Books published by Columbia University Press

The neurodegenerative disease expert Yves Agid offers a groundbreaking and accessible account of subconsciousness and its significance. Shedding new light on the physiological bases of our behavior and mental states, this book provides an innovative exploration of the complexities of the mind.

The Black real estate entrepreneur Philip Payton played a central role in Harlem's transformation into a Black community in the early twentieth century. In this biography, Kevin McGruder explores Payton's career and its implications for the history of residential segregation.

In this magisterial cultural and intellectual history, Thomas Bauer reconsiders classical and modern Islam by tracing differing attitudes toward ambiguity. Over a span of many centuries, he explores the tension between one strand that aspires to annihilate all uncertainties and a competing tendency that looks for ways to live with complexity.

Fifty years ago, the two leading German philosophers and sociologists since the Second World War, Jurgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann, embarked on a sweeping and contentious debate that would continue for decades. This is the first book in English about one of the most important conflicts in social theory today.

Guy Crosby offers a lively tour of the history and science behind the art of cooking, with a focus on achieving a healthy daily diet. He traces the evolution of cooking from its earliest origins, recounting the innovations that have unraveled the mysteries of health and taste.

Who are the millions of people marching against the Trump administration? American Resistance traces activists from the streets back to the communities and congressional districts around the country where they live, work, and vote. Using innovative data, Dana R. Fisher analyzes how resistance groups have channeled outrage into activism.

The Resistance in Western Europe is a sweeping analytical history of the underground anti-Nazi forces during World War II. Examining clandestine organizations in Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Italy, Olivier Wieviorka sheds new light on the factors that shaped the resistance and its place in Anglo-American military strategy.

Vice, Crime, and Poverty traces the untold history of the concept of the underworld and its representations in popular culture. From the Parisian demimonde to Victorian squalor, from the slums of New York to the sewers of Buenos Aires, Dominique Kalifa deciphers the making of an image that has cast an enduring spell on its audience.

Simultaneously an introduction to Hegel and a fundamental reimagining of Hegel's project, this book presents a radical Hegel for the twenty-first century. Todd McGowan contends that the revolutionary core of Hegel's thought is contradiction.

Fred Evans develops philosophical and political criteria for assessing how public art can respond to the fragility of democracy. He calls for considering such artworks as acts of citizenship, pointing to their capacity to resist autocratic tendencies and reveal new dimensions of democratic society.

Uncovering the melancholic tradition of the global left.

Drawing on Gregg Hartvigsen's extensive experience teaching biostatistics and modeling biological systems, this text is an engaging, practical, and lab-oriented introduction to R for students in the life sciences.

Peace on Our Terms is the first book to demonstrate the centrality of women's activism to the Paris Peace Conference and the critical diplomatic events of 1919. Mona L. Siegel tells the timely story of how female activists transformed women's rights into a global rallying cry, laying a foundation for generations to come.

The First Political Order is a groundbreaking demonstration that the persistent and systematic subordination of women underlies all other institutions, with wide-ranging implications for global security and development. It offers a new paradigm for understanding insecurity, instability, autocracy, and violence.

Karl Coplan shares his personal journey of attempting to cut back on carbon without giving up the amenities of a suburban middle-class lifestyle. Live Sustainably Now shows that there does not have to be a trade-off between the ethical obligation to maintain a sustainable carbon footprint and the belief that life should be fulfilling and fun.

Identifying a crucial link between poetic form and the forming of attention, Lucy Alford offers a new terminology for how poetic attention works and how attention becomes a subject and object of poetry. She combines close readings of a wide variety of poems with research in the philosophy, aesthetics, and psychology of attention.

From the Spanish Inquisition to Nazi Germany to the United States today, ordinary people have often chosen to turn in their neighbors to the authorities. In Judge Thy Neighbor, Patrick Bergemann provides a theoretical framework for understanding the motives for denunciations in terms of institutional structures and incentives.

Evan Friss traces the colorful and fraught history of bicycles-and bicyclists-in New York City. He uncovers the bicycle's place in the city over time, showing how the bicycle has served as a mirror of the city's changing social, economic, infrastructural, and cultural politics.

This book brings together leading scholars in social and political philosophy to develop new perspectives on recognition and its role in social life. It begins with a debate between Axel Honneth and Judith Butler, the first sustained engagement between these two major thinkers on this subject.

This book brings together leading scholars in social and political philosophy to develop new perspectives on recognition and its role in social life. It begins with a debate between Axel Honneth and Judith Butler, the first sustained engagement between these two major thinkers on this subject.

Traditional economic theory studies idealized markets in which prices alone can guide efficient allocation, with no need for central organization. Such models build from Adam Smith's famous concept of an invisible hand, which guides markets and renders regulation or interference largely unnecessary. Yet for many markets, prices alone are not enough to guide feasible and efficient outcomes, and regulation alone is not enough, either. Consider air traffic control at major airports. While prices could encourage airlines to take off and land at less congested times, prices alone do just part of the job; an air traffic control system is still indispensable to avoid disastrous consequences. With just an air traffic controller, however, limited resources can be wasted or poorly used. What's needed in this and many other real-world cases is an auction system that can effectively reveal prices while still maintaining enough direct control to ensure that complex constraints are satisfied.In Discovering Prices, Paul Milgrom-the world's most frequently cited academic expert on auction design-describes how auctions can be used to discover prices and guide efficient resource allocations, even when resources are diverse, constraints are critical, and market-clearing prices may not even exist. Economists have long understood that externalities and market power both necessitate market organization. In this book, Milgrom introduces complex constraints as another reason for market design. Both lively and technical, Milgrom roots his new theories in real-world examples (including the ambitious U.S. incentive auction of radio frequencies, whose design he led) and provides economists with crucial new tools for dealing with the world's growing complex resource allocation problems.

The Imjin War (1592-1598) was a grueling conflict that wreaked havoc on the towns and villages of the Korean Peninsula. The involvement of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean forces, not to mention the regional scope of the war, was the largest the world had seen, and the memory dominated East Asian memory until World War II. Despite massive regional realignments, Korea's Choson Dynasty endured, but within its polity a new, national discourse began to emerge. Meant to inspire civilians to rise up against the Japanese army, this potent rhetoric conjured a unified Korea and intensified after the Manchu invasions of 1627 and 1636.By documenting this phenomenon, JaHyun Kim Haboush offers a compelling counternarrative to Western historiography, which ties Korea's idea of nation to the imported ideologies of modern colonialism. She instead elevates the formative role of the conflicts that defined the second half of the Choson Dynasty, which had transfigured the geopolitics of East Asia and introduced a national narrative key to Korea's survival. Re-creating the cultural and political passions that bound Choson society together during this period, Haboush reclaims the root story of solidarity that helped Korea thrive well into the modern era.

The Story of the Stone is widely held to be the greatest work of Chinese literature. This book is a straightforward guide to a complex classic. Each chapter of the companion summarizes and comments on each chapter of the novel, providing English-speaking readers with the cultural context to enjoy the story and understand its world.

Initially created to counteract broadcasts from Nazi Germany, the BBC's Eastern Service became a cauldron of global modernism and an unlikely nexus of artistic exchange. Daniel Ryan Morse demonstrates the significance of the Eastern Service for global Anglophone literature and literary broadcasting.

Super Polluters offers a groundbreaking global analysis of carbon pollution caused by the generation of electricity. The sociologists Don Grant, Andrew Jorgenson, and Wesley Longhofer analyze a novel dataset on the carbon dioxide emissions and structural attributes of thousands of fossil-fueled power plants around the world.

Mary C. Rawlinson offers a critical analysis of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit that exposes three crucial elisions: Hegel's effacements of sexual difference, human mortality, and literary style. Demonstrating the power of Hegel's phenomenological method, The Betrayal of Substance is a magisterial rereading of this challenging masterwork.

In this major intellectual history, Ira Katznelson examines the works of Hannah Arendt, Robert Dahl, Richard Hofstadter, Karl Polanyi, and others. In light of their epoch's calamities, these intellectuals insisted that the tradition of Enlightenment thought required a new realism, a good deal of renovation, and much recommitment.

The so-called Chicago school has been a dominant presence in sociology since it emerged around the University of Chicago in the early decades of the twentieth century. Jean-Michel Chapoulie's groundbreaking book on the development and influence of the Chicago tradition provides a unique perspective on the history of social science.

This wide-ranging and powerful book argues that Theravada Buddhism provides ways of thinking about the self that can reinvigorate the humanities and offer broader insights into how to learn and how to act.