Books published by Princeton University Press

"What is the relationship between politics and morality? Should politicians violate moral constraints to achieve greater goods or to avoid disasters? Is it always wrong for politicians to lie and deceive? In Political Ethics: A Handbook, edited by Andrew Sabl and Edward Hall, a collection of leading experts in the field of political ethics offer an introduction to the key issues in this rapidly growing subfield of political theory. The essays cover a broad range of topics and themes relevant to stable democracies around the world, including the ethics of lobbying, leadership, partisanship, secrecy and whistleblowing, the role of representatives, compromise, emergency powers, political activism, public administration, and political corruption. These essays are written at a level accessible to undergraduates, as well as advanced scholars seeking scholarly introductions to the topics covered. Ultimately, the book considers how to evaluate political conduct from a realistic but ethically demanding standpoint, and offers a clear-eyed analysis of the ethical challenges inherent in political life in the twenty-first century"--

"What is the relationship between politics and morality? Should politicians violate moral constraints to achieve greater goods or to avoid disasters? Is it always wrong for politicians to lie and deceive? In Political Ethics: A Handbook, edited by Andrew Sabl and Edward Hall, a collection of leading experts in the field of political ethics offer an introduction to the key issues in this rapidly growing subfield of political theory. The essays cover a broad range of topics and themes relevant to stable democracies around the world, including the ethics of lobbying, leadership, partisanship, secrecy and whistleblowing, the role of representatives, compromise, emergency powers, political activism, public administration, and political corruption. These essays are written at a level accessible to undergraduates, as well as advanced scholars seeking scholarly introductions to the topics covered. Ultimately, the book considers how to evaluate political conduct from a realistic but ethically demanding standpoint, and offers a clear-eyed analysis of the ethical challenges inherent in political life in the twenty-first century"--

"The most remarkable history of biology that has ever been written."--Michel Foucault Nobel Prize-winning scientist François Jacob's The Logic of Life is a landmark book in the history of biology and science. Focusing on heredity, which Jacob considers the fundamental feature of living things, he shows how, since the sixteenth century, the scientific understanding of inherited traits has moved not in a linear, progressive way, from error to truth, but instead through a series of frameworks. He reveals how these successive interpretive approaches--focusing on visible structures, internal structures (especially cells), evolution, genes, and DNA and other molecules--each have their own power but also limitations. Fundamentally challenging how the history of biology is told, much as Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions did for the history of science as a whole, The Logic of Life has greatly influenced the way scientists and historians view the past, present, and future of biology.

One summer day in 1941, half of the Polish town of Jedwabne murdered the other half, 1,600 men, women, and children, all but seven of the town's Jews. Neighbors tells their story. This is a shocking, brutal story that has never before been told. It is the most important study of Polish-Jewish relations to be published in decades and should become a classic of Holocaust literature. Jan Gross pieces together eyewitness accounts and other evidence into an engulfing reconstruction of the horrific July day remembered well by locals but forgotten by history. His investigation reads like a detective story, and its unfolding yields wider truths about Jewish-Polish relations, the Holocaust, and human responses to occupation and totalitarianism. It is a story of surprises: The newly occupying German army did not compel the massacre, and Jedwabne's Jews and Christians had previously enjoyed cordial relations. After the war, the nearby family who saved Jedwabne's surviving Jews was derided and driven from the area. The single Jew offered mercy by the town declined it. Most arresting is the sinking realization that Jedwabne's Jews were clubbed, drowned, gutted, and burned not by faceless Nazis, but by people whose features and names they knew well: their former schoolmates and those who sold them food, bought their milk, and chatted with them in the street. As much as such a question can ever be answered, Neighbors tells us why. In many ways, this is a simple book. It is easy to read in a single sitting, and hard not to. But its simplicity is deceptive. Gross's new and persuasive answers to vexed questions rewrite the history of twentieth-century Poland. This book proves, finally, that the fates of Poles and Jews during World War II can be comprehended only together.

"Although the influence of the Brothers Grimm on folklore in virtually every country in the West has been widely studied, a similar development in the early part of twentieth-century China is virtually unknown. This book collects and translates more than 40 tales selected from the "Lin Lan" series, published in China from the late 1920s to the early 1930s. The pseudonym "Lin Lan" was created in 1924, when a group of three literary stories about the legendary Xu Wenchang (1521-1593), himself the author of many literary works still popular today, were published in a morning newspaper. The success of this first attempt encouraged the creators to publish more folk tales and fairy tales, which ultimately played a major role in the development of modern folk literature in China. The series, written and developed by a Shanghai publisher under the pen name Lin Lan, was divided into three subgenres-minjian chuanshuo (folk legends/tales), minjian tonghua (folk fairy tales), and minjian qushi (comic folk tales)-published in 43 volumes containing nearly one thousand tales in all. The tales were collected the tales from oral storytellers throughout China in response to a call from the publisher, and combined elements of European fairy-tale literature with traditional Chinese narratives"--

"This book unfolds the untold history of one of the United States' most notable civil rights crises from the perspective of academic leaders"--

"A book that examines the growing population of mixed minority-white backgrounds and society"--

"Donald Trump took office in 2017 amid an increasingly polarized political field. He quickly carved out a loyal base among the radical wing of the Republican party, dominated the news cycle with an endless stream of controversies, and, with the support of his voting base and party, presided over one of the most publicized, dramatic, and contentious one-term presidencies in American history. In The Presidency of Donald J. Trump, Julian Zelizer gathers leading American historians to put President Trump and his administration into political and historical context. These scholars offer strikingly original assessments of the central issues that shaped the Trump years, including the #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter movements, Trump's crusade against media he dubbed "fake news," the border wall and immigration more broadly, the rapid rise of open white supremacy, the national COVID-19 response, the calls to "defund the police," the efforts to contest the outcome of the election, and the January 6th insurrection, among others. Together, these essays argue that the Trump presidency was not unprecedented, but it represented and emerged from the long-term development of the Republican Party and American polarization more broadly"--

"Donald Trump took office in 2017 amid an increasingly polarized political field. He quickly carved out a loyal base among the radical wing of the Republican party, dominated the news cycle with an endless stream of controversies, and, with the support of his voting base and party, presided over one of the most publicized, dramatic, and contentious one-term presidencies in American history. In The Presidency of Donald J. Trump, Julian Zelizer gathers leading American historians to put President Trump and his administration into political and historical context. These scholars offer strikingly original assessments of the central issues that shaped the Trump years, including the #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter movements, Trump's crusade against media he dubbed "fake news," the border wall and immigration more broadly, the rapid rise of open white supremacy, the national COVID-19 response, the calls to "defund the police," the efforts to contest the outcome of the election, and the January 6th insurrection, among others. Together, these essays argue that the Trump presidency was not unprecedented, but it represented and emerged from the long-term development of the Republican Party and American polarization more broadly"--

"The Joshua Generation examines the book of Joshua's many lives, from its relationship to ancient political forms to the present Israeli Occupation. Its scope encompasses the nationalist celebrations and the stringent critiques of the biblical volume along with their impacts on political discourse and lived space"--

A leading political theorist's groundbreaking defense of ideal conceptions of justice in political philosophyThroughout the history of political philosophy and politics, there has been continual debate about the roles of idealism versus realism. For contemporary political philosophy, this debate manifests in notions of ideal theory versus nonideal theory. Nonideal thinkers shift their focus from theorizing about full social justice, asking instead which feasible institutional and political changes would make a society more just. Ideal thinkers, on the other hand, question whether full justice is a standard that any society is likely ever to satisfy. And, if social justice is unrealistic, are attempts to understand it without value or importance, and merely utopian?Utopophobia argues against thinking that justice must be realistic, or that understanding justice is only valuable if it can be realized. David Estlund does not offer a particular theory of justice, nor does he assert that justice is indeed unrealizable-only that it could be, and this possibility upsets common ways of proceeding in political thought. Estlund engages critically with important strands in traditional and contemporary political philosophy that assume a sound theory of justice has the overriding, defining task of contributing practical guidance toward greater social justice. Along the way, he counters several tempting perspectives, including the view that inquiry in political philosophy could have significant value only as a guide to practical political action, and that understanding true justice would necessarily have practical value, at least as an ideal arrangement to be approximated.Demonstrating that unrealistic standards of justice can be both sound and valuable to understand, Utopophobia stands as a trenchant defense of ideal theory in political philosophy.

In the past several decades, there has been a growing chorus of voices contending that the Supreme Court and federal judiciary should stay out of foreign affairs and leave the field to Congress and the president. Challenging this idea, Restoring the Global Judiciary argues instead for a robust judicial role in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy.

Revision of author's dissertation, Assembling the cure: Materia Medica and the culture of healing in late imperial China--Harvard University, 2014.

Notable writersΓÇöincluding UK poet laureate Simon Armitage, Julian Barnes, Margaret MacMillan, and Jenny UglowΓÇöcelebrate our fascination with the houses of famous literary figures, artists, composers, and politicians of the pastWhat can a house tell us about the person who lives there? Do we shape the buildings we live in, or are we formed by the places we call home? And why are we especially fascinated by the houses of the famous and often long-dead? In Lives of Houses, notable biographers, historians, critics, and poets explores these questions and more through fascinating essays on the houses of great writers, artists, composers, and politicians of the past.Editors Kate Kennedy and Hermione Lee are joined by wide-ranging contributors, including Simon Armitage, Julian Barnes, David Cannadine, Roy Foster, Alexandra Harris, Daisy Hay, Margaret MacMillan, Alexander Masters, and Jenny Uglow. We encounter W. H. Auden, living in joyful squalor in New York''s St. Mark''s Place, and W. B. Yeats in his flood-prone tower in the windswept West of Ireland. We meet Benjamin Disraeli, struggling to keep up appearances, and track the lost houses of Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen. We visit Benjamin Britten in Aldeburgh, England, and Jean Sibelius at Ainola, Finland. But Lives of Houses also considers those who are unhoused, unwilling or unable to establish a homeΓÇöfrom the bewildered poet John Clare wandering the byways of England to the exiled Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera living on the streets of London.With more than forty illustrations, Lives of Houses illuminates what houses mean to us and how we use them to connect to and think about the past. The result is a fresh and engaging look at house and home.Featuring Alexandra Harris on moving house ΓùÅ Susan Walker on Morocco''s ancient Roman House of Venus ΓùÅ Hermione Lee on biographical quests for writersΓÇÖ houses ΓùÅ Margaret MacMillan on her mother''s Toronto house ΓùÅ a poem by Maura Dooley, "Visiting Orchard House, Concord, Massachusetts"ΓÇöthe house in which Louisa May Alcott wrote and set her novel Little Women ΓùÅ Felicity James on William and Dorothy Wordsworth''s Dove Cottage ΓùÅ Robert Douglas-Fairhurst at home with Tennyson ΓùÅ David Cannadine on Winston Churchill''s dream house, Chartwell ΓùÅ Jenny Uglow on Edward Lear at San Remo''s Villa Emily ΓùÅ Lucy Walker on Benjamin Britten at Aldeburgh, England ΓùÅ Seamus Perry on W. H. Auden at 77 St. Mark''s Place, New York City ΓùÅ Rebecca Bullard on Samuel Johnson''s houses ΓùÅ a poem by Simon Armitage, "The Manor" ΓùÅ Daisy Hay at home with the Disraelis ΓùÅ Laura Marcus on H. G. Wells at Uppark ΓùÅ Alexander Masters on the fear of houses ΓùÅ Elleke Boehmer on sites associated with Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera ΓùÅ Kate Kennedy on the mental asylums where World War I poet Ivor Gurney spent the last years of his life ΓùÅ a poem by Bernard O''Donoghue, "Safe Houses" ΓùÅ Roy Foster on W. B. Yeats and Thoor Ballylee ΓùÅ Sandra Mayer on W. H. Auden''s Austrian home ΓùÅ Gillian Darley on John Soane and the autobiography of houses ΓùÅ Julian Barnes on Jean Sibelius and Ainola