Böcker utgivna av The University of Chicago Press

Two and a half centuries after the American Revolution the US stands as one of the greatest powers on earth and the undoubted leader of the western hemisphere. The author maintains that the Founding Fathers clearly understood the connection between public finance and power: a well-managed public debt was a key part of every modern state.

Arabs have traditionally considered classical Arabic poetry, together with the Qur'an, as one of their supreme cultural accomplishments. Taking a comparatist approach, this book attempts to integrate the classical Arabic lyric into an enlarged understanding of lyric poetry as a genre.

"This wholly original book provides the untold history of punishment inside prisons. Legal scholar Judith Resnik charts the invention of the corrections profession that imposed radical restrictions on human movement as if doing so was normal. She weaves together the stories of people who debated how to punish and the stories of people living under the regimes that resulted. Resnik excavates the first-ever international rules aiming to improve the treatment of prisoners, which the League of Nations adopted in 1934 as the Nazis rose to power. Her transatlantic account documents the impact of World War II, the United Nations, the US Civil Rights Movement, and pioneering prisoners who insisted law protected their dignity as individuals. Resnik maps the results, including a trial of whipping--Arkansas' preferred "discipline" in the 1960s--and challenges thereafter to hyper-crowded cells, filth, violence, and profound isolation. Resnik tracks the cross-border expansion of the prison industry, waves of abolition efforts, and the impact of legal precepts rejecting "excessive," "cruel and unusual," and "degrading" sanctions. Exploring the interdependency of people in and out of prisons, Impermissible Punishments argues that governments committed to equality cannot set out to ruin people and therefore many contemporary forms of punishment need to end"--

The continuation of Alexis de Toccqueville's great meditation on the origins and meanings of the French Revolution. With his monumental work The Old Regime and the Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59)-best known for his classic Democracy in America-envisioned a multivolume philosophical study of the origins of modern France that would examine the implications of French history on the nature and development of democratic society. Volume I, which covered the eighteenth-century background to the Revolution, was published to great acclaim in 1856. On the continuation of this project, he wrote: "When this Revolution has finished its work, [this volume] will show what that work really was, and what the new society which has come from that violent labor is, what the Revolution has taken away and what it has preserved from that old regime against which it was directed." Tocqueville died in the midst of this work. Here in Volume II is all that he had completed, including the chapters he started for a work on Napoleon, notes and analyses he made in the course of researching and writing the first volume, and his notes on his preparation for his continuation. More than ever before, readers will be able to glean how Tocqueville's account of the Revolution would have come out, had he lived to finish it. This handsomely produced volume completes the set and is essential reading for anyone interested in the French Revolution or in Tocqueville's thought.

"Stâephane Gerson's edited collection spotlights historians who have embraced the methodological, practical, and ethical challenges of writing about that most slippery and opaque of subjects, their own families-a practice that many historians have long felt has been discouraged professionally. In a remarkable number of ways, the diverse lineup of contributors here bring into the open the difficulties and complexities-personal, professional, and historiographic-that ensue from not distancing themselves from their subjects but stressing their closeness. Gerson suggests that historians overall might write better histories if they felt free to acknowledge that what speaks to them professionally might also be what moves them personally"--

"Stâephane Gerson's edited collection spotlights historians who have embraced the methodological, practical, and ethical challenges of writing about that most slippery and opaque of subjects, their own families-a practice that many historians have long felt has been discouraged professionally. In a remarkable number of ways, the diverse lineup of contributors here bring into the open the difficulties and complexities-personal, professional, and historiographic-that ensue from not distancing themselves from their subjects but stressing their closeness. Gerson suggests that historians overall might write better histories if they felt free to acknowledge that what speaks to them professionally might also be what moves them personally"--

Offers an expansive, unified theory of thought that brings together the vast resources of neuroscience, computation, and cognitive linguistics. What is an idea, and where does it come from? We experience thought as if it were abstract, but every thought is actually a physical thing, carried out by the neural systems of our brains. Thought does not occur neuron-by-neuron; it happens when neurons come together to form circuits and when simple circuits combine to form complex ones. Thoughts, then, derive their structures from the circuitry we also use for vision, touch, and hearing. This circuitry is what allows simple thoughts to come together into complex concepts, making meaning, creating metaphors, and framing our social and political ideas. With The Neural Mind, George Lakoff, a pioneering cognitive linguist, and computer scientist Srini Narayanan deftly combine insights from cognitive science, computational modeling, and linguistics to show how thoughts arise from the neural circuitry that runs throughout our bodies. They answer key questions about the ways we make meaning: How does neural circuitry create the conceptual "frames" through which we understand our social lives? What kind of neural circuitry characterizes metaphorical thought, in which ideas are understood in terms of other ideas with similar structures? Lively and accessible, the book shows convincingly that the "metaphors we live by"--to use Lakoff's famous phrase--aren't abstractions but deeply embodied neural constructs. The Neural Mind is the first book of its kind, bringing together the ideas of multiple disciplines to offer a unified, accessible theory of thought. A field-defining work, Lakoff and Narayanan's book will be of interest not just to linguists and cognitive scientists, but also to psychologists, philosophers, anthropologists, journalists, sociologists, and political scientists--and to anyone who wants to understand how we really think.

"Along with Dante and Petrarch, Boccaccio (1313-1375) is one of the "Three Crowns" of Italian literature, a trio of writers who shaped the history of humanism, literature, and poetry in Italy, Europe, and beyond. Much as Dante established vernacular Italian in poetry, Boccaccio did the same for prose, most notably in his best-known work, the Decameron, an unforgettable work that takes an unflinching look at human passion, celebrates storytelling and community as a means of survival. This major biography by the esteemed literary scholar Marco Santagata sheds new light on Boccaccio's life-his family, friends, and foes; his aspirations, fears, and frustrations. Santagata shows in this rich portrait how the transformations Italy was undergoing at the time affected Boccaccio at various stages of his life. Most importantly, he shows how the world around him shaped Boccaccio's understanding of what literature could be; what kinds of stories it could or should convey and what kinds of characters it could depict; and, perhaps most importantly, what role literature and art can play in a changing world. This work promises to be the definitive biography of Boccaccio for many years to come"--