Bøger udgivet af Cornell University Press

Entering the shady world of what he calls "violent entrepreneurship," Vadim Volkov explores the economic uses of violence and coercion in Russia in the 1990s. Violence has played, he shows, a crucial role in creating the institutions of a new market...

Preferential trade agreements have become common ways to protect or restrict access to national markets in products and services. The United States has signed trade agreements with almost two dozen countries as close as Mexico and Canada and as distant as Morocco and Australia. The European Union has done the same. In addition to addressing economic issues, these agreements also regulate the protection of human rights. In Forced to Be Good, Emilie M. Hafner-Burton tells the story of the politics of such agreements and of the ways in which governments pursue market integration policies that advance their own political interests, including human rights.How and why do global norms for social justice become international regulations linked to seemingly unrelated issues, such as trade? Hafner-Burton finds that the process has been unconventional. Efforts by human rights advocates and labor unions to spread human rights ideals, for example, do not explain why American and European governments employ preferential trade agreements to protect human rights. Instead, most of the regulations protecting human rights are codified in global moral principles and laws only because they serve policymakers' interests in accumulating power or resources or solving other problems. Otherwise, demands by moral advocates are tossed aside. And, as Hafner-Burton shows, even the inclusion of human rights protections in trade agreements is no guarantee of real change, because many of the governments that sign on to fair trade regulations oppose such protections and do not intend to force their implementation.Ultimately, Hafner-Burton finds that, despite the difficulty of enforcing good regulations and the less-than-noble motives for including them, trade agreements that include human rights provisions have made a positive difference in the lives of some of the people they are intended-on paper, at least-to protect.

Barbara H. Rosenwein here reassesses the significance of property in the tenth and eleventh centuries, a period of transition from the Carolingian empire to the regional monarchies of the High Middle Ages. In To Be the Neighbor of Saint Peter she explores in rich detail the question of monastic donations, illuminating the human motives, needs, and practices behind gifts of land and churches to the French monastery of Cluny during the 140 years that followed its founding. Donations, Rosenwein shows, were largely the work of neighbors, and they set up and affirmed relationships with Saint Peter, to whom Cluny was dedicated.Cluny was an eminent religious institution and served as a model for other monasteries. It attracted numerous donations and was party to many land transactions. Its charters and cartularies constitute perhaps the single richest collection of information on property for the period 909-1049. Analyzing the evidence found in these records, Rosenwein considers the precise nature of Cluny's ownership of land, the character of its claims to property, and its tutelage over the land of some of the monasteries in its ecclesia.

"It is one of the merits of Max Black's companion to the Tractatus that he emphasizes the continuity of Wittgenstein's philosophical development by frequent quotation from his later writings."--New York Review of Books"Black's book is, in effect, two books in one, and each of them is very good. First, there is the useful companion to the Tractatus: the store of information that anyone who picked up the Tractatus would want to have. Second, there are the interpretive essays: always judicious, frequently illuminating. It is hard to see how this book could have been more complete."--Philosophical BooksOne of the unquestioned philosophical masterpieces of modern times is Ludwig Wittgensteinís Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. It is a work of extreme compression. Within a compass of twenty thousand words, and in cryptic and elliptical sentences, Wittgenstein writes of the nature of the universe, the essence of language, the foundations of logic and mathematics, theories of probability, new ideas about philosophical method, and the work of Russell and Frege. He also makes scattered comments about the philosophy of science, ethics, religion, and mysticism. Inasmuch as Wittgenstein found it difficult, if not distasteful, to force philosophical thoughts and insights into a linear deductive order, a serious need for students is a collocation of scattered passages and a close com­mentary on the text. Both are provided in this brilliant study by a distinguished philosopher

Beyond Description brings anthropologists and other social scientists together to examine the problem of explanation. What is "an explanation?" What can it add? What makes it authoritative, clarifying, or misleading? Whom does it serve and how is it produced? These questions lie at the heart of recent public crises of confidence in expertise, political representation, and classic liberal visions of whom we can rely on for true and trustworthy accounts. In a world beset by events and processes that seem to defy expert predictions of their impossibility, and in which post-hoc accounts can often feel more like rationalizations than explanations, competing voices vie for public presence and seek to silence one another. Anthropology and the social sciences face such questions too, making contemporary explanatory practice both an empirical and a reflexive challenge. By combining ethnographic studies of practices of explanation in a range of contemporary political, medical, artistic, religious, and bureaucratic settings, the essays in Beyond Description offer critical examinations of changing norms and forms of explanation in the world and within anthropology itself.

Popular opinion holds that public housing is a failure; so what more needs to be said about seventy-five years of dashed hopes and destructive policies? Over the past decade, however, historians and social scientists have quietly exploded the common wisdom about public housing. Public Housing Myths pulls together these fresh perspectives and unexpected findings into a single volume to provide an updated, panoramic view of public housing.With eleven chapters by prominent scholars, the collection not only covers a groundbreaking range of public housing issues transnationally but also does so in a revisionist and provocative manner. With students in mind, Public Housing Myths is organized thematically around popular preconceptions and myths about the policies surrounding big city public housing, the places themselves, and the people who call them home. The authors challenge narratives of inevitable decline, architectural determinism, and rampant criminality that have shaped earlier accounts and still dominate public perception.Contributors: Nicholas Dagen Bloom, New York Institute of Technology; Yonah Freemark, Chicago Metropolitan Planning Council; Alexander Gerould, San Francisco State University; Joseph Heathcott, The New School; D. Bradford Hunt, Roosevelt University; Nancy Kwak, University of California, San Diego; Lisa Levenstein, University of North Carolina at Greensboro; Fritz Umbach, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY; Florian Urban, Glasgow School of Art; Lawrence J. Vale, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Rhonda Y. Williams, Case Western Reserve University

In Schoolishness, Susan D. Blum continues her journey as an anthropologist and educator. The author defines "schoolishness" as educational practices that emphasize packaged "learning," unimaginative teaching, uniformity, constant evaluation by others, arbitrary forms, predetermined time, and artificial boundaries, resulting in personal and educational alienation, dependence, and dread.Drawing on critical, progressive, and feminist pedagogy in conversation with the anthropology of learning, and building on the insights of her two previous books Blum proposes less-schoolish ways of learning in ten dimensions, to lessen the mismatch between learning in school and learning in the wild. She asks, if learning is our human "superpower," why is it so difficult to accomplish in school? In every chapter Blum compares the fake learning of schoolishness with successful examples of authentic learning, including in her own courses, which she scrutinizes critically.Schoolishness is not a pedagogical how-to book, but a theory-based phenomenology of institutional education. It has moral, psychological, and educational arguments against schoolishness that, as Blum notes, "rhymes with foolishness."

In Tibetan Manuscripts and Early Printed Books, Volume I, Matthew T. Kapstein and an international team of specialists provide a comprehensive introduction to the material and aesthetic features of the wide range of Tibetan books, described in detail and illustrated with copious full-color photographs. With a documented history of over thirteen centuries, Tibetan books have long served as a medium of culture and learning throughout Central and East Asia. Major collections of Tibetan manuscripts and printed books--for Tibetan works were put into print even before the age of Gutenberg--are found in libraries and museums far from the traditional centers of Tibetan learning. Yet the history, production, and design of these works remain poorly understood.Topics covered in volume I include the manufacture of paper and ink, format and layout, scripts and scribal conventions, illumination and decoration, woodblock printing, book storage, preservation, and the use of contemporary digital technologies for the documentation of traditional works. Volume I of Tibetan Manuscripts and Early Printed Books is an essential resource for all students of Tibetan civilization, as well as for scholars, collectors, and others interested in the diverse book cultures of Asia.

An exploration of the links within the study of history between experience and identity, history and various theories of subjectivity, extreme events and their representation, institutional structures and the knowledge produced within them.

In Walking Corpses, Timothy S. Miller and John W. Nesbitt contextualize reactions to leprosy in medieval Western Europe by tracing its history in Late Antique Byzantium, which had been confronting leprosy and its effects for centuries. Integrating developments in both the Latin West and the Greek East, Walking Corpses challenges a number of misperceptions about attitudes toward the disease, including that theologians branded leprosy as punishment for sin (rather, it was seen as a mark of God's favor); that Christian teaching encouraged bans on the afflicted from society (in actuality, it was Germanic customary law); or that leprosariums were prisons (instead, they were centers of care, many of them self-governing). Informed by extensive archival research and recent bioarchaeology, Walking Corpses also includes new translations of three Greek texts regarding leprosy, while a new preface to the paperback edition updates the historiography on medieval perceptions and treatments of leprosy.

Do the pressures of economic globalization undermine the welfare state? Contrary to the expectations of many analysts, Taiwan and South Korea have embarked on a new trajectory, toward a strengthened welfare state and universal inclusion. In Healthy...

This book explores the idea of grand strategy and offers a full-blown critique--both theoretical and empirical--of the gaps and inconsistencies that weaken modern realist theory. Grand strategy, the authors maintain, is determined as much by domestic politics as by international pressures.

In Sociology of Corruption, David Jancsics provides a fresh approach to the study of corruption in Hungary, which once seemed to be the most likely of the ex-communist bloc nations to catch up to the West and is, according to many experts and scholars, a country with a highly corrupt dynamic.Based on data from 2022, Hungary is now the most corrupt member state of the European Union. There is also a consensus among experts that a small clique of corrupt political actors has captured most Hungarian state institutions and a significant portion of the business sector. What fostered corruption in Hungary? What are the most typical forms of corruption in this country? What do Hungarians think about it? What is the role of prime minister Viktor Orbán in this? Sociology of Corruption proposes a novel sociological theory of corruption focusing on social status and relationships, network structures, and power dynamics as important explanatory factors of corrupt behavior. Although his focus is on Hungary, Jancsics's findings are applicable to other nations and cultural contexts.

Not only can the influence of Gottlob Frege (1848-1925) be found in contemporary work in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, and the philosophy of language...

The Future Is Feminist by Sara Rahnama offers a closer look at a pivotal moment in Algerian history when Algerians looked to feminism as a path out of the stifling realities of French colonial rule. Algerian people focused outward to developments in the Middle East, looking critically at their own society and with new eyes to Islamic tradition. In doing so, they reordered the world on their own terms--pushing back against French colonial claims about Islam's inherent misogyny. Rahnama describes how Algerians took inspiration from Middle Eastern developments in women's rights. Empowered by the Muslim reform movement sweeping the region, they read Islamic knowledge with new eyes, even calling Muhammad "the first Arab feminist." They compared the blossoming women's rights movements across the Middle East and this history of Islam's feminist potential to the stifled position of Algerian women, who suffered from limited access to education and respectable work. Local dynamics also shaped these discussions, including the recent entry of thousands of Algerian women into the workforce as domestic workers in European settler homes. While Algerian people disagreed about whether Algeria's future should be colonial or independent, they agreed that women's advancement would offer a path forward for Muslim society toward a more prosperous future. Through its use of Arabic-language sources alongside French ones, The Future Is Feminist moves beyond Algeria's colonial relationship to France to illuminate its relationship to the Middle East.

This philosophical analysis of the phenomenon of racism brings together some of the most influential analytic philosophers writing on racism today. The introduction by Tamas Pataki outlines the historical and thematic development of conceptions of race and racism, and locates the following essays against the backdrop of contemporary reactions to that development. While the framework is primarily analytic, the volume also includes essays deeply informed by psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and feminist and social theory. The fourteen chapters in this collection address three interrelated questions: What is racism? What are the causes of racism? And what are the moral and political implications of racism? Although their approaches are wide ranging, the contributors to Racism in Mind broadly endorse a psychological-characterological approach to the understanding of many aspects of racism.

Concentrating on the period between 1945 and 1989, The Elusive Balance reevaluates Soviet and U.S. perceptions of the balance of power. William Curti Wohlforth uses a comparative and long-term approach to chart the diplomatic history of relations between the two countries. He offers new interpretations of the onset, course, and end of the Cold War, and the motivations behind Soviet behavior.

Peasant Politics of the Twenty-First Century illuminates the transnational agrarian movements that are remaking rural society and the world's food and agriculture systems. Marc Edelman explains how peasant movements are staking their claims from farmers' fields to massive protests around the world, shaping heated debates over peasants' rights and the very category of "peasant" within the agrarian organizations and in the United Nations.Edelman chronicles the rise of these movements, their objectives, and their alliances with environmental, human rights, women's, and food justice groups. The book scrutinizes high-profile activists and the forgotten genealogies and policy implications of foundational analytical frameworks like "moral economy," and concepts, such as "food sovereignty" and "civil society." Peasant Politics of the Twenty-First Century charts the struggle of agrarian movements in the face of land grabbing, counter agrarian reform, and a looming climate catastrophe, and celebrates engaged research from Central America to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.

In his third and concluding volume, Lloyd P. Gerson presents an innovative account of Platonism, the central tradition in the history of philosophy, in conjunction with Naturalism, the "anti-Platonism" in antiquity and contemporary philosophy. Gerson contends that Platonism identifies philosophy with a distinct subject matter, namely, the intelligible world and seeks to show that the Naturalist rejection of Platonism entails the elimination of a distinct subject matter for philosophy. Thus, the possibility of philosophy depends on the truth of Platonism. From Aristotle to Plotinus to Proclus, Gerson clearly links the construction of the Platonic system well beyond simply Plato's dialogues, providing strong evidence of the vast impact of Platonism on philosophy throughout history. Platonism and Naturalism concludes that attempts to seek a rapprochement between Platonism and Naturalism are unstable and likely indefensible.

Big dams built for irrigation, power, water supply, and other purposes were among the most potent symbols of economic development for much of the twentieth century. Of late they have become a lightning rod for challenges to this vision of development...

In Indirect Rule, David A. Lake examines how states indirectly exercise authority over others and how this mode of rule affects domestic and international politics. Indirect rule has long characterized interstate relationships and US foreign relations. A key mechanism of international hierarchy, indirect rule involves an allied group within a client state adopting policies preferred by a dominant state in exchange for the latter's support. Drawing on the history of US involvement in the Caribbean and Central America, Western Europe, and the Arab Middle East, Lake shows that indirect rule is more likely to occur when the specific assets at risk are large and governance costs are low. Lake's conceptualization of indirect rule sharpens our understanding of how the United States came to occupy the pinnacle of world power. Yet the consequences of indirect rule he documents--including anti-Americanism--reveal its shortcomings. As US efforts at democracy promotion and other forms of intervention abroad face declining support at home, Indirect Rule compels us to consider whether this method of rule ultimately advances American interests.

Funk the Clock is about those said to be emblematic of the future yet denied a place in time. Hence, this book is both an invitation and provocation for Black youth to give the finger to the hands of time, while inviting readers to follow their lead.In revealing how time is racialized, how race is temporalized, and how racism takes time, Rahsaan Mahadeo makes clear why conventional sociological theories of time are both empirically and theoretically unsustainable and more importantly, why they need to be funked up/with. Through his study of a youth center in Minneapolis, Mahadeo provides examples of Black youth constructing alternative temporalities that center their lived experiences and ensure their worldviews, tastes, and culture are most relevant and up to date. In their stories exists the potential to stretch the sociological imagination to make the familiar (i.e. time) strange. Funk the Clock forges new directions in the study of race and time by upending what we think we know about time, while centering Black youth as key collaborators in rewriting knowledge as we know it.

Conventional wisdom holds that "institutions matter." Here, Andrew MacIntyre reveals exactly how they matter in the developing world. Combining an eye for current concerns in international politics with a deep knowledge of Southeast Asia, MacIntyre...

One of the most troubling aspects of the politics of homelessness, Leonard C. Feldman contends, is the reduction of the homeless to what Hannah Arendt calls "the abstract nakedness of humanity" and what Giorgio Agamben terms "bare life." Feldman argues that the politics of alleged compassion and the politics of those interested in ridding public spaces of the homeless are linked fundamentally in their assumption that homeless people are something less than citizens. Feldman's book brings political theories together (including theories of sovereign power, justice, and pluralism) with discussions of real-world struggles and close analyses of legal cases concerning the rights of the homeless.In Feldman's view, the "bare life predicament" is a product not simply of poverty or inequality but of an inability to commit to democratic pluralism. Challenging this reduction of the homeless, Citizens without Shelter examines opportunities for contesting such a fundamental political exclusion, in the service of homeless citizenship and a more robust form of democratic pluralism. Feldman has in mind a truly democratic pluralism that would include a pluralization of the category of "home" to enable multiple forms of dwelling; a recognition of the common dwelling activities of homeless and non-homeless persons; and a resistance to laws that punish or confine the homeless.

In Symbolism and Interpretation, Tzvetan Todorov examines two aspects of discourse: its production, which has traditionally been the domain of rhetoric, and its reception, which has always been the object of hermeneutics. He analyzes the diverse theories of symbolism and interpretation that have been elaborated over the centuries and considers their contribution to a general theory of verbal symbolism, discussing a wide range of thinkers, from the Sanskrit philosophers and Aristotle to the German Romantics and contemporary semioticians.Todorov begins by examining general ideas of linguistic symbolism and the interpretive process. He then turns to a detailed consideration of two of the most influential and pervasive interpretative strategies in Western thought: the patristic exegesis of Augustine and Aquinas, and the philological exegesis foreshadowed in the work of Spinoza, developed by Wolf, Ast, Boeckh, and Lanson, and criticized by Schleiermacher. Todorov clarifies in masterly fashion the intricacies of the many schools of thought and refines the concepts crucial to critical theory today, including the distinctions between language and discourse, direct and indirect meaning, sign and symbol. Ably translated by Catherine Porter, Symbolism and Interpretation provides a coherent and innovative framework that is indispensable to the study of semiotics, its history, and its future.

Throughout the past century, a debate has raged over the thesis of realism and its alternatives. Realism--the seemingly commonsensical view that all or most of what we encounter in the world exists and is what it is independently of human thought--has been vigorously denied by such prominent intellectuals as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, Thomas Kuhn, Hilary Putnam, and Nelson Goodman. The opponents of realism, among them historians and social scientists who support social constructionism, hold that all or most of reality depends on human conceptual schemes and beliefs. In this volume of original essays, a group of philosophers explores the ongoing controversy. The book opens with an introduction by William P. Alston, whose writing on the subject has been widely influential. Selected essays then compare and contrast aspects of the arguments put forward by the realists with those of the antirealists. Other chapters discuss the importance of the debate for philosophical topics such as epistemology and for domains ranging from religion, literature, and science to morality.

The Natural Border tells the recent history of Mediterranean rural capitalism from the perspective of marginalized Black African farm workers. Timothy Raeymaekers shows how in the context of global supply chains and repressive border regimes, agrarian production and reproduction are based on fundamental racial hierarchies.Taking the example of the tomato--a typical 'Made in Italy' commodity--Raeymaekers asks how political boundaries are drawn around the land and the labor needed for its production, what technologies of exclusion and inclusion enable capitalist operations to take place in the Mediterranean agrarian frontier, and which practices structure the allocation, use and commodification of land and labor across the tomato chain. While the mobile infrastructures that mobilize, channel, commodify and segregate labor play a central role in the 'naturalization' of racial segregation, they are also terrains of contestation and power--and thus, as The Natural Border demonstrates, reflect the tense socio-ecological transformation the Mediterranean border space is going through today.