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A Hacker Manifesto
McKenzie Wark
Harvard University Press, 2004

A double is haunting the world--the double of abstraction, the virtual reality of information, programming or poetry, math or music, curves or colorings upon which the fortunes of states and armies, companies and communities now depend. The bold aim of this book is to make manifest the origins, purpose, and interests of the emerging class responsible for making this new world--for producing the new concepts, new perceptions, and new sensations out of the stuff of raw data.

A Hacker Manifesto deftly defines the fraught territory between the ever more strident demands by drug and media companies for protection of their patents and copyrights and the pervasive popular culture of file sharing and pirating. This vexed ground, the realm of so-called "intellectual property," gives rise to a whole new kind of class conflict, one that pits the creators of information--the hacker class of researchers and authors, artists and biologists, chemists and musicians, philosophers and programmers--against a possessing class who would monopolize what the hacker produces.

Drawing in equal measure on Guy Debord and Gilles Deleuze, A Hacker Manifesto offers a systematic restatement of Marxist thought for the age of cyberspace and globalization. In the widespread revolt against commodified information, McKenzie Wark sees a utopian promise, beyond the property form, and a new progressive class, the hacker class, who voice a shared interest in a new information commons.

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Hadassah
An American Story
Hadassah Lieberman
Brandeis University Press, 2021

Born in Prague to Holocaust survivors, Hadassah Lieberman and her family immigrated in 1949 to the United States. She went on to earn a BA from Boston University in government and dramatics and an MA in international relations and American government from Northeastern University. She built a career devoted largely to public health that has included positions at Lehman Brothers, Pfizer, and the National Research Council. After her first marriage ended in divorce, she married Joe Lieberman, a US senator from Connecticut who was the Democratic nominee for vice president with Al Gore and would go on to run for president.

In Hadassah, Lieberman pens the compelling story of her extraordinary life: from her family's experience in Eastern Europe to their move to Gardner, Massachusetts; forging her career; experiencing divorce; and, following her remarriage, her life on the national political stage. By offering insight into her identity as an immigrant, an American Jew, a working woman, and a wife, mother, and grandmother, Lieberman’s moving memoir speaks to many of the major issues of our time, from immigration to gender politics. Featuring an introduction by Joe Lieberman and an afterword by Megan McCain, it is a true American story.

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Haiti Fights Back
The Life and Legacy of Charlemagne Péralte
Yveline Alexis
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Winner of the 2021 Haitian Studies Association Book Prize​

Haiti Fights Back: The Life and Legacy of Charlemagne Péralte is the first US scholarly examination of the politician and caco leader (guerrilla fighter) who fought against the US military occupation of Haiti. The occupation lasted close to two decades, from 1915-1934. Alexis argues for the importance of documenting resistance while exploring the occupation’s mechanics and its imperialism. She takes us to Haiti, exploring the sites of what she labels as resistance zones, including Péralte’s hometown of Hinche and the nation’s large port areas--Port-au-Prince and Cap-Haïtien. Alexis offers a new reading of U.S. military archival sources that record Haitian protests as banditry. Haiti Fights Back illuminates how Péralte launched a political movement, and meticulously captures how Haitian women and men resisted occupation through silence, military battles, and writings. She locates and assembles rare, multilingual primary sources from traditional repositories, living archives (oral stories), and artistic representations in Haiti and the United States. The interdisciplinary work draws on legislation, cacos’ letters, newspapers, and murals, offering a unique examination of Péralte’s life (1885-1919) and the significance of his legacy through the twenty-first century. Haiti Fights Back offers a new approach to the study of the U.S. invasion of the Americas by chronicling how Caribbean people fought back.
 
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Hannah Arendt
A Critical Introduction
Finn Bowring
Pluto Press, 2011

Hannah Arendt is one of the most famous political theorists of the twentieth century, yet in the social sciences her work has rarely been given the attention it deserves. This careful and comprehensive study introduces Arendt to a wider audience.

Finn Bowring shows how Arendt's writings have engaged with and influenced prominent figures in the sociological canon, and how her ideas may shed light on some of the most pressing social and political problems of today. He explores her critique of Marx, her relationship to Weber, the influence of her work on Habermas and the parallels and discrepancies between her and Foucault. This is a clearly written and scholarly text which surveys the leading debates over Arendt’s work, including discussions of totalitarianism, the public sphere and the nature of political responsibility.
This book will bring new perspectives to students and lecturers in sociology and politics.

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Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics
Craig Calhoun
University of Minnesota Press, 1997

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Hans Jonas
The Integrity of Thinking
David J. Levy
University of Missouri Press, 2002
Hans Jonas: The Integrity of Thinking provides the first overall account of the work of Hans Jonas. While Jonas is not the best-known thinker of the twentieth century, David J. Levy shows that he is one of the most important. Levy covers the philosopher’s life and his contributions to the history of religion, philosophical biology, philosophical anthropology, ethics, and theology. Jonas’s work is situated in relationship to that of his first intellectual mentor, Martin Heidegger, as well as that of such related thinkers among his contemporaries as Eric Voegelin.
Setting Jonas’s work in the historical and philosophical context of his life and times, Levy summarizes Jonas’s original achievements in fields as apparently diverse as the history of ancient Gnosticism, the philosophical significance of biology, the problems of ethics in a technological age, and the mysteries of theology, while demonstrating the notable unity of theme and purpose that guided his various fields of inquiry.
Jonas’s work will become increasingly significant in the years ahead as we face the problems produced by current developments in technology such as biological engineering. Such issues were of particular interest for him, and he was unique among his philosophical contemporaries in devoting attention to them. His eloquent writings on these themes bring wisdom and common sense anchored in Jonas’s own historical and biographical experience of the fragility of human life and the common good. Having begun his academic life in Germany between the world wars, he later served in the British army throughout the struggle against Hitler and lost his mother at Auschwitz.
Unlike the scattered works, anthologies, and essays that are currently available, Hans Jonas: The Integrity of Thinking provides a much-needed single, coherent overview of the various fields to which Jonas’s attention was drawn, bringing out the unified, systematic quality of Jonas’s philosophical approach.
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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.

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The Hard Count
The Political and Social Challenges of Census Mobilization
D. Sunshine Hillygus
Russell Sage Foundation, 2006
American democracy relies on an accurate census to fairly allocate political representation and billions of dollars in federal funds. Declining participation in previous censuses and a general waning of civic engagement in society raised the possibility that the 2000 count would miss many Americans—disproportionately ethnic and racial minorities—depriving them of their share of influence in American society and yielding an unfair distribution of federal resources. Faced with this possibility, the Census Bureau launched a massive mobilization campaign to encourage Americans to complete and return their census forms. In The Hard Count, former Census Bureau director Kenneth Prewitt, D. Sunshine Hillygus, Norman H. Nie, and Heili Pals present a rigorous evaluation of this campaign. Can a busy, mobile, disengaged public be motivatived to participate in this civic activity? Using a rich set of data and drawing on theories of civic mobilization, political persuasion, and media effects, the authors assess the factors that influenced participation in the 2000 census.. The Hard Count profiles a watershed moment in the history of the American census. As the mobilization campaign was underway, political opposition to the census sprang up, citing privacy issues and seeking to limit the kind of data the census could collect. Hillygus, Nie, Prewitt, and Pals analyze the competing effects of the mobilization campaign and the privacy controversy on public attitudes and cooperation with the census. Using an internet based survey, the authors tracked a representative sample of Americans over time to gauge changes in census attitudes, privacy concerns, and their eventual decision whether or not to return their census form. The study uniquely captures the public's exposure to census advertising, community mobilization, and news stories, and was designed so people could view video clips and photos of actual campaign advertisements on their sets in their homes. The authors find that the Census Bureau campaign did in fact raise awareness of the census and census participation. The mobilization campaign was especially effective at increasing participation among groups historically undercounted by the census. They also find that census participation would have been higher if not for the privacy controversy, which discouraged many people from cooperating with the census and led others to omit information from their census form. The findings of The Hard Count have important policy implications for future census counts and offer theoretical insights regarding the influence of mobilization campaigns on civic participation. The goal of full and equal cooperation with the decennial census and other government surveys is an important national priority. The Hard Count shows that a mobilization campaign can dramatically increase voluntary participation in the decennial headcount and identifies emerging social and political challenges that may threaten future census counts and contribute to the growing fragility of our national statistical system.. A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation Census Series
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Hard Times
A Novel of Liberals and Radicals in 1860s Russia
Vasily Sleptsov
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016
Vasily Sleptsov was a Russian social activist and writer during the politically charged 1860s, known as the “era of great reforms,” and marked by Alexander II’s emancipation of the serfs and the relaxation lifting of censorship. Popular in his day, Sleptsov’s contemporaries Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov praised his writing:, with Chekhov once remarkeding, “Sleptsov taught me, better than most, to understand the Russian intelligent, and my own self as well.” 
            The novella Hard Times is considered Sleptsov’s most important work. It focused popular attention on the radical and liberal movements through its fictional setting, where the characters contend with constantly evolving political and social dilemmas. Hard Times was immediately recognized as a vibrant and compelling depiction of prerevolutionary Russian intellectual society, full of lively debates about the possibilities of liberal reform or radical revolution that questioned the viability of a political system facing massive social problems.
            This is the first English-language version of Hard Times, expertly and fluidly translated by Michael Katz. Highly readable, it provides important historical insights on the political and social climate of a volatile and transformative period in Russia history.
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A Harvest Truce
A Play
Serhiy Zhadan
Harvard University Press, 2024

Brothers Anton and Tolik reunite at their family home to bury their recently deceased mother. An otherwise natural ritual unfolds under extraordinary circumstances: their house is on the front line of a war ignited by Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. Isolated without power or running water, the brothers’ best hope for success and survival lies in the declared cease fire—the harvest truce. But such hopes are swiftly dashed, as it becomes apparent that the conflagration of war will not abate.

With echoes of Waiting for Godot, Serhiy Zhadan’s A Harvest Truce stages a tragicomedy in which the commonplace experiences of death, birth, and the cycles of life marked by the practices of growing and harvesting food are rendered futile and farcical in the wake of the indifferent juggernaut of war.

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Havel
Unfinished Revolution
David Gilbreath Barton
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021

This is the story of a man who tried to resurrect the spirit of democratic life. He was born into a time of chaos and absurdity, and he took it as his fate to carry a candle into the night. This is his story and the story of many others, the writers, artists, actors, and philosophers who took it upon themselves to remember a tradition that had failed so miserably it had almost been forgotten.

Václav Havel (1936–2011), the famous Czech dissident, intellectual, and playwright, was there when a half million people came to Wenceslas Square to demand an end to Communism in 1989. Many came to hear him call for a free Czechoslovakia, for democratic elections, and a return to Europe. The demonstrators roared when he spoke. “Havel to the castle,” they chanted— meaning Havel for president. And a few weeks later, Havel became a most unusual president. He was sometimes misunderstood and not always popular, but by the time of his death in 2011, the world recognized Havel as one of the most prominent figures of the twentieth century.

Born into one of the most prominent and wealthy families in Prague, Havel was the constant subject of attention and an artistic eccentric in a family of businessmen. A young Havel and his family were cast by the Communist takeover as class enemies. Havel traveled a dark road that, ironically, provided the experiences he needed to reconnect not only to his own “ground of being” but to the traditions of civic society. This biography is the story of Havel’s inward journey in his underground years and thus the story of how Havel, the outsider, became the ultimate insider as president of the nation.

In this intimate and sweeping portrayal of Havel, David Barton reveals the eccentricities of the last president of Czechoslovakia, and the first president of the Czech Republic.

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Hawai'i
Eight Hundred Years of Political and Economic Change
Sumner La Croix
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Relative to the other habited places on our planet, Hawai‘i has a very short history. The Hawaiian archipelago was the last major land area on the planet to be settled, with Polynesians making the long voyage just under a millennium ago. Our understanding of the social, political, and economic changes that have unfolded since has been limited until recently by how little we knew about the first five centuries of settlement.

Building on new archaeological and historical research, Sumner La Croix assembles here the economic history of Hawai‘i from the first Polynesian settlements in 1200 through US colonization, the formation of statehood, and to the present day. He shows how the political and economic institutions that emerged and evolved in Hawai‘i during its three centuries of global isolation allowed an economically and culturally rich society to emerge, flourish, and ultimately survive annexation and colonization by the United States. The story of a small, open economy struggling to adapt its institutions to changes in the global economy, Hawai‘i offers broadly instructive conclusions about economic evolution and development, political institutions, and native Hawaiian rights.
 
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Hayek
A Life, 1899–1950
Bruce Caldwell and Hansjoerg Klausinger
University of Chicago Press, 2022
A 2022 Economist Best Book of the Year.
The definitive account of the distinguished economist’s formative years.


Few twentieth-century figures have been lionized and vilified in such equal measure as Friedrich Hayek—economist, social theorist, leader of the Austrian school of economics, and champion of classical liberalism. Hayek’s erudite arguments in support of individualism and the market economy have attracted a devout following, including many at the levers of power in business and government. Critics, meanwhile, cast Hayek as the intellectual forefather of “neoliberalism” and of all the evils they associate with that pernicious doctrine. 

In Hayek: A Life, historians of economics Bruce Caldwell and Hansjörg Klausinger draw on never-before-seen archival and family material to produce an authoritative account of the influential economist’s first five decades. This includes portrayals of his early career in Vienna; his relationships in London and Cambridge; his family disputes; and definitive accounts of the creation of The Road to Serfdom and of the founding meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society. 

A landmark work of history and biography, Hayek: A Life is a major contribution both to our cultural accounting of a towering figure and to intellectual history itself. 
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Hector P Garcia
Everyday Rhetoric and Mexican American Civil Rights
Michelle Hall Kells. Foreword by Rolando Hinojosa-Smith
Southern Illinois University Press, 2006

Examining the Mexican American civil rights movement through the public rhetoric of a veteran activist

Héctor P. García: Everyday Rhetoric and Mexican American Civil Rights examines the transition of Mexican Americans from political and social marginalization to civic inclusion after World War II. Focusing on the public rhetoric of veteran rights activist and physician Dr. Héctor P. García, a Mexican immigrant who achieved unprecedented influence within the U.S. political system, author Michelle Hall Kells provides an important case study in the exercise of influence, the formation of civic identity, and the acquisition of social power among this underrepresented group.

As a major influence in national twentieth-century civil rights reform, García effectively operated between Anglo and Mexican American sociopolitical structures. The volume illustrates how García, a decorated World War II veteran and founder of the American GI Forum in Texas in 1948, successfully engendered a discourse that crossed geographical, political, and cultural borders, forming associations with the working poor as well as with prominent national figures such as John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Through his rhetoric and action, García publicly revealed the plight of Mexican Americans, crossing class, regional, and racial lines to improve socioeconomic conditions for his people.

Héctor P. García, which is enhanced by sixteen illustrations, contributes to rhetorical, cultural, and historical studies and offers new scholarship establishing García’s role on the national front, effectively tracing Garcia’s legacy of resistance, the process of achieving enfranchisement, and the role of racism in the evolution from social marginalization to national influence.

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Hegel, Heidegger, and the Ground of History
Michael Allen Gillespie
University of Chicago Press, 1984
In this wide-ranging and thoughtful study, Michael Allen Gillespie explores the philosophical foundation, or ground, of the concept of history. Analyzing the historical conflict between human nature and freedom, he centers his discussion on Hegel and Heidegger but also draws on the pertinent thought of other philosophers whose contributions to the debate is crucial—particularly Rousseau, Kant, and Nietzsche.
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Hegel’s Theory of Normativity
The Systematic Foundations of the Philosophical Science of Right
Kevin Thompson
Northwestern University Press, 2019
Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right offers an innovative and important account of normativity, yet the theory set forth there rests on philosophical foundations that have remained largely obscure. In Hegel’s Theory of Normativity, Kevin Thompson proposes an interpretation of the foundations that underlie Hegel’s theory: its method of justification, its concept of freedom, and its account of right. Thompson shows how the systematic character of Hegel’s project together with the metaphysical commitments that follow from its method are essential to secure this theory against the challenges of skepticism and to understand its distinctive contribution to questions regarding normative justification, practical agency, social ontology, and the nature of critique.
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Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy
Peter Trawny
University of Chicago Press, 2015
In 2014, the first three volumes of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks—the personal and philosophical notebooks that he kept during the war yearswere published in Germany. These notebooks provide the first textual evidence of anti-Semitism in Heidegger’s philosophy, not simply in passing remarks, but as incorporated into his philosophical and political thinking itself. In Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy, Peter Trawny, the editor of those notebooks, offers the first evaluation of Heidegger’s philosophical project in light of the Black Notebooks.
           
While Heidegger’s affiliation with National Socialism is well known, the anti-Semitic dimension of that engagement could not be fully told until now. Trawny traces Heidegger’s development of a grand “narrative” of the history of being, the “being-historical thinking” at the center of Heidegger’s work after Being and Time. Two of the protagonists of this narrative are well known to Heidegger’s readers: the Greeks and the Germans. The world-historical antagonist of this narrative, however, has remained hitherto undisclosed: the Jews, or, more specifically, “world Judaism.” As Trawny shows, world Judaism emerges as a racialized, destructive, and technological threat to the German homeland, indeed, to any homeland whatsoever. Trawny pinpoints recurrent, anti-Semitic themes in the Notebooks, including Heidegger’s adoption of crude cultural stereotypes, his assigning of racial reasons to philosophical decisions (even undermining his Jewish teacher, Edmund Husserl), his endorsement of a Jewish “world conspiracy,” and his first published remarks on the extermination camps and gas chambers (under the troubling aegis of a Jewish “self-annihilation”). Trawny concludes with a thoughtful meditation on how Heidegger’s achievements might still be valued despite these horrifying facets. Unflinching and systematic, this is one of the most important assessments of one of the most important philosophers in our history.
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Heidegger
Phenomenology, Ecology, Politics
Michael Marder
University of Minnesota Press, 2018

Understanding the political and ecological implications of Heidegger’s work without ignoring his noxious public engagements


The most controversial philosopher of the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger has influenced generations of intellectuals even as his involvement with Nazism and blatant anti-Semitism, made even clearer after the publication of his Black Notebooks, have recently prompted some to discard his contributions entirely. For Michael Marder, Heidegger’s thought remains critical for interpretations of contemporary politics and our relation to the natural environment.

Bringing together and reframing more than a decade of Marder’s work on Heidegger, this volume questions the wholesale rejection of Heidegger, arguing that dismissive readings of his project overlook the fact that it is impossible to grasp without appreciating his lifelong commitment to phenomenology and that Heidegger’s anti-Semitism is an aberration in his still-relevant ecological and political thought, rather than a defining characteristic. Through close readings of Heidegger’s books and seminars, along with writings by other key phenomenologists and political philosophers, Marder contends that neither Heidegger’s politics nor his reflections on ecology should be considered in isolation from his phenomenology. By demonstrating the codetermination of his phenomenological, ecological, and political thinking, Marder accounts for Heidegger’s failures without either justifying them or suggesting that they invalidate his philosophical endeavor as a whole.

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Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy
On Original Forgetting
Richard L. Velkley
University of Chicago Press, 2011
In this groundbreaking work, Richard L. Velkley examines the complex philosophical relationship between Martin Heidegger and Leo Strauss. Velkley argues that both thinkers provide searching analyses of the philosophical tradition’s origins in radical questioning. For Heidegger and Strauss, the recovery of the original premises of philosophy cannot be separated from rethinking the very possibility of genuine philosophizing.
 
Common views of the influence of Heidegger’s thought on Strauss suggest that, after being inspired early on by Heidegger’s dismantling of the philosophical tradition, Strauss took a wholly separate path, spurning modernity and pursuing instead a renewal of Socratic political philosophy. Velkley rejects this reading and maintains that Strauss’s engagement with the challenges posed by Heidegger—as well as by modern philosophy in general—formed a crucial and enduring framework for his lifelong philosophical project. More than an intellectual biography or a mere charting of influence, Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy is a profound consideration of these two philosophers’ reflections on the roots, meaning, and fate of Western rationalism.
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Helen Ring Robinson
Colorado Senator and Suffragist
Pat Pascoe
University Press of Colorado, 2011
Calling herself "the housewife of the senate," Helen Ring Robinson was Colorado's first female state senator and only the second in the United States. Serving from 1913 to 1917, she worked for social and economic justice as a champion of women, children, and workers' rights and education during a tumultuous time in the country's history. Her commitment to these causes did not end in the senate; she continued to labor first for world peace and then for the American war effort after her term ended. Helen Ring Robinson is the first book to focus on this important figure in the women's suffrage movement and the 1913, 1914, and 1915 sessions of the Colorado General Assembly.

Author Pat Pascoe, herself a former Colorado senator, uses newspapers, legislative materials, Robinson's published writings, and her own expertise as a legislator to craft the only biography of this contradictory and little-known woman. Robinson had complex politics as a suffragist, peace activist, international activist, and strong supporter of the war effort in World War I and a curious personal life with an often long-distance marriage to lawyer Ewing Robinson, yet close relationship with her stepdaughter, Alycon. Pascoe explores both of these worlds, although much of that personal life remains a mystery. This fascinating story will be a worthwhile read to anyone interested in Colorado history, women's history, labor history, or politics.

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Henri Bergson
Vladimir Jankélévitch
Duke University Press, 2015
Appearing here in English for the first time, Vladimir Jankélévitch's Henri Bergson is one of the two great commentaries written on Henri Bergson. Gilles Deleuze's Bergsonism renewed interest in the great French philosopher but failed to consider Bergson's experiential and religious perspectives. Here Jankélévitch covers all aspects of Bergson's thought, emphasizing the concepts of time and duration, memory, evolution, simplicity, love, and joy. A friend of Bergson's, Jankélévitch first published this book in 1931 and revised it in 1959 to treat Bergson's later works. This unabridged translation of the 1959 edition includes an editor's introduction, which contextualizes and outlines Jankélévitch's reading of Bergson, additional essays on Bergson by Jankélévitch, and Bergson's letters to Jankélévitch.
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Henry Kissinger and the American Century
Jeremi Suri
Harvard University Press, 2007

What made Henry Kissinger the kind of diplomat he was? What experiences and influences shaped his worldview and provided the framework for his approach to international relations? Jeremi Suri offers a thought-provoking, interpretive study of one of the most influential and controversial political figures of the twentieth century.

Drawing on research in more than six countries in addition to extensive interviews with Kissinger and others, Suri analyzes the sources of Kissinger's ideas and power and explains why he pursued the policies he did. Kissinger's German-Jewish background, fears of democratic weakness, belief in the primacy of the relationship between the United States and Europe, and faith in the indispensable role America plays in the world shaped his career and his foreign policy. Suri shows how Kissinger's early years in Weimar and Nazi Germany, his experiences in the U.S. Army and at Harvard University, and his relationships with powerful patrons--including Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon--shed new light on the policymaker.

Kissinger's career was a product of the global changes that made the American Century. He remains influential because his ideas are rooted so deeply in dominant assumptions about the world. In treating Kissinger fairly and critically as a historical figure, without polemical judgments, Suri provides critical context for this important figure. He illuminates the legacies of Kissinger's policies for the United States in the twenty-first century.

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Henry M. Teller
Colorado's Grand Old Man
Duane A. Smith
University Press of Colorado, 2002
Serving longer in the U.S. Senate than any other Coloradan, Henry M. Teller was one of the Centennial State's greatest statesmen and political leaders. Now Duane A. Smith, author of Horace Tabor: His Life and the Legend, rescues this larger-than-life figure from obscurity in this new and definitive biography of the Central City lawyer turned Colorado senator. Teller was a prime example of what a politician should be in an era when elected officials left a great deal to be desired. As Colorado's representative, Teller stated his beliefs and stuck by them. Not all agreed with him, but all admired him for his honesty and integrity. His legal career in Colorado encompassed much of the early legislation in the territory, such as developing mining law and the organization of the Colorado Central Railroad, while his Washington career touched on nearly every important western economic development issue that occurred in Colorado between 1876 and 1909. Teller declared to the U.S. Congress that Colorado was a part of the nation, and that the West deserved a say in its decisions. Incorporating extensive primary and secondary sources, federal documents, the Teller papers, a wealth of newspaper articles, and a superb array of photographs, Smith's biography will be a wonderful source for anyone interested in Colorado history and the political past of the state and nation.
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Henryk Grossman and the Recovery of Marxism
Rick Kuhn
University of Illinois Press, 2006

Rick Kuhn’s Henryk Grossman and the Recovery of Marxism is the definitive study of the life and work of this renowned economist, activist, and intellectual. As a young man, Grossman joined the socialist movement and participated in Jewish workers' strikes and demonstrations, as well as in boycotts against employers and the Austro-Hungarian state. He moved to Vienna, but was driven back to Poland by the Austrian state's racist citizenship policies. A member of the illegal Polish Communist Party, Grossman was frequently arrested and jailed, finally leaving Poland for a post at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main, which gave rise to the famous 'Frankfurt School'. 

Grossman published his best known work in Frankfurt, including studies of Marx's method in Capital and theories of economic crisis that remain influential today. In tracing Grossman's experiences, from Kraków to New York, and offering a detailed account of his ideas, the biography provides an intimate account of key events in twentieth century history, including the politicization of east European Jewry, the World Wars, the rise of Stalinism and Nazism, and the cold war.

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The Heroic and the Notorious
U.S. Senators from Illinois
David Kenney and Robert E. Hartley
Southern Illinois University Press, 2012

This sweeping survey constitutes the first comprehensive treatment of the men and women who have been chosen to represent Illinois in the United States Senate from 1818 to the present day. David Kenney and Robert E. Hartley underscore nearly two centuries of Illinois history with these biographical and political portraits, compiling an incomparably rich resource for students, scholars, teachers, journalists, historians, politicians, and any Illinoisan interested in the state’s senatorial heritage.

Originally published as An Uncertain Tradition: U.S. Senators From Illinois 1818–2003, this second edition brings readers up to date with new material on Paul Simon, Richard Durbin, and Peter Fitzgerald, as well as completely new sections on Roland Burris, Barack Obama, and Illinois’s newest senator, Mark Kirk. This fresh and careful study of the shifting set of political issues Illinois’s senators encountered over time is illuminated by the lives of participants in the politics of choice and service in the Senate. Kenney and Hartley offer incisive commentary on the quality of Senate service in each case, as well as timeline graphs relating to the succession of individuals in each of the two sequences of service, the geographical distribution of senators within the state, and the variations in party voting for Senate candidates. Rigorously documented and supremely readable, this convenient reference volume is enhanced by portraits of many of the senators.

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Hillary and Bill
The Clintons and the Politics of the Personal
William H. Chafe
Duke University Press, 2016
In Hillary and Bill, William H. Chafe boldly argues that the trajectory of the Clintons' political lives can be understood only through the prism of their personal relationship. Inseparable from the day they first met, their personal dynamic has determined their political fates. Hillary was instrumental in Bill's triumphs as Arkansas's governor, and she saved his presidential candidacy in 1992 during the Gennifer Flowers sex scandal. He responded by delegating to her powers that no other First Lady had ever exercised. Chafe's penetrating insights—into subjects such as health care, Kenneth Starr, welfare reform, and the Lewinsky scandal—add texture and depth to our understanding of the Clintons' experience together. Hillary and Bill is the definitive account of the Clintons’ relationship and its far-reaching impact on American political life.
 
In this new edition, Chafe explores how Hillary adopted a new persona as a U.S. senator, returning to the consensus-oriented reformer she had been before she met Bill. Listening to her constituents and building bridges to Republicans in Congress, she left behind the us-against-them political personality of her White House years. She kept this persona as secretary of state, establishing personal ties with foreign leaders and reaching out to average citizens in the countries she visited. Still, she retained her obsession with her personal privacy and permitted the Clinton Foundation to create potential conflicts of interest with her government responsibilities. The key question, as she approached the 2016 presidential race, was which Hillary would be the presidential candidate—the person who reaches out to others and seeks collaborators or the Hillary who demonizes the opposition and fiercely protects her privacy and self-image.
 
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History and Utopia
E. M. Cioran
University of Chicago Press, 1998
In this book, Cioran writes of politics, of history, and of the utopian dream.

"A small masterwork . . . a stringent examination of some persistent and murky notions in human history. . . . It is best to read Cioran while sitting. The impact upon the intellect can be temporarily stunning, and motor systems may give way under the assault."—Joseph Patrick Kennedy, Houston Chronicle

"Cioran has a claim to be regarded as among the handful of original minds . . . writing today."—New York Times

"A sort of final philosopher of the Western world. [Cioran's] statements have the compression of poetry and the audacity of cosmic clowning."—Washington Post

E. M. Cioran (1911-1995) was born and educated in Romania and lived in Paris from 1937 until his death. He is the author of numerous works, including On the Heights of Despair, also available from the University of Chicago Press.
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front cover of History of Political Ideas, Volume 1 (CW19)
History of Political Ideas, Volume 1 (CW19)
Hellenism, Rome, and Early Christianity
Eric Voegelin, Edited & Intro by Athanasios Moulakis
University of Missouri Press, 1997

Reaching from the decline of the Greek Polis to Saint Augustine, this first volume of Eric Voegelin's eagerly anticipated History of Political Ideas fills the gap left between volumes 3 and 4 of Order and History. The heart of the book is the powerful account of Apostolic Christianity's political implications and the work of the early church fathers. Voegelin's consideration of the political philosophy of Rome and his unique analysis of Greek and early Roman law are of particular interest.

Although History of Political Ideas was begun as a textbook for Macmillan, Voegelin never intended it to be a conventional "synthesis." He sought instead an original comprehensive interpretation, founded on primary materials and taking into account the most advanced specialist scholarship—or science as he called it—available to him. Because of this, the book grew well beyond the confines of an easily marketable college survey and until now remained unpublished.

In the process of writing it, Voegelin himself outgrew the conceptual frame of a "History of Political Ideas," turning to compose Order and History and the other works of his maturity. History of Political Ideas became the ordered collection of materials from which much of Voegelin's later theoretical elaboration grew, structured in a manner that reveals the conceptual intimations of his later thought. As such, it provides an unparalleled opportunity to observe the working methods and the intellectual evolution of one of our century's leading political thinkers. In its embracing scope, History of Political Ideas contains both analyses of themes Voegelin developed in his later works and discussions of authors and ideas to which he did not return or which he later approached from a different angle and with a different emphasis.

In Hellenism, Rome, and Early Christianity, Voegelin demonstrates that the "spiritual disintegration" of the Hellenic world inaugurated a long process of transition in the self- understanding of Mediterranean and European man. The reflections that emerge remain universal concerns regarding the order of human existence in society and history. Although one may come to different conclusions, Voegelin's responses to the problems of the period suggest avenues of investigation that are still little traveled.

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front cover of History of Political Ideas, Volume 2 (CW20)
History of Political Ideas, Volume 2 (CW20)
The Middle Ages to Aquinas
Eric Voegelin, Edited & Intro by Peter von Sivers
University of Missouri Press, 1997

Voegelin's magisterial account of medieval political thought opens with a survey of the structure of the period and continues with an analysis of the Germanic invasions, the fall of Rome, and the rise of empire and monastic Christianity. The political implications of Christianity and philosophy in the period are elaborated in chapters devoted to John of Salisbury, Joachim of Flora (Fiore), Frederick II, Siger de Brabant, Francis of Assisi, Roman law, and climaxing in a remarkable study of Saint Thomas Aquinas's mighty thirteenth-century synthesis.

Although History of Political Ideas was begun as a textbook for Macmillan, Voegelin never intended it to be a conventional chronological account. He sought instead an original comprehensive interpretation, founded on primary materials and taking into account the most advanced specialist scholarship—or science as he called it—available to him. Because of this, the book grew well beyond the confines of an easily marketable college survey and until now remained unpublished.

In the process of writing it, Voegelin himself outgrew the conceptual frame of a "History of Political Ideas," turning to compose Order and History and the other works of his maturity. History of Political Ideas became the ordered collection of materials from which much of Voegelin's later theoretical elaboration grew, structured in a manner that reveals the conceptual intimations of his later thought. As such, it provides an unparalleled opportunity to observe the working methods and the intellectual evolution of one of our century's leading political thinkers. In its embracing scope, History of Political Ideas contains both analyses of themes Voegelin developed in his later works and discussions of authors and ideas to which he did not return or which he later approached from a different angle and with a different emphasis.

The Middle Ages to Aquinas has withstood the test of time. What makes it still highly valuable is its thoroughly revisionist approach, cutting through all the convenient clichés and generalizations and seeking to establish the experiential underpinnings that typified the medieval period.

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History of Political Ideas, Volume 3 (CW21)
The Later Middle Ages
Eric Voegelin, Edited & Intro by David Walsh
University of Missouri Press, 1998

In The Later Middle Ages, the third volume of his monumental History of Political Ideas, Eric Voegelin continues his exploration of one of the most crucial periods in the history of political thought. Illuminating the great figures of the high Middle Ages, Voegelin traces the historical momentum of our modern world in the core evocative symbols that constituted medieval civilization. These symbols revolved around the enduring aspiration for the sacrum imperium, the one order capable of embracing the transcendent and immanent, the ecclesiastical and political, the divine and human. The story of the later Middle Ages is that of the "civilizational schism"—the movement in which not only the reality but the aspiration for the sacrum imperium gradually disappeared and the unification of faith and reason dissolved.

His recognition of this civilizational schism provides Voegelin with a unique perspective on medieval society. William of Ockham, Dante, Giles of Rome, and Marsilius of Padua all emerge in Voegelin's study as predecessors to modern thought; each turns to personal authority and intellectual analysis in an attempt to comprehend the loss of the sacrum imperium as an authoritative ideal. Voegelin is further drawn into investigations that, despite insufficient attention by scholars, still bear relevance to the study of the later Middle Ages. The mysticism apparent in Piers Plowman and the apocalyptic revolt of Cola di Rienzo are merely two reactions to the disintegration of wholeness.

Yet the story of the later Middle Ages does not merely revolve around disintegration. Voegelin recognizes the emergence of the constitutional political tradition as the most positive development of this period. He is at his best when explaining the difference between the presence of a representative institution and the growth of communal consciousness. Voegelin's study of the English political pattern is matched only by his unique perspective on the German imperial zone, culminating in a fitting conclusion on Nicholas of Cusa—the one political thinker with the ability to evoke the unity of mankind beyond fragmentation.

The Later Middle Ages is at once a brilliant examination of the symbols that characterized medieval society and a remarkable predecessor to Voegelin's study of the modern world, beginning with the Renaissance and the Reformation.

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front cover of History of Political Ideas, Volume 4 (CW22)
History of Political Ideas, Volume 4 (CW22)
Renaissance and Reformation
Eric Voegelin, Edited & Intro by David L. Morse & William M. Thompson
University of Missouri Press, 1998

By closely examining the sources, movements, and persons of the Renaissance and the Reformation, Voegelin reveals the roots of today's political ideologies in this fourth volume of his History of Political Ideas. This insightful study lays the groundwork for Voegelin's critique of the modern period and is essential to an understanding of his later analysis.

Voegelin identifies not one but two distinct beginnings of the movement toward modern political consciousness: the Renaissance and the Reformation. Historically, however, the powerful effects of the second have overshadowed the first. In this book, Voegelin carefully examines both periods and their presence in modern thought.

The Renaissance, represented by the works of Niccolò Machiavelli, Desiderius Erasmus, and Thomas More, is characterized by a struggle for balance. Machiavelli and Erasmus both looked to a virtuous prince to achieve order, one calling for brute force and the other for Christian spirituality to reach their goal. Also a participant in the first beginning of modernity, More was a complex thinker identified as a saint both of the church and of the communist movement. The issues he explored in Utopia, as Voegelin demonstrates, indirectly gave rise to concepts that have profoundly affected Western history: colonization, imperialism, national socialism, and communism.

Exploring the transition from the Renaissance to the Reformation is a brilliant chapter, "The People of God," which examines the sectarian movement. These pages contain the rich historical background that led to Voegelin's later conclusions about Gnosticism and its modern influences.

Voegelin offers a controversial view of the Reformation as well as the political and religious situation directly preceding it. Yet he sheds light on the strengths and inadequacies of its key figures, Martin Luther and John Calvin. The driving force behind the Reformation stemmed solely from the powerful personality of Luther. What began as an abstract, purely technical discussion developed into a full-blown revolt. Later in the period, Calvin confronted the problems left behind by Luther and endeavored to create his own universal church to supplant the Catholic Church. His theory of a new elite would have a distinct impact on history.

By examining the political ideas that first emerged during the Renaissance and Reformation, this fascinating volume provides a foundation for understanding the events of centuries to follow.

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front cover of History of Political Ideas, Volume 7 (CW25)
History of Political Ideas, Volume 7 (CW25)
The New Order and Last Orientation
Eric Voegelin, Edited & Intro by Jurgen Gebhardt & Thomas A. Hollweck
University of Missouri Press, 1999

In The New Order and Last Orientation, Eric Voegelin explores two distinctly different yet equally important aspects of modernity. He begins by offering a vivid account of the political situation in seventeenth-century Europe after the decline of the church and the passing of the empire. Voegelin shows how the intellectual and political disorder of the period was met by such seemingly disparate responses as Grotius's theory of natural right, Hobbes's Leviathan, the role of the Fronde in the formation of the French national state, Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, and Locke's Second Treatise, the blueprint of a modern middle-class society. By putting these responses and the thought of Montesquieu, Hume, and others in the context of the birth pains of the national state and the emergence of a new self-understanding of man, Voegelin achieves a brilliant mixture of political history and profound philosophical analysis.

Voegelin's verdict of modernity is pronounced most powerfully in the opening part of "Last Orientation," in the chapter entitled "Phenomenalism." His discussion of the intellectual confusion underlying the modern project of scientistic phenomenalism is the most original criticism leveled against modernity to date. It is at the same time the first step toward a recovery of reality through philosophy conceived as a science of substance in the spirit of Giordano Bruno. Voegelin's first example of such an effort at recovering reality is the chapter on Schelling, one of the spiritual realists who has not been affected by the prevailing rationalist or reductionist creeds that are part of the modern disorder. Schelling's indirect yet powerful influence on Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud more than justifies Voegelin's interest in his philosophy and character, even though Voegelin would later distance himself from some of Schelling's positions.

The volume's concluding chapter, "Nietzsche and Pascal," applies the understanding gained from the study of Schelling to the thought of the most powerful critic of the age, Nietzsche. Nietzsche's self-avowed affinity with Pascal provides the key to an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of his thought and reaffirms the connection that links the beginning of modernity with its most recent crises and the efforts to overcome them.

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front cover of History of Political Ideas, Volume 8 (CW26)
History of Political Ideas, Volume 8 (CW26)
Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man
Eric Voegelin, Edited & Intro by David Walsh.
University of Missouri Press, 1999

Reaching into our own time, Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man confronts the disintegration of traditional sources of meaning and the correlative attempt to generate new sources of order from within the self. Voegelin allows us to contemplate the crisis in its starkest terms as the apocalypse of man that now seeks to replace the apocalypse of God. The totalitarian upheaval that convulsed Voegelin's world, and whose aftermath still defines ours, is only the external manifestation of an inner spiritual turmoil. Its roots have been probed throughout the eight volumes of History of Political Ideas, but its emergence is marked by the age of Enlightenment.

In our postmodern era, discussions of the collapse of the "enlightenment project" have become commonplace. Voegelin compels us to follow the great-souled individuals who sought to go from disintegration of the present toward evocations of order for the future. Such thinkers as Comte, Bakunin, and Marx suffered through the crisis and fully understood the need for a new outpouring of the spirit. They resolved to supply the deficiency themselves. As a consequence they launched us irrevocably on the path of the apocalypse of man.

One of the great merits of Voegelin's analysis is his exposition of the pervasive character of this crisis. It is not confined to the megalomaniacal dreamers of a revolutionary apocalypse; rather, echoes of it are found in the more moderate Enlightenment preoccupation with progress to be attained through application of the scientific method. Faith in the capacity of instrumental reason to answer the ultimate questions of human existence defined men such as Voltaire, Helvétius, Diderot, D'Alembert, and Condorcet. It remains the authoritative faith of our world today, Voegelin argues, demonstrated by our continuing inability to step outside the parameters of the Enlightenment. Are we condemned, then, to oscillate between the rational incoherence of a science that never delivers on its promises and a now discredited revolutionary idealism that wreaks havoc in practice? This is the question toward which Voegelin's final volume points. While not direct, his response is evident everywhere. Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man could have been written only by a man who had reached his own resolution of the crisis.

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History of Political Philosophy
Edited by Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey
University of Chicago Press, 1987
This volume provides an unequaled introduction to the thought of chief contributors to the Western tradition of political philosophy from classical Greek antiquity to the twentieth century. Written by specialists on the various philosophers, this third edition has been expanded significantly to include both new and revised essays.
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Hobbes's Critique of Religion and Related Writings
Leo Strauss
University of Chicago Press, 2011

Leo Strauss’s The Political Philosophy of Hobbes deservedly ranks among his most widely acclaimed works. In it Strauss argues that the basis for Hobbes’s natural and political science is his interest in “self-knowledge of man as he really is.” The writings collected in this book, each written prior to that classic volume, complement that account. Thus at long last, this book allows us to have a complete picture of Strauss’s interpretation of Hobbes, the thinker pivotal to the fundamental theme of his life’s work: the conflicting demands of philosophy and revelation, or as he termed it, “the theologico-political problem.”


It is no exaggeration to say that Strauss’s work on Hobbes’s critique of religion is essential to his analysis of Hobbes’s political philosophy, and vice versa. This volume will spark new interest in Hobbes’s explication of the Bible and in his understanding of religion by revealing previously neglected dimensions and motives of Hobbes’s “theology.” At the same time, scholars interested in the intellectual development of Leo Strauss will find in these writings the missing link, as it were, between his two early books,Spinoza’s Critique of Religion and The Political Philosophy of Hobbes.


In addition, this volume makes available for the first time in English a letter, a book outline, an extended review, an engagement with legal positivism, and an account of Strauss’s work on Hobbes by Heinrich Meier, all of which shed light on Strauss’s concerns and his approach to Hobbes in particular, as well as to modern political thought and life.

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Hobbes's Kingdom of Light
A Study of the Foundations of Modern Political Philosophy
Devin Stauffer
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Was Hobbes the first great architect of modern political philosophy? Highly critical of the classical tradition in philosophy, particularly Aristotle, Hobbes thought that he had established a new science of morality and politics. Devin Stauffer here delves into Hobbes’s critique of the classical tradition, making this oft-neglected aspect of the philosopher’s thought the basis of a new, comprehensive interpretation of his political philosophy.

In Hobbes’s Kingdom of Light, Stauffer argues that Hobbes was engaged in a struggle on multiple fronts against forces, both philosophic and religious, that he thought had long distorted philosophy and destroyed the prospects of a lasting peace in politics. By exploring the twists and turns of Hobbes’s arguments, not only in his famous Leviathan but throughout his corpus, Stauffer uncovers the details of Hobbes’s critique of an older outlook, rooted in classical philosophy and Christian theology, and reveals the complexity of Hobbes’s war against the “Kingdom of Darkness.” He also describes the key features of the new outlook—the “Kingdom of Light”—that Hobbes sought to put in its place. Hobbes’s venture helped to prepare the way for the later emergence of modern liberalism and modern secularism. Hobbes’s Kingdom of Light is a wide-ranging and ambitious exploration of Hobbes’s thought.
 
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Hobsbawm
History and Politics
Gregory Elliott
Pluto Press, 2010

Historian Eric Hobsbawm is possibly the foremost chronicler of the modern age. His panoramic studies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, stretching from the French Revolution to the fall of Soviet communism, have informed the historical consciousness of scholars and general readers alike. At the same time, his writings on labour movements and socialist politics have occupied a central place in left-wing debates. Despite this, no extended study of Hobsbawm's work has yet been attempted Gregory Elliott fills this gap in exemplary fashion.

Elliott analyses both the scholarly record of Hobsbawm and the intellectual and political journey that his life represents. In doing so, he seeks to situate Hobsbawm's thought within the context of a generalised crisis of confidence on the Left after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Rich in content and written in Elliott's authoritative and highly readable style, this book is a must for anyone with an interest in Hobsbawm and the crisis of the Left.

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Holy Joe
Joseph W. Folk and the Missouri Idea
Steven L. Piott
University of Missouri Press, 1997

One of Missouri's best-known leaders of the Progressive Era, Joseph W. Folk epitomized the moral reformer in politics. As a crusading district attorney in St. Louis, Folk won national acclaim for his investigations of wrongdoing in municipal government. With the help of muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens, Folk revealed for the first time the extent of political corruption then plaguing America's cities and helped bring about a popular demand for the regeneration of municipal government nationwide.

A firm believer that the law was a weapon with which to check political corruption and restrain powerful special interests, Folk popularized the "Missouri Idea," the doctrine that public office is a public trust, not merely an opportunity for private gain. Elected as governor of Missouri in 1904, Folk orchestrated a remarkable record of legislative accomplishment. He established himself as one of Missouri's outstanding governors and one of the nation's leading progressive reformers.

In asserting that traditional moral values could be applied to politics, Folk became known among friends and enemies as Holy Joe. His refusal to make any distinction between public and private morality, however, alienated some Missourians, while his disregard for party organization angered politicians. His idealism cost him political advancement and ultimately a place in national politics.

Whereas some studies of the Progressive Era have minimized the moral dimension of Progressivism and downplayed the importance of reformers like Joseph W. Folk, Holy Joe establishes him as a major leader of the Progressive movement. This biography will be a welcome addition to the literature on the subject.

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Holy Week
A Novel of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
Jerzy Andrzejewski
Ohio University Press, 2006

At the height of the Nazi extermination campaign in the Warsaw Ghetto, a young Jewish woman, Irena, seeks the protection of her former lover, a young architect, Jan Malecki. By taking her in, he puts his own life and the safety of his family at risk. Over a four-day period, Tuesday through Friday of Holy Week 1943, as Irena becomes increasingly traumatized by her situation, Malecki questions his decision to shelter Irena in the apartment where Malecki, his pregnant wife, and his younger brother reside. Added to his dilemma is the broader context of Poles’ attitudes toward the “Jewish question” and the plight of the Jews locked in the ghetto during the final moments of its existence.

Few fictional works dealing with the war have been written so close in time to the events that inspired them. No other Polish novel treats the range of Polish attitudes toward the Jews with such unflinching honesty.

Jerzy Andrzejewski’s Holy Week (Wielki Tydzien, 1945), one of the significant literary works to be published immediately following the Second World War, now appears in English for the first time.

This translation of Andrzejewski’s Holy Week began as a group project in an advanced Polish language course at the University of Pittsburgh. Class members Daniel M. Pennell, Anna M. Poukish, and Matthew J. Russin contributed to the translation; the instructor, Oscar E. Swan, was responsible for the overall accuracy and stylistic unity of the translation as well as for the biographical and critical notes and essays.

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Honest John Williams
U.S. Senator from Delaware
Carol E. Hoffecker
University of Delaware Press
John J. Williams was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1946, defeating incumbent Democratic U.S. Senator James M. Tunnell. Honest John Williams: U.S. Senator from Delaware examines the political career of Williams, a political novice who established himself as an important advocate for fiscal probity and integrity in government during four successive terms in the U.S. Senate between 1947 and 1970. Over the course of those twenty-four years in the Senate, which spanned the administrations of five separate U.S. presidents (Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon), Williams positioned himself as an opponent of wasteful government spending and corruption, often working ‘across the aisle’ in order to achieve specific political goals. In Honest John Williams, noted Delaware historian Carol E. Hoffecker offers readers a comprehensive look at the legislative course forged by Delaware’s first four-term senator, a chicken-feed dealer born on a farm near Sussex County who went on to become an important advocate for fiscal probity and integrity in twentieth-century American politics.
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Hope and Hard Truth
A Life in Texas Politics
Mary Beth Rogers
University of Texas Press, 2022

Mary Beth Rogers has led an eventful life rooted in the weeds of Texas politics, occasionally savoring a few victories—particularly the 1990 governor’s race when, as campaign manager for Ann Richards, she did the impossible and put a Democratic woman in office. She also learned to absorb her losses—after all, she was a liberal feminist in America’s most aggressively conservative state.

Rogers’s road to a political life was complex. Candidly and vulnerably, she shares both public and private memories of how she tried to maintain a rich family life with growing children and a husband with a debilitating illness. She goes on to provide an insider’s account of her experiences as Richards’s first chief of staff while weaving her way through the highs and lows of political intrigue and legislative maneuvering.

Reflecting on her family heritage and nascent spiritual quest, Rogers discovers a reality at once sobering and invigorating: nothing is ever completely lost or completely won. It is a constant struggle to create humane public policies built on a foundation of fairness and justice—particularly in her beloved Texas.

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Hope for Common Ground
Mediating the Personal and the Political in a Divided Church
Julie Hanlon Rubio
Georgetown University Press

Much like the rest of the country, American Catholics are politically divided, perhaps more so now than at any point in their history. In this learned but accessible work for scholars, students, and religious and lay readers, ethicist Julie Hanlon Rubio suggests that there is a way beyond red versus blue for orthodox and progressive Catholics. In a call for believers on both sides of the liberal-conservative divide to put aside labels and rhetoric, Rubio, a leading scholar in marriage and family for more than twenty years, demonstrates that common ground does exist in the local sphere between the personal and the political.

In Hope for Common Ground, Rubio draws on Catholic Social Thought to explore ways to bring Catholics together. Despite their differences, Catholics across the political spectrum can share responsibility for social sin and work within communities to contribute to social progress. Rubio expands this common space into in-depth discussions on family fragility, poverty, abortion, and end-of-life care. These four issues, though divisive, are part of a seamless worldview that holds all human life as sacred. Rubio argues that if those on different sides focus on what can be done to solve social problems in “the space between” or local communities, opposing sides will see they are not so far apart as they think. The common ground thus created can then lead to far-reaching progress on even the most divisive issues—and help quiet the discord tearing apart the Church.

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Hope in Hopeless Times
John Holloway
Pluto Press, 2022
In this final part of his ground-breaking trilogy, John Holloway expertly fuses anti-capitalism and anti-identitarianism, and brings hope into the critique of political economy and revolutionary theory, challenging us to find hope within ourselves and channel it into a dignified, revolutionary rage.

Hope lies in our richness, in the joy of our collective creativity. But that richness exists in the peculiar form of money. The fact that we relate to one another through money causes tremendous social pain and destruction and is dragging us through pandemics and war towards extinction.

Richness against money: this battle will decide the future of humanity. If we cannot emancipate richness from money-capital profit, there is probably no hope. Money seems invincible but the constant expansion of debt shows that its rule is fragile. The fictitious expansion of money through debt is driven by fear, fear of us, fear of the rabble. Money contains, but richness overflows.
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Horace Tabor
His Life and the Legend
Duane A. Smith
University Press of Colorado, 1989
Horace Tabor: His Life and the Legend is the first biography to give full attention to Tabor's mining, business, and political activities as well as to his matrimonial escapades. It is a careful and detailed portrait of a man so extraordinary that even in his own lifetime the facts were largely obscured behind the legend. Rarely has the Victorian American West, both good and bad, been better synopsized in the figure of one man.Show More an.Show Less

An 1858er who had spent nearly two decades following the will-o-the-wisp Colorado mining frontier, in 1876 Tabor was then living and working in out-of-the-way Oro City, near where Leadville would be one day. Soon thereafter came the Little Pittsburg silver strike, and Tabor's fortune took flight. Very quickly, Colorado - and the rest of the nation - was hearing about Horace Tabor. "Denver's lucky star was on high when Governor Tabor decided to spend his fortune here," praised the Denver Tribune in 1881. The Leadville Daily Herald (July 8, 1882) also understood his contribution: "Colorado has produced fortunes for many men, but no man who has met with success has so freely made investments in this state, as has Governor Tabor."

The events that followed that amazing silver discovery on Fryer Hill, May 1878 unfolded like a classic Greek tragedy. Tabor weathered them all, and his name has resounded through the succeeding decades. No other Coloradan of his generation is so well remembered, nor does anyone else so typify the tempo of this legendary mining era.

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Hospitality, Volume I
Jacques Derrida
University of Chicago Press, 2023
Jacques Derrida explores the ramifications of what we owe to others.

Hospitality reproduces a two-year seminar series delivered by Jacques Derrida at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris between 1995 and 1997. In these lectures, Derrida asks a series of related questions about responsibility and “the foreigner”: How do we welcome or turn away the foreigner? What does the idea of the foreigner reveal about kinship and the state, particularly in relation to friendship, citizenship, migration, asylum, assimilation, and xenophobia? Derrida approaches these questions through readings of several classical texts as well as modern texts by Heidegger, Arendt, Camus, and others. Central to his project is a rigorous distinction between conventional, finite hospitality, with its many conditions, and the aspirational idea of hospitality as something offered unconditionally to the stranger. This volume collects the first year of the seminar.
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Hospitality, Volume II
Jacques Derrida
University of Chicago Press, 2024
Jacques Derrida explores the ramifications of what we owe to others.

Hospitality reproduces a two-year seminar series delivered by Jacques Derrida at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris between 1995 and 1997. In these lectures, Derrida asks a series of related questions about responsibility and “the foreigner”: How do we welcome or turn away the foreigner? What does the idea of the foreigner reveal about kinship and the state, particularly in relation to friendship, citizenship, migration, asylum, assimilation, and xenophobia? Central to his project is a rigorous distinction between conventional, finite hospitality, with its many conditions, and the aspirational idea of hospitality as something offered unconditionally to the stranger. This volume collects the second year of the seminar, which considers an Islamic problematic of hospitality, the relevance of forgiveness, and the work of Emmanuel Levinas.
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The House That Madigan Built
The Record Run of Illinois' Velvet Hammer
Ray Long. Foreword by Charles N. Wheeler III
University of Illinois Press, 2022
Michael Madigan rose from the Chicago machine to hold unprecedented power as Speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives. In his thirty-six years wielding the gavel, Madigan outlasted governors, passed or blocked legislation at will, and outmaneuvered virtually every attempt to limit his reach.

Veteran reporter Ray Long draws on four decades of observing state government to provide the definitive political analysis of Michael Madigan. Secretive, intimidating, shrewd, power-hungry--Madigan mesmerized his admirers and often left his opponents too beaten down to oppose him. Long vividly recreates the battles that defined the Madigan era, from stunning James Thompson with a lightning-strike tax increase, to pressing for a pension overhaul that ultimately failed in the courts, to steering the House toward the Rod Blagojevich impeachment. Long also shines a light on the machinery that kept the Speaker in power. Head of a patronage army, Madigan ruthlessly used his influence and fundraising prowess to reward loyalists and aid his daughter’s electoral fortunes. At the same time, he reshaped bills to guarantee he and his Democratic troops shared in the partisan spoils of his legislative victories. Yet Madigan’s position as the state’s seemingly invulnerable power broker could not survive scandals among his close associates and the widespread belief that his time as Speaker had finally reached its end.

Unsparing and authoritative, The House That Madigan Built is the page-turning account of one the most powerful politicians in Illinois history.

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How Fire Runs
A Novel
Charles Dodd White
Ohio University Press, 2020
A chilling, timely reminder of the moral and human costs of racial hatred. What happens when a delusional white supremacist and his army of followers decide to create a racially pure “Little Europe” within a rural Tennessee community? As the town’s residents grapple with their new reality, minor skirmishes escalate and dirty politics, scandals, and a cataclysmic chain of violence follows. In this uncanny reflection of our time, award-winning novelist Charles Dodd White asks whether Americans can save themselves from their worst impulses and considers the consequences when this salvation comes too late.
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How Socrates Became Socrates
A Study of Plato’s “Phaedo,” “Parmenides,” and “Symposium”
Laurence Lampert
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Plato dispersed his account of how Socrates became Socrates across three dialogues. Thus, Plato rendered his becoming discoverable only to readers truly invested. In How Socrates Became Socrates, Laurence Lampert recognizes the path of Plato’s strides and guides us through the true account of Socrates’ becoming. He divulges how and why Plato ordered his Phaedo, Parmenides, and Symposium chronologically to give readers access to Socrates’ development on philosophy’s fundamental questions of being and knowing.
 
In addition to a careful and precise analysis of Plato’s Phaedo,Parmenides, and Symposium, Lampert shows that properly entwined, Plato’s three dialogues fuse to portray a young thinker entering philosophy’s true radical power. Lampert reveals why this radicality needed to be guarded and places this discussion within the greater scheme of the politics of philosophy.
 
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The Human Condition
Second Edition
Hannah Arendt
University of Chicago Press, 2018
The past year has seen a resurgence of interest in the political thinker Hannah Arendt, “the theorist of beginnings,” whose work probes the logics underlying unexpected transformations—from totalitarianism to revolution.

A work of striking originality, The Human Condition is in many respects more relevant now than when it first appeared in 1958. In her study of the state of modern humanity, Hannah Arendt considers humankind from the perspective of the actions of which it is capable. The problems Arendt identified then—diminishing human agency and political freedom, the paradox that as human powers increase through technological and humanistic inquiry, we are less equipped to control the consequences of our actions—continue to confront us today. This new edition, published to coincide with the sixtieth anniversary of its original publication, contains Margaret Canovan’s 1998 introduction and a new foreword by Danielle Allen.

A classic in political and social theory, The Human Condition is a work that has proved both timeless and perpetually timely.
 
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Human Dignity
George Kateb
Harvard University Press, 2014

We often speak of the dignity owed to a person. And dignity is a word that regularly appears in political speeches. Charters are promulgated in its name, and appeals to it are made when people all over the world struggle to achieve their rights. But what exactly is dignity? When one person physically assaults another, we feel the wrong demands immediate condemnation and legal sanction. Whereas when one person humiliates or thoughtlessly makes use of another, we recognize the wrong and hope for a remedy, but the social response is less clear. The injury itself may be hard to quantify.

Given our concern with human dignity, it is odd that it has received comparatively little scrutiny. Here, George Kateb asks what human dignity is and why it matters for the claim to rights. He proposes that dignity is an “existential” value that pertains to the identity of a person as a human being. To injure or even to try to efface someone’s dignity is to treat that person as not human or less than human—as a thing or instrument or subhuman creature. Kateb does not limit the notion of dignity to individuals but extends it to the human species. The dignity of the human species rests on our uniqueness among all other species. In the book’s concluding section, he argues that despite the ravages we have inflicted on it, nature would be worse off without humanity. The supremely fitting task of humanity can be seen as a “stewardship” of nature. This secular defense of human dignity—the first book-length attempt of its kind—crowns the career of a distinguished political thinker.

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Humanism as Realism
Three Essays Concerning the Thought of Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt
Lisa Fretschel
St. Augustine's Press, 2023
Originally published in Polish in 2019 by The Lethe Foundation, this book demonstrates the relevance and importance of Paul Elmer More (1864–1937) and Irving Babbitt (1865–1933). Their collective legacy is one of responsible and truly thoughtful living. Their treatment of Humanists and their diagnosis of modernity is an important theme in this work, and the indication of the political consequences of humanism.

This is a protreptic book. Its main goal is to encourage people to undertake independent studies or more generally, simply to think independently. If we want to think for ourselves, and not like preprogrammed humanoids, we can’t do so in a vacuum. We have to lean on something. In the Author’s view, the more than century-old writings of Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt are perfectly suited to the role of such a support for us, living in the here and now. They make it possible for us to dig ourselves out from underneath the heaps of opinions, “principles” or “theories” that allegedly can’t be rejected, that we’re obliged to follow, but that have a paralyzing and dumbing-down effect on us, making our lives from the
outset seems like the dream of a childish old man."

––Taken from the Preface by Pawel Armada
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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.

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Hyperpolitics
An Interactive Dictionary of Political Science Concepts
Mauro Calise and Theodore J. Lowi
University of Chicago Press, 2010

Fifteen years in the making, Hyperpolitics is an interactive dictionary offering a wholly original approach for understanding and working with the most central concepts in political science. Designed and authored by two of the discipline’s most distinguished scholars, its purpose is to provide its readers with fresh critical insights about what informs these political concepts, as well as a method by which readers—and especially students—can unpack and reconstruct them on their own.

International in scope, Hyperpolitics draws upon a global vocabulary in order to turn complex ideas into an innovative teaching aid. Its companion open access website (www.hyperpolitics.net) has already been widely acknowledged in the fields of education and political science and will continue to serve as a formidable hub for the book’s audience. Much more than a dictionary and enhanced by dynamic graphics, Hyperpolitics introduces an ingenious means of understanding complicated concepts that will be an invaluable tool for scholars and students alike.

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Hypocrisy and Integrity
Machiavelli, Rousseau, and the Ethics of Politics
Ruth W. Grant
University of Chicago Press, 1997
Questioning the usual judgements of political ethics, Ruth W. Grant argues that hypocrisy can actually be constructive while strictly principled behavior can be destructive. Hypocrisy and Integrity offers a new conceptual framework that clarifies the differences between idealism and fanaticism while it uncovers the moral limits of compromise.

"Exciting and provocative. . . . Grant's work is to be highly recommended, offering a fresh reading of Rousseau and Machiavelli as well as presenting a penetrating analysis of hypocrisy and integrity."—Ronald J. Terchek, American Political Science Review

"A great refreshment. . . . With liberalism's best interests at heart, Grant seeks to make available a better understanding of the limits of reason in politics."—Peter Berkowitz, New Republic
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