturbance at all ages.

The book follows the treatment situation through all its stages, from the first session to termination and follow-up. It focuses on the interaction between therapist and child in the treatment room, illustrating the points with copious clinical vignettes. One point examined is the structure of treatment with respect to such matters as scheduling sessions and handling interruptions. Another element that comes under scrutiny is the development of the child's relationship to the therapist, which subsumes such factors as establishing an alliance, transference, and resistance. The child's repertoire of expressions, both verbal and nonverbal, is explored, as is the therapist's armamentarium of interpretations and interventions. Woven throughout the description of these elements is incisive commentary by Anna Freud. Her commonsense approach gives the book unique value, lifting it to a rare level of human wisdom.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Loving Humanity, Learning, and Being Honored
The Foundations of Leadership in Xenophon's Education of Cyrus
Norman B. Sandridge
Harvard University Press, 2012
Xenophon is generally thought to have done his best theorizing on leadership through his portrayal of Cyrus the Great, the first king of the Persian Empire. In this book, Norman Sandridge argues that Xenophon actually reduces his Theory of Leadership to a set of fundamental traits, namely, the love of humanity, the love of learning, and the love of being honored. These so-called fundamental traits are the product of several rich contexts across culture and across time: the portrait of Cyrus seems as much a composite of Persian folklore as a pointed response to Plato’s Philosopher King. Sandridge further argues that Xenophon’s Theory of Leadership is effective for addressing many problems of leadership that were familiar to Xenophon and his fourth-century Athenian contemporaries, notably Plato and Isocrates. By looking at the contexts in which Xenophon’s theory was conceived, as well as the problems of leadership he sought to address, this book sees Xenophon as attempting a sincerely laudatory though not ideal portrait of Cyrus. The study thus falls between interpretations of the Education of Cyrus that have seen Cyrus as either a perfect leader or an ironically flawed one.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
El Niño, Catastrophism, and Culture Change in Ancient America
Daniel H. Sandweiss
Harvard University Press, 2008
El Niño is an extreme climate perturbation that periodically changes weather throughout the globe, often with dire consequences. First recognized in Peru, El Niño events are best known and documented there. This book summarizes research on the nature of El Niño events in the Americas and details specific historic and prehistoric patterns in Peru and elsewhere. By also looking at other catastrophic natural events in the ancient New World, the book illustrates how scientific archaeology can serve pure research as well as provide information for contemporary issues.
[more]

front cover of About Abortion
About Abortion
Terminating Pregnancy in Twenty-First-Century America
Carol Sanger
Harvard University Press, 2017

One of the most private decisions a woman can make, abortion is also one of the most contentious topics in American civic life. Protested at rallies and politicized in party platforms, terminating pregnancy is often characterized as a selfish decision by women who put their own interests above those of the fetus. This background of stigma and hostility has stifled women’s willingness to talk about abortion, which in turn distorts public and political discussion. To pry open the silence surrounding this public issue, Sanger distinguishes between abortion privacy, a form of nondisclosure based on a woman’s desire to control personal information, and abortion secrecy, a woman’s defense against the many harms of disclosure.

Laws regulating abortion patients and providers treat abortion not as an acceptable medical decision—let alone a right—but as something disreputable, immoral, and chosen by mistake. Exploiting the emotional power of fetal imagery, laws require women to undergo ultrasound, a practice welcomed in wanted pregnancies but commandeered for use against women with unwanted pregnancies. Sanger takes these prejudicial views of women’s abortion decisions into the twenty-first century by uncovering new connections between abortion law and American culture and politics.

New medical technologies, women’s increasing willingness to talk online and off, and the prospect of tighter judicial reins on state legislatures are shaking up the practice of abortion. As talk becomes more transparent and acceptable, women’s decisions about whether or not to become mothers will be treated more like those of other adults making significant personal choices.

[more]

front cover of Humanity without Dignity
Humanity without Dignity
Moral Equality, Respect, and Human Rights
Andrea Sangiovanni
Harvard University Press, 2017

Name any valued human trait—intelligence, wit, charm, grace, strength—and you will find an inexhaustible variety and complexity in its expression among individuals. Yet we insist that such diversity does not provide grounds for differential treatment at the most basic level. Whatever merit, blame, praise, love, or hate we receive as beings with a particular past and a particular constitution, we are always and everywhere due equal respect merely as persons.

But why? Most who attempt to answer this question appeal to the idea that all human beings possess an intrinsic dignity and worth—grounded in our capacities, for example, to reason, reflect, or love—that raises us up in the order of nature. Andrea Sangiovanni rejects this predominant view and offers a radical alternative.

To understand our commitment to basic equality, Humanity without Dignity argues that we must begin with a consideration not of equality but of inequality. Rather than search for a chimerical value-bestowing capacity possessed to an equal extent by each one of us, we ought to ask: Why and when is it wrong to treat others as inferior? Sangiovanni comes to the conclusion that our commitment to moral equality is best explained by a rejection of cruelty rather than a celebration of rational capacity. He traces the impact of this fundamental shift for our understanding of human rights and the norms of anti-discrimination that underlie it.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Armenian Communties in Syria under Ottoman Dominion
Avedis K. Sanjian
Harvard University Press

logo for Harvard University Press
Colophons of Armenian Manuscripts, 1301-1480
A Source for Middle Eastern History
Avedis K. Sanjian
Harvard University Press, 1969

logo for Harvard University Press
Latin Poetry
Jacopo Sannazaro
Harvard University Press, 2009
Jacopo Sannazaro (1456–1530), considered by some authorities the finest Neo-Latin poet of the Italian Renaissance, spent most of his career in Naples, where he was a member and ultimately the head of the Accademia Pontaniana. He is most famous for having written, in Italian, the first pastoral romance in European literature, the Arcadia (1504). But after this early work, Sannazaro devoted himself entirely to Latin poetry modeled on his beloved Virgil. In addition to his epic The Virgin Birth (1526), which earned him the title of “the Christian Virgil,” he also composed Piscatory Eclogues, an innovative adaption of the eclogue form, as well as elegies, epigrams, and a number of shorter works.This volume contains the first complete English translation of all of Sannazaro’s poetry in Latin, accompanied by extensive notes.
[more]

front cover of Abolitionists Abroad
Abolitionists Abroad
American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa
Lamin Sanneh
Harvard University Press, 1999

In 1792, nearly 1,200 freed American slaves crossed the Atlantic and established themselves in Freetown, West Africa, a community dedicated to anti-slavery and opposed to the African chieftain hierarchy that was tied to slavery. Thus began an unprecedented movement with critical long-term effects on the evolution of social, religious, and political institutions in modern Africa.

Lamin Sanneh's engrossing book narrates the story of freed slaves who led efforts to abolish the slave trade by attacking its base operation: the capture and sale of people by African chiefs. Sanneh's protagonists set out to establish in West Africa colonies founded on equal rights and opportunity for personal enterprise, communities that would be havens for ex-slaves and an example to the rest of Africa. Among the most striking of these leaders is the Nigerian Samuel Ajayi Crowther, a recaptured slave who joined a colony in Sierra Leone and subsequently established satellite communities in Nigeria. The ex-slave repatriates brought with them an evangelical Christianity that encouraged individual spirituality--a revolutionary vision in a land where European missionaries had long assumed they could Christianize the whole society by converting chiefs and rulers.

Tracking this potent African American anti-slavery and democratizing movement through the nineteenth century, Lamin Sanneh draws a clear picture of the religious grounding of its conflict with the traditional chieftain authorities. His study recounts a crucial development in the history of West Africa.

[more]

front cover of Dante
Dante
The Story of His Life
Marco Santagata
Harvard University Press, 2016

A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year
A Marginal Revolution Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year
A Seminary Co-op Notable Book of the Year
A Times Higher Education Book of the Week
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year

Marco Santagata’s Dante: The Story of His Life illuminates one of the world’s supreme poets from many angles—writer, philosopher, father, courtier, political partisan. Santagata brings together a vast body of Italian scholarship on Dante’s medieval world, untangles a complex web of family and political relationships for English readers, and shows how the composition of the Commedia was influenced by local and regional politics.

“Reading Marco Santagata’s fascinating new biography, the reader is soon forced to acknowledge that one of the cornerstones of Western literature [The Divine Comedy], a poem considered sublime and universal, is the product of vicious factionalism and packed with local scandal.”
—Tim Parks, London Review of Books

“This is a wonderful book. Even if you have not read Dante you will be gripped by its account of one of the most extraordinary figures in the history of literature, and one of the most dramatic periods of European history. If you are a Dantean, it will be your invaluable companion forever.”
—A. N. Wilson, The Spectator

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Genteel Tradition
Nine Essays
George Santayana
Harvard University Press

logo for Harvard University Press
Decoding the Rabbis
A Thirteenth-Century Commentary on the Aggadah
Marc Saperstein
Harvard University Press, 1980

logo for Harvard University Press
The Polaris System Development
Bureaucratic and Programmatic Success in Government
Harvey M. Sapolsky
Harvard University Press, 1972

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

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

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Anthrax
Bioterror as Fact and Fantasy
Philipp Sarasin
Harvard University Press, 2006

The potential for creating and using biological weapons to wreak havoc is an urgent concern not just in America, but worldwide. In fact, many security experts believe that the next act of widespread terrorism will likely come from a weapon of biochemical means.

In Anthrax: Bioterror as Fact and Fantasy, Philipp Sarasin explores the real threats of biological weapons--in contrast to the idea of biological substances as nebulous agents of terror--by analyzing the famous anthrax scares that occurred in the United States in 2001. Basing his analysis on government documents and media coverage between the events of September 11, 2001, and the beginning of the Iraq War in March 2003, he shows that the anthrax letters became the necessary fantasy-link between the 9/11 attacks and Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction." While many bioterrorism experts agree that it would be difficult to use anthrax effectively as a weapon in a large-scale attack, the anthrax scares that occurred in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks amplified the American public's fear and uncertainty about what might come next. In effect, these incidents infected the American psyche and created an increased sense of vulnerability that shaped the public's understanding of the War on Terror.

Sarasin, in offering a European's view of the U.S. reaction to the anthrax scare, argues that while threats of bioterrorism are real, they are disproportionate to the fantasmal fears and illusions that now permeate American politics and culture. In short, fear of bioterror has contaminated modern American life.

[more]

front cover of Dynamic Macroeconomic Theory
Dynamic Macroeconomic Theory
Thomas J. Sargent
Harvard University Press, 1987

The tasks of macroeconomics are to interpret observations on economic aggregates in terms of the motivations and constraints of economic agents and to predict the consequences of alternative hypothetical ways of administering government economic policy. General equilibrium models form a convenient context for analyzing such alternative government policies. In the past ten years, the strengths of general equilibrium models and the corresponding deficiencies of Keynesian and monetarist models of the 1960s have induced macroeconomists to begin applying general equilibrium models.

This book describes some general equilibrium models that are dynamic, that have been built to help interpret time-series of observations of economic aggregates and to predict the consequences of alternative government interventions. The first part of the book describes dynamic programming, search theory, and real dynamic capital pricing models. Among the applications are stochastic optimal growth models, matching models, arbitrage pricing theories, and theories of interest rates, stock prices, and options. The remaining parts of the book are devoted to issues in monetary theory; currency-in-utility-function models, cash-in-advance models, Townsend turnpike models, and overlapping generations models are all used to study a set of common issues. By putting these models to work on concrete problems in exercises offered throughout the text, Thomas Sargent provides insights into the strengths and weaknesses of these models of money. An appendix on functional analysis shows the unity that underlies the mathematics used in disparate areas of rational expectations economics.

This book on dynamic equilibrium macroeconomics is suitable for graduate-level courses; a companion book, Exercises in Dynamic Macroeconomic Theory, provides answers to the exercises and is also available from Harvard University Press.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Teaching American Students
A Guide for International Faculty and Teaching Assistants in Colleges and Universities, Third Edition
Ellen Sarkisian
Harvard University Press, 2006

Many faculty and graduate students from other countries expect language difficulties when they teach, but are unprepared for other surprises: different cultures make different assumptions about the academic background of college students, how students learn, the appropriate roles of teachers and students, and even the fundamental purpose of a college education.

The third edition of Teaching American Students explains the expectations of undergraduates at American colleges and universities and offers practical strategies for teaching, including how to give clear presentations, how to teach interactively, and how to communicate effectively. Also included are illustrative examples as well as advice from international faculty and teaching assistants. Appendices offer concrete suggestions on topics from planning the first day of class to grading papers and problem sets.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Ecology of Neotropical Savannas
Guillermo Sarmiento
Harvard University Press, 1984

Savanna ecosystems play a major role in the natural landscape and in the economic life of vast areas of the tropics. These grasslands are inherently fragile, yet Third World economic development makes human exploitation inevitable. The question that remains is whether utilization of the savannas for agriculture and other purposes will create sustained economic growth or a desert waste.

Guillermo Sarmiento is an unquestionable authority on the grasslands of the New World. His book is the first modern, integrated view of the genesis and function of this important natural system--a synthesis of savanna architecture, seasonal rhythms, productive processes, and water and nutrient economy. Sarmiento's emphasis is on the Venezuelan savannas that he has spent a lifetime studying, but his outlook is far broader. He makes frequent comparisons with other neotropical and tropical savannas and with temperate prairies, and he offers conclusions of global importance, not only for ecologists and agronomist but for anyone concerned with the politics of Third World development.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Unreal Houses
Character, Gender, and Genealogy in the Tale of Genji
Edith Sarra
Harvard University Press, 2020

The Tale of Genji (ca. 1008), by noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu, is known for its sophisticated renderings of fictional characters’ minds and its critical perspectives on the lives of the aristocracy of eleventh-century Japan. Unreal Houses radically rethinks the Genji by focusing on the figure of the house. Edith Sarra examines the narrative’s fictionalized images of aristocratic mansions and its representation of the people who inhabit them, exploring how key characters in the Genji think about houses in both the architectural and genealogical sense of the word.

Through close readings of the Genji and other Heian narratives, Unreal Houses elucidates the literary fabrication of social, architectural, and affective spaces and shows how the figure of the house contributes to the structuring of narrative sequences and the expression of relational nuances among fictional characters. Combining literary analysis with the history of gender, marriage, and the built environment, Sarra opens new perspectives on the architectonics of the Genji and the feminine milieu that midwifed what some have called the world’s first novel.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Sarton on the History of Science
George Sarton
Harvard University Press

logo for Harvard University Press
"What is Literature?" and Other Essays
Jean-Paul Sartre
Harvard University Press, 1988
"What is Literature?" remains the most significant critical landmark of French literature since World War II. Neither abstract nor abstruse, it is a brilliant, provocative performance by a writer more inspired than cautious."What is Literature?" challenges anyone who writes as if literature could be extricated from history or society. But Sartre does more than indict. He offers a definitive statement about the phenomenology of reading, and he goes on to provide a dashing example of how to write a history of literature that takes ideology and institutions into account. This new edition of "What is Literature?" also collects three other crucial essays of Sartre's for the first time in a volume of his. The essays presenting Sartre's monthly, Les Temps modernes, and on the peculiarly French manner of nationalizing literature do much to create a context for Sartre's treatise. "Black Orpheus" has been for many years a key text for the study of black and third-world literatures.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Histoires Grecques
Snapshots from Antiquity
Maurice Sartre
Harvard University Press, 2009

In a series of brilliant snapshots, each a distinct bit of a larger story, Maurice Sartre’s Histoires Grecques spans the grand narrative of Greek culture over a thousand years and a vast expanse of land and sea. From Homer to Damascius, from recent discoveries in Kandahar to an account of the murder of Hypatia in 415 CE, each snapshot captures a moment in the history of Greek civilization. Together they offer a fresh perspective on an ancient culture whose wealth and depth of thought, variety and multiplicity of accomplishments, and astonishing continuity through time and space have made it the Western world’s culture of reference.

A textual fragment, a coin, an epigraph: each artifact and image launches Sartre—and his readers—on a journey into the practical mysteries of Greek civilization. Ranging from Afghanistan to the Mediterranean world, these excursions—step by step, moment by moment—finally amount to a panoramic vision of one of the most important civilizations of all time. Histoires Grecques shows the newcomer and the seasoned scholar alike how history itself is written—and imparts the experience, and the pleasure, of discovering history as discrete stories seen through the eyes of one of the most eminent historians of ancient Greece.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Middle East under Rome
Maurice Sartre
Harvard University Press, 2004

The ancient Middle East was the theater of passionate interaction between Phoenicians, Aramaeans, Arabs, Jews, Greeks, and Romans. At the crossroads of the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, and the Arabian peninsula, the area dominated by what the Romans called Syria was at times a scene of violent confrontation, but more often one of peaceful interaction, of prosperous cultivation, energetic production, and commerce--a crucible of cultural, religious, and artistic innovations that profoundly determined the course of world history.

Maurice Sartre has written a long overdue and comprehensive history of the Semitic Near East (modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel) from the eve of the Roman conquest to the end of the third century C.E. and the dramatic rise of Christianity. Sartre's broad yet finely detailed perspective takes in all aspects of this history, not just the political and military, but economic, social, cultural, and religious developments as well. He devotes particular attention to the history of the Jewish people, placing it within that of the whole Middle East.

Drawing upon the full range of ancient sources, including literary texts, Greek, Latin, and Semitic inscriptions, and the most recent archaeological discoveries, The Middle East under Rome will be an indispensable resource for students and scholars. This absorbing account of intense cultural interaction will also engage anyone interested in the history of the Middle East.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan
Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return
Miryam Sas
Harvard University Press, 2011

In the years of rapid economic growth following the protest movements of the 1960s, artists and intellectuals in Japan searched for a means of direct impact on the whirlwind of historical and cultural transformations of their time. Yet while the artists often called for such “direct” encounter, their works complicate this ideal with practices of interruption, self-reflexive mimesis, and temporal discontinuity. In an era known for idealism and activism, some of the most cherished ideals—intimacy between subjects, authenticity, a sense of home—are limitlessly desired yet always just out of reach.

In this book, Miryam Sas explores the theoretical and cultural implications of experimental arts in a range of media. Casting light on important moments in the arts from the 1960s to the early 1980s, this study focuses first on underground (post-shingeki) theater and then on related works of experimental film and video, buto dance, and photography. Emphasizing the complex and sophisticated theoretical grounding of these artists through their works, practices, and writings, this book also locates Japanese experimental arts in an extensive, sustained dialogue with key issues of contemporary critical theory.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Madness and Modernism
Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought
Louis Sass
Harvard University Press
The similarities between madness and modernism are striking: defiance of authority, nihilism, extreme relativism, distortions of time, strange transformations of self, and much more. In this brilliant book, Louis Sass, a clinical psychologist, offers a startlingly new vision of schizophrenia, comparing it with the works of such artists and writers as Kafka, Beckett, and Duchamp and considering the ideas of philosophers including Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida. Here is a highly original portrait of the world of the madman, along with a provocative commentary on modernist and postmodernist culture.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Promise of Private Pensions
The First Hundred Years
Steven A. Sass
Harvard University Press, 1997

The private pension is a curiosity in the modern economic environment. Why do profit-seeking companies pay retirement benefits to those no longer on the job? In this new institutional history, Steven Sass explores the rise and growth of the financial support system that today commands trillions of dollars of investment capital and supports hundreds of thousands of older Americans.

Before 1900 America's elderly derived their livelihood from simple sources. They worked if they could, relied on their children, and took charity if necessary. By the dawn of the twentieth century, however, the country was constructing a new industrial economy. Both laborers and capital were moving away from farms toward large corporate establishments. These market changes weakened family links and traditional skills, rendering workers more vulnerable to economic shocks. The elderly, in particular, fell out of step with the new mechanized and bureaucratic regime. It was in response to these dramatic economic shifts that the institution of private pensions emerged. In return for workers' long-term loyalty, employers promised to help sustain them through old age.

As Sass shows, creating the pension system proved far more complicated than anyone had anticipated. Over the last hundred years it has evolved into a complex institution driven by congressional mandates, judicial/administrative decisions, union campaigns, political debates, and the ministrations of lawyers, economists, human resource specialists, actuaries, and insurance experts. Sass traces the U.S. pension system through to the present day, exploring how our modern corporate economy is confronting the challenges of an aging population.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Crimea Question
Identity, Transition, and Conflict
Gwendolyn Sasse
Harvard University Press, 2007
Regional diversity such as Ukraine's often embodies potential for friction and conflict, in particular when it involves territorialized ethnicity and divergent historical experiences. Political elites interested in stability and conflict prevention must find ways either to accommodate or control this diversity. In the early to mid-1990s, the Western media, policymakers, and academics alike warned that Crimea was a potential center of unrest in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's dissolution. However, large-scale conflict in Crimea did not materialize, and Kyiv has managed to integrate the peninsula into the new Ukrainian polity. This book explores the factors that led to the largely peaceful transition and places the situation in the larger context of conflict-prevention studies, explaining this critical case in which conflict did not erupt despite a structural predisposition to ethnic, regional, and even international enmity.
[more]

front cover of Expulsions
Expulsions
Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy
Saskia Sassen
Harvard University Press, 2014

Soaring income inequality and unemployment, expanding populations of the displaced and imprisoned, accelerating destruction of land and water bodies: today’s socioeconomic and environmental dislocations cannot be fully understood in the usual terms of poverty and injustice, according to Saskia Sassen. They are more accurately understood as a type of expulsion—from professional livelihood, from living space, even from the very biosphere that makes life possible.

This hard-headed critique updates our understanding of economics for the twenty-first century, exposing a system with devastating consequences even for those who think they are not vulnerable. From finance to mining, the complex types of knowledge and technology we have come to admire are used too often in ways that produce elementary brutalities. These have evolved into predatory formations—assemblages of knowledge, interests, and outcomes that go beyond a firm’s or an individual’s or a government’s project.

Sassen draws surprising connections to illuminate the systemic logic of these expulsions. The sophisticated knowledge that created today’s financial “instruments” is paralleled by the engineering expertise that enables exploitation of the environment, and by the legal expertise that allows the world’s have-nations to acquire vast stretches of territory from the have-nots. Expulsions lays bare the extent to which the sheer complexity of the global economy makes it hard to trace lines of responsibility for the displacements, evictions, and eradications it produces—and equally hard for those who benefit from the system to feel responsible for its depredations.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Expulsions
Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy
Saskia Sassen
Harvard University Press

An Observer Architecture Book of the Year

Soaring income inequality and unemployment, expanding populations of the displaced and imprisoned, accelerating destruction of land and water bodies: today’s socioeconomic and environmental dislocations cannot be fully understood in the usual terms of poverty and injustice, according to Saskia Sassen. They are more accurately understood as a type of expulsion—from professional livelihood, from living space, even from the very biosphere that makes life possible.

“Saskia Sassen’s Expulsions describes the global forces that make ever more tenuous and fragile most people’s grip on the places where they live.”
—Rowan Moore, The Observer

“Coupled with her earlier work, this may be a paradigm breaking/making work.”
—Michael D. Kennedy, Contemporary Sociology

“Once again, sociologist Sassen uses her considerable knowledge to think creatively at both the local and global levels…In place of the principle of inclusion in the pre-1980s Keynesian era, the planet is increasingly dominated by a principle of exclusion of people, land, natural resources, and water. Sassen presents a powerful conceptual analysis and an equally powerful and timely call to action.”
—M. Oromaner, Choice

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Space and Power
Saskia Sassen
Harvard University Press

front cover of Time’s Monster
Time’s Monster
How History Makes History
Priya Satia
Harvard University Press, 2020

A New Statesman Best Book of the Year

“Powerful and radically important.”
—Robert Gildea, Times Literary Supplement

“Bracingly describes the ways imperialist historiography has shaped visions of the future as much as the past.”
—Pankaj Mishra, New York Review of Books

“An account of how the discipline of history has itself enabled the process of colonization…A coruscating and important reworking of the relationship between history, historians, and empire.”
—Kenan Malik, The Guardian

For generations, the history of the British Empire was written by its victors, whose accounts of conquest guided the consolidation of imperial rule in India, the Middle East, Africa, and the Caribbean. British historians’ narratives of the development of imperial governance licensed the brutal suppression of colonial rebellion. Their reimagining of empire during the two world wars compromised decolonization. In this brilliant work, Priya Satia shows how these historians not only interpreted the major political events of their time but also shaped the future that followed.

From the imperial histories of John Stuart Mill and Winston Churchill to the works of anticolonial thinkers such as William Blake, Mahatma Gandhi, and E. P. Thompson, Satia captures two opposing approaches to the discipline of history and illuminates the ethical universe that came with them. Against the backdrop of enduring inequalities and a crisis in the humanities, hers is an urgent moral voice.

[more]

front cover of Chivalry in Medieval England
Chivalry in Medieval England
Nigel Saul
Harvard University Press, 2011

Popular views of medieval chivalry—knights in shining armor, fair ladies, banners fluttering from battlements—were inherited from the nineteenth-century Romantics. This is the first book to explore chivalry’s place within a wider history of medieval England, from the Norman Conquest to the aftermath of Henry VII’s triumph at Bosworth in the Wars of the Roses.

Saul invites us to view the world of castles and cathedrals, tournaments and round tables, with fresh eyes. Chivalry in Medieval England charts the introduction of chivalry by the Normans, the rise of the knightly class as a social elite, the fusion of chivalry with kingship in the fourteenth century, and the influence of chivalry on literature, religion, and architecture. Richard the Lionheart and the Crusades, the Black Death and the Battle of Crecy, the Magna Carta and the cult of King Arthur—all emerge from the mists of time and legend in this vivid, authoritative account.

[more]

front cover of Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t
Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t
Jazz and the Making of the Sixties
Scott Saul
Harvard University Press, 2003

In the long decade between the mid-1950s and the late ’60s, jazz was changing more than its sound. The age of Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite, John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, and Charles Mingus’s The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady was a time when jazz became both newly militant and newly seductive, its example powerfully shaping the social dramas of the Civil Rights movement, the Black Power movement, and the counterculture. Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t is the first book to tell the broader story of this period in jazz—and American—history.

The story’s central figures are jazz musicians like Coltrane and Mingus, who rewrote the conventions governing improvisation and composition as they sought to infuse jazz with that gritty exuberance known as “soul.” Scott Saul describes how these and other jazz musicians of the period engaged in a complex cultural balancing act: utopian and skeptical, race-affirming and cosmopolitan, they tried to create an art that would make uplift into something forceful, undeniable in its conviction, and experimental in its search for new possibilities. Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t considers these musicians and their allies as a cultural front of the Civil Rights movement, a constellation of artists and intellectuals whose ideas of freedom pushed against a Cold War consensus that stressed rational administration and collective security. Capturing the social resonance of the music’s marriage of discipline and play, the book conveys the artistic and historical significance of the jazz culture at the start, and the heart, of the Sixties.

[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter