Books published by The University of Chicago Press

An intelligent, engaging, and in-depth reading of the nature of the state and the establishment of the modern political order in the mid-nineteenth century. Previous studies have covered in great detail how the modern state slowly emerged from the early Renaissance through the seventeenth century, but we know relatively little about the next great act: the birth and transformation of the modern democratic state. And in an era where our democratic institutions are rife with conflict, it's more important now than ever to understand how our institutions came into being. Stephen W. Sawyer's Demos Assembled provides us with a fresh, transatlantic understanding of that political order's genesis. While the French influence on American political development is well understood, Sawyer sheds new light on the subsequent reciprocal influence that American thinkers and politicians had on the establishment of post-revolutionary regimes in France. He argues that the emergence of the stable Third Republic (1870-1940), which is typically said to have been driven by idiosyncratic internal factors, was in fact a deeply transnational, dynamic phenomenon. Sawyer's findings reach beyond their historical moment, speaking broadly to conceptions of state formation: how contingent claims to authority, whether grounded in violence or appeals to reason and common cause, take form as stateness.

Looks at the shift from the marketplace as an actual place to a theoretical idea and how this shaped the early American economy. When we talk about the economy, "the market" is often just an abstraction. While the exchange of goods was historically tied to a particular place, capitalism has gradually eroded this connection to create our current global trading systems. In Trading Spaces, Emma Hart argues that Britain's colonization of North America was a key moment in the market's shift from place to idea, with major consequences for the character of the American economy. Hart's book takes in the shops, auction sites, wharves, taverns, fairs, and homes of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America--places where new mechanisms and conventions of trade arose as Europeans re-created or adapted continental methods to new surroundings. Since those earlier conventions tended to rely on regulation more than their colonial offspring did, what emerged in early America was a less-fettered brand of capitalism. By the nineteenth century, this had evolved into a market economy that would not look too foreign to contemporary Americans. To tell this complex transnational story of how our markets came to be, Hart looks back farther than most historians of US capitalism, rooting these markets in the norms of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain. Perhaps most important, this is not a story of specific commodity markets over time but rather is a history of the trading spaces themselves: the physical sites in which the grubby work of commerce occurred and where the market itself was born.

What does it mean to market yourself as a business in today's job search world? Finding a job used to be simple. Now . . . well, it's complicated. In today's economy, you can't just be an employee looking to get hired--you have to market yourself as a business, one that can help another business achieve its goals. That's a radical transformation in how we think about work and employment, says Ilana Gershon. And with Down and Out in the New Economy, she digs deep into that change and what it means, not just for job seekers, but for businesses and our very culture. In telling her story, Gershon covers all parts of the employment spectrum: she interviews hiring managers about how they assess candidates; attends personal branding seminars; talks with managers at companies around the United States to suss out regional differences--like how Silicon Valley firms look askance at the lengthier employment tenures of applicants from the Midwest. And she finds that not everything has changed: though the technological trappings may be glitzier, in a lot of cases, who you know remains more important than what you know. Rich in the voices of people deeply involved with all parts of the employment process, Down and Out in the New Economy offers a snapshot of the quest for work today--and a pointed analysis of its larger meaning.

A powerful dissection of a core American myth. The idea that the United States is unlike every other country in world history is a surprisingly resilient one. Throughout his distinguished career, Ian Tyrrell has been one of the most influential historians of the idea of American exceptionalism, but he has never written a book focused solely on it until now. The notion that American identity might be exceptional emerged, Tyrrell shows, from the belief that the nascent early republic was not simply a postcolonial state but a genuinely new experiment in an imperialist world dominated by Britain. Prior to the Civil War, American exceptionalism fostered declarations of cultural, economic, and spatial independence. As the country grew in population and size, becoming a major player in the global order, its exceptionalist beliefs came more and more into focus--and into question. Over time, a political divide emerged: those who believed that America's exceptionalism was the basis of its virtue and those who saw America as either a long way from perfect or actually fully unexceptional, and thus subject to universal demands for justice. Tyrrell masterfully articulates the many forces that made American exceptionalism such a divisive and definitional concept. Today, he notes, the demands that people acknowledge America's exceptionalism have grown ever more strident, even as the material and moral evidence for that exceptionalism--to the extent that there ever was any--has withered away.

"Albert Camus's novel The Plague will go down in literary history as one of the most talked about books of the Covid-19 crisis. Originally intended as an allegory of World War II, this story of an Algerian city gripped by an epidemic has been a staple of literature classes since 1947. Generations of students have learned that Camus was "really" writing about his experience of occupied Paris. In 2020, that reading tradition was transformed. The epidemic brought the novel close to readers who began to read it as a book about their own lives-a book to help them get through a global health crisis. Alice Kaplan, who teaches Camus at Yale, and Laura Marris, translator of a new edition of The Plague, wondered how Camus could know so much about what we were living through in mid-2020. His novel has it all: the official denials in the face of mounting deaths, the end of travel, the separation from one another during quarantine, the numbing grief. They wrote States of Plague in response-as a guide to these moments where the written and the real collide. For many people, The Plague feels personal now. And through this lens, certain features became vital: Camus's sensitivity toward illness, his experience of a contagious disease, the cost of separation in his own life, and the psychology and politics of the city in quarantine. Because they come to the book from different perspectives, Kaplan and Marris alternate their voices so that their chapters offer two complementary ways of looking at Camus. They find that their sense of Camus evolves under the force of a new reality, alongside the pressures of illness, recovery, concern, and care in their own lives. Kaplan herself is struggling with a case if Covid as the book opens; as it closes, Marris receives her first vaccine shot. In between, they find, aspects of Camus's novel that once seemed merely literary spoke directly to their own fear and grief. They uncover for us the mysterious way a great writer can imagine the world during a crisis and draw back the veil on our possible futures"--

"This book contains the text of Thomas Kuhn's unfinished book, The Plurality of Worlds: An Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Development, which Kuhn himself described as "a return to the central claims of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and the problems that it raised but did not resolve." The Plurality of Worlds is preceded by two related texts that Kuhn publicly delivered but never published in English: his paper "Scientific Knowledge as a Historical Product" and his Shearman Memorial Lectures, "The Presence of Past Science." The book opens with an introduction by the editor that describes the origins and structure of The Plurality of Worlds, and sheds light on its central philosophical problems. Kuhn's aims in his last writings are bold. He sets out to develop an empirically grounded theory of meaning that would allow him to make sense of both the possibility of historical understanding and the inevitability of incommensurability between past and present science. Moreover, he intends to show that incommensurability is fully compatible with a robust notion of a real world that science investigates, with the rationality of scientific belief change, and with the idea that scientific development is progressive. This is a must-read follow-up to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, one of the most important books of the twentieth century"--

Often overshadowed by the magnificence of his achievements as a visual artist is Michelangelo's devotion to poetry. Here is a collection of his poetic works translated to capture all the pathos, complexity, and ardor of both his language and his poetic temperament.

A unique and haunting first-person Holocaust account by Zalmen Gradowski, a Sonderkommando prisoner killed in Auschwitz. On October 7, 1944, a group of Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz obtained explosives and rebelled against their Nazi murderers. It was a desperate uprising that was defeated by the end of the day. More than four hundred prisoners were killed. Filling a gap in history, The Last Consolation Vanished is the first complete English translation and critical edition of one prisoner's powerful account of life and death in Auschwitz, written in Yiddish and buried in the ashes near Crematorium III. Zalmen Gradowski was in the Sonderkommando (special squad) at Auschwitz, a Jewish prisoner given the unthinkable task of ushering Jewish deportees into the gas chambers, removing their bodies, salvaging any valuables, transporting their corpses to the crematoria, and destroying all evidence of their murders. Sonderkommandos were forcibly recruited by SS soldiers; when they discovered the horror of their assignment, some of them committed suicide or tried to induce the SS to kill them. Despite their impossible situation, many Sonderkommandos chose to resist in two interlaced ways: planning an uprising and testifying. Gradowski did both, by helping to lead a rebellion and by documenting his experiences. Within 120 scrawled notebook pages, his accounts describe the process of the Holocaust, the relentless brutality of the Nazi regime, the assassination of Czech Jews, the relationships among the community of men forced to assist in this nightmare, and the unbearable separation and death of entire families, including his own. Amid daily unimaginable atrocities, he somehow wrote pages that were literary, sometimes even lyrical--hidden where and when one would least expect to find them. The October 7th rebellion was completely crushed and Gradowski was killed in the process, but his testimony lives on. His extraordinary and moving account, accompanied by a foreword and afterword by Philippe Mesnard and Arnold I. Davidson, is a voice speaking to us from the past on behalf of millions who were silenced. Their story must be shared.

James Boyd White addresses questions about how we imagine the world, and ourselves, and others within it. Also how we use imagination to give meaning to past experiences and to shape future ones.

The Ait Mazine of northern Morocco reenact the story of Abraham as a ritual sacrifice, a symbolic observance of submission to the divine. After comes a bacchanalian masquerade which seems to violate every principle the sacrifice affirmed. This study reunites them as a single ritual process.

A collection of writing on the experience of teaching.

With a perpetually tight job market, the road to an academic career can be a rocky and frustrating one. There are lots of questions, and this book attempts to provide good, frank answers to them.

This text, using examples ranging from Samuel Johnson and Jane Austen to Donald Barthelme and Anita Brookner, examines the influence that the concept of "boredom" exerts on the literary imagination.

This collection of 12 theoretical essays spans more than 40 years of research in order to explore the bases of human action and society. Framed by a new introduction and an extensive epilogue, the essays trace the major developments of contemporary sociological theory and analysis.

Through the figure of the "heterological historian", this text creates a framework for the understanding of history and the ethical duties of the historian. It also weighs the impact of modern archival methods, such as film and the Internet, which add new constraints to the writing of history.

The gypsies of central France, the Manus, do not speak of their dead and burn or discard all the deceased belongings. Patrick Williams argues that this view of death is central to how the Manus see the world and their place in it.

Postcolonial novelists such as Salman Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul are widely celebrated, yet the achievements of postcolonial poets have been strangely neglected. This work argues that postcolonial poets have also dramatically expanded the atlas of literature in English.

When we think about what constitutes being a good citizen, routine activities like voting, letter-writing, and paying attention to the news spring to mind. This title argues that these activities play only a small part in democratic citizenship - a form of citizenship that requires creative thinking, talking, and acting.

In this volume Levi-Strauss explores the mythologies of the Americas, with occasional incursions into European and Japanese folklore, tales of sloths and squirrels are interwoven with discussions of Freud, Saussure, "signification," and plays by Sophocles and Labiche.

From autobiographical writings, this book reconstructs the extraordinary life of Thomas Platter and the lives of his sons. It expands the historical contexts of these accounts and, in the process, brings to life the customs, perceptions and character of an age on the threshold of modernity.

Addresses the 20th-century study of mysticism as a kind of mystical tradition in its own right, with its own unique histories, discourses, sociological dynamics, and rhetorics of secrecy. Jeffrey J. Kripal examines the lives and works of five historians of mysticism.

In this ethnography of babies, Alma Gottlieb focusses on the Beng people of West Africa. A Beng infant is thought to begin life filled with spiritual knowledge, having been reincarnated after a rich life in a previous world.

This work discusses whether Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" was revolutionary. Steve Fuller argues that Kuhn held a profoundly conservative view of science and how one ought to study its history.

How is historical knowledge produced? And how do silence and forgetting figure in the knowledge we call history? This exploration of these questions exposes the circumstantial nature of history, revealing the economic, social and political forces at play in history's production.

Completely bilingual, this dictionary focuses on two contemporary international languages, American English and a worldwide Spanish rooted in both Latin American and Iberian sources. It has been updated with six thousand new words and meanings selected for their frequency of use, rising popularity, and situational necessity.

In "Ecce Homo" (1888), Nietzsche quoted that before him `... there simply was no psychology'. This study focuses on this pronouncement, examining the contours of Nietzsche's psychology in the context of his life, work and psychological make-up.