Symbolic resources affect social, cultural, and economic development. The value of being "Made in America" or "Made in Italy," for example, depends not only on the material advantages each place offers but also on the symbolic resources embedded in those...

Why has power in the West assumed the form of an "economy," that is, of a government of men and things? If power is essentially government, why does it need glory, that is, the ceremonial and liturgical apparatus that has always accompanied it?In the...

Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most elusive thinkers in the philosophical tradition. His highly unusual style and insistence on what remains hidden or unsaid in his writing make pinning him to a particular position tricky. Nonetheless, certain...

The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, first published in 1944, is considered one of the most profound and relevant works by the influential theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and certainly the fullest statement of his political philosophy...

Life throws ethical questions at us every day, some momentous and difficult, some fairly trivial and easily worked out. To help the average person deal with such puzzling issues, the website AskPhilosophers.org brings together a panel of distinguished...

'Culture and Domination' challenges the claim of traditional hermeneutics that culture is a realm of meaning and value set apart from social relations of domination and power. In this forceful critical reassessment of hermeneutics, Marxism, and...

Following his timely and well-received A Failure of Capitalism, Richard Posner steps back to take a longer view of the continuing crisis of democratic capitalism as the American and world economies crawl gradually back from the depths to which they had...

Pragmatism has been reinvented in every generation since its beginnings in the late nineteenth century. This book, by one of today’s most distinguished contemporary heirs of pragmatist philosophy, rereads cardinal figures in that tradition, distilling...

The global trend toward democratization of the last two decades has been accompanied by the resurgence of various politics of "identity/difference." From nationalist and ethnic revivals in the countries of east and central Europe to the former Soviet...

The "City of God" or the "City of Man"? This is the choice St. Augustine offered 1500 years ago--and according to Pierre Manent the modern West has decisively and irreversibly chosen the latter. In this subtle and wide-ranging book on the Western...

Skillful, sophisticated translations of two of Nietzsche's essential works about the conflict between the moral and aesthetic approaches to life, the impact of Christianity on human values, the meaning of science, the contrast between the Apollonian and...

When the Supreme Court in 2003 struck down a Texas law prohibiting homosexual sodomy, it cited the right to privacy based on the guarantee of "substantive due process" embodied by the Constitution. But did the court act undemocratically by overriding the...

"This updated collection is as timely now as it was back then: few students of political theory are sufficiently conversant with the rich medieval tradition of reflection on such problems as 'reason and revelation' or ‘natural and divine law.’... One...

One of the most influential historians of ancient philosophy of the past half-century, Pierre Hadot was adept at using ancient philosophers to illuminate the relevance of their ideas to contemporary life. This new edition of The Present Alone is Our...

This book is a continuation of Giorgio Agamben's investigation of political theory, which began with the highly influential volume Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Having already traced the roots of the idea of sovereignty, sacredness, and...

Has the passing of the old God paved the way for a new kind of religious project, a more responsible way to seek, sound, and love the things we call divine? Has the suspension of dogmatic certainties and presumptions opened a space in which we can...

How should we live? What do we owe to other people? In Goodness and Advice, the eminent philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson explores how we should go about answering such fundamental questions. In doing so, she makes major advances in moral philosophy,...

Introduction to the Human Sciences carries forward a projected six-volume translation series of the major writings of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911)--a philosopher and historian of culture who has had a strong and continuing influence on twentieth-century...

This book consists of two parts: “The Law of Peoples,” a major reworking of a much shorter article by the same name published in 1993, and the essay “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” first published in 1997. Taken together, they are the culmination...

Two cornerstones of liberalism from the great social radical of English philosophy John Stuart Mill was a prodigious thinker who sharply challenged the beliefs of his age. In On Liberty, one of the sacred texts of liberalism, he argues that any...