Books published by Stanford University Press

The Re-Enchantment of the World is an interdisciplinary volume that challenges the long-prevailing view of modernity as "disenchanted." There is of course something to the widespread idea, so memorably put into words by Max Weber, that modernity is characterized by the "progressive disenchantment of the world." Yet what is less often recognized is the fact that a powerful counter-tendency runs alongside this one, an overwhelming urge to fill the vacuum left by departed convictions, and to do so without invoking superseded belief systems. In fact, modernity produces an array of strategies for re-enchantment, each fully compatible with secular rationality. It has to, because God has many "aspects"¿or to put it in more secular terms, because traditional religion offers so much in so many domains. From one thinker to the next, the question of just what, in religious enchantment, needs to be replaced in a secular world receives an entirely different answer. Now, for the first time, many of these strategies are laid out in a single volume, with contributions by specialists in literature, history, and philosophy.

State-of-the-art reinterpretations of the reasons for Japan's decision to surrender, by distinguished historians of differing national perspectives and differing views.

"This analysis of financialization ultimately exposes weaknesses in the rentier thesis (made popular by Piketty), which assumes the inevitability of inequality as an outcome of slower economic growth in advanced societies. After demonstrating that the roots of such inequality lay in social structural arrangements of our own making, Prechel considers pre-conditions to change"--

This book addresses digital cultural formation through four dominant technological platforms over the past two decades in China.

A radical rethinking of hierarchy as a moral idiom through an ethnography of professional thieves in northern India.

Wayne Soon tells the global health story of Overseas Chinese who transformed medicine in China and Taiwan through the practices of military medicine, blood banking, mobile medicine, and mass medical training.