A clear-eyed exploration of the career of Leon Trotsky, the tragic hero who "dreamed of justice and then wreaked havoc," by a leading expert on human rights and the former Soviet Union Born Lev Davidovich Bronstein in southern Ukraine, Trotsky was both...

In German Idealism and the Jew, Michael Mack uncovers the deep roots of anti-Semitism in the German philosophical tradition. While many have read German anti-Semitism as a reaction against Enlightenment philosophy, Mack instead contends that the...

Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript is a classic of existential literature. It concludes the first and richest phase of Kierkegaard's pseudonymous authorship and is the text that philosophers look to first when attempting to define...

A foundational text of Western education, this 1762 treatise served as a model for a new approach to teaching during the French Revolution. Emile recounts a boy's education, and Rousseau considered it the most important of his writings. With its theories...

Re/presenting Class is a collection of essays that develops a poststructuralist Marxian conception of class in order to theorize the complex contemporary economic terrain. Both building upon and reconsidering a tradition that Stephen Resnick and Richard...

Underlying Julia Kristeva's latest work is the idea that otherness - whether it be ethnic, religious, social, or political - needs to be understood and accepted in order to guarantee social harmony. Nations Without Nationalism is an impassioned plea for...

Essential illustrated guide to key ideas of political thought. Philosophers have always asked fundamental and disturbing questions about politics. Plato and Aristotle debated the merits of democracy. The origins of society, the state and government...

James Harrington's brief career as a political and historical theorist spans the last years of the Cromwellian Protectorate and the Restoration of 1660. This 1992 volume comprises the first and last of Harrington's writings. Harrington was the first...

In Tourists of History, the cultural critic Marita Sturken argues that over the past two decades, Americans have responded to national trauma through consumerism, kitsch sentiment, and tourist practices in ways that reveal a tenacious investment in the...

Not everything is black and white. Our daily lives are full of vagueness or fuzziness. Language is the most obvious example - for instance, when we describe someone as tall, it is as though there is a particular height beyond which a person can be...

Two books have been particularly influential in contemporary philosophy of science: Karl R. Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery, and Thomas S. Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Both agree upon the importance of revolutions in science, but...

Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou defy theoretical humanities' deeply-entrenched resistance to engagements with the life sciences. Rather than treat biology and its branches as hopelessly reductive and politically suspect, they view recent advances...

Jared Diamond and other leading scholars have argued that the domestication of animals for food, labor, and tools of war has advanced the development of human society. But by comparing practices of animal exploitation for food and resources in different...

This bold, insightful book argues that America today towers as the most philosophical culture in the history of the world, an unprecedented marketplace for truth and debate.With verve and keen intelligence, Carlin Romano—Pulitzer Prize finalist,...

The brilliant writings of a highly influential Greek philosopher, with a foreword by Daniel Klein, author of Travels with EpicurusThe teachings of Epicurus—about life and death, religion and science, physical sensation, happiness, morality, and...

Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) was the greatest intellectual historian of the twentieth century. But his work also made an original and important contribution to moral and political philosophy and to liberal theory. In 1921, at the age of eleven, Isaiah...

"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." This ancient Greek aphorism, preserved in a fragment from the poet Archilochus, describes the central thesis of Isaiah Berlin's masterly essay on Leo Tolstoy and the philosophy of...

"Worldly Philosopher chronicles the times and writings of Albert O. Hirschman, one of the twentieth century's most original and provocative thinkers. In this gripping biography, Jeremy Adelman tells the story of a man shaped by modern horrors and hopes,...

How civility has shaped and been shaped by historical and social forces, and why it is in danger todayCivility is desirable and possible, but can this fragile ideal be guaranteed? The Importance of Being Civil offers the most comprehensive look at the...

Optimism is fundamental to the human spirit and has sparked innovation across the centuries, but does it have a dark side? Renowned philosopher and author Roger Scruton argues that unchecked optimism can be dangerous--and that real happiness hinges on a...