"How Commerce Became Legal"

New from Stanford University Press: How Commerce Became Legal: Merchants and Market Governance in Nineteenth-Century Egypt by Omar Youssef Cheta.

About the book, from the publisher:

When Egypt's markets opened to private capital in the 1840s, a new infrastructure of commercial laws and institutions emerged. Egypt became the site of profound legal experimentation, and the resulting commercial sphere reflected the political contestations among the governors of Egypt, European consulates, Ottoman rulers, and a growing number of private entrepreneurs, both foreign and local. How Commerce Became Legal explores the legal and business practices that resulted from this fusion of Ottoman, French, and Islamic legal concepts and governed commerce in Egypt.

Focusing on the decades between the formalization of Cairo's practical autonomy within the Ottoman Empire in the 1840s and its incorporation into the British Empire in the 1880s, Omar Cheta considers how modern laws redefined the commercial sphere, shaping a mode of market governance that would persist for decades to come. He highlights the demarcation of a new law-defined commercial realm separate from the land regime and from civil or family-centered exchanges, and reconstructs these changes through both legal codes and state orders, as well as individual merchant voices preserved in court documents. As this book documents both individual experiences and structural explanations, it offers a rare perspective on the scope and reach of market governance over the mid nineteenth century, revealing changes simultaneously from within and without state institutions.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The War on Illahee"

New from Yale University Press: The War on Illahee: Genocide, Complicity, and Cover-Ups in the Pioneer Northwest by Marc James Carpenter.

About the book, from the publisher:

How a generation of pioneers and their historians knowingly hid the violent history of Indigenous dispossession in the Pacific Northwest

The small, mostly forgotten wars of the 1850s in the American Pacific Northwest were part of a broader genocidal war—the War on Illahee—to seize Native land for Euro‑Americans. Illahee (a term for “homeland” in Chinook) was turned into the states of Oregon and Washington through the violence of invading soldiers, settlers, and serial killers. Clashes over the brutality of invasion—should it be celebrated, isolated, or erased?—left behind accidental archives of atrocity, as history writers disagreed over which stories they should tell and which stories they could sell. By the 1920s, the War on Illahee had been disappeared.

Drawing on records from the perpetrators themselves, the papers of historians, and previously suppressed evidence from Indigenous survivors, Marc James Carpenter has written both a new history of pioneer atrocities within and beyond the wars on Native people in the American Pacific Northwest, and a new history of how these wars were remembered, commemorated, and forgotten. The overlapping distortions have embedded inaccuracies in our histories and textbooks all the way to the present. Beyond reshaping the history of the Pacific Northwest, this searing book opens broader conversations about settler colonialism, historical memory, problematic monuments, and the historical profession.

--Mashal Zeringue

"The Limits of Liberty"

New from Oxford University Press: The Limits of Liberty by Sarah Conly.

About the book, from the publisher:

When does liberty matter? It is often thought that personal liberty is always valuable and that it has a unique intrinsic value. In The Limits of Liberty, philosopher Sarah Conly argues that it is much less valuable than traditionally believed. Conly posits that liberty only has value for its consequences-liberties that bring good things have value, but liberties that bring bad consequences have no value. This means that in many cases where liberty has been valued, we are mistaken. Restrictions on certain liberties are more acceptable than commonly thought.

The Limits of Liberty lays the groundwork for this argument, then delves into controversial policy revisions across various areas. In medical ethics, Conly proposes that patient autonomy should be respected less than it currently is, highlighting instances of people being vaccinated against their will. In environmental ethics, the problem of incremental harms is discussed- particularly when each person contributes a small amount to an overall harm and thus feels no responsibility. The argument is made that each person is morally responsible for environmentally harmful actions, and that there is a duty, enforceable by the government if necessary, to eat less meat and have fewer children.

When it comes to the ethics of personal expression, Conly argues for more restrictions on speech. Specifically, that there should be greater legal liability for internet speech than currently exists. In the realm of religion, a case can be made against religious accommodation, the policy of making exceptions to laws for people whose religion is contrary to the law. Ultimately, The Limits of Liberty offers novel policy recommendations in medical ethics, environmental ethics, freedom of speech policy, and freedom of religion, challenging traditional views on the value of personal liberty.

The Page 99 Test: Against Autonomy.

Writers Read: Sarah Conly (December 2012.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Man Up"

New from Princeton University Press: Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism by Cynthia Miller-Idriss.

About the book, from the publisher:

The revelatory and urgent story of how an explosion of misogyny is driving a surge of mass and far-right violence throughout the West—from an internationally recognized extremism expert and media commentator

What two things do most mass shooters, terrorists, or violent extremists have in common? Most of us know the first: they are almost always men or boys. But the second? They are almost always virulent misogynists, homophobes, or transphobes—even if they are also motivated by racism, antisemitism, or xenophobia. The antigovernment militiamen charged with plotting to kidnap and execute Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer used language saturated with misogyny, with one telling an FBI informant, “Just grab the bitch.” The men who killed scores at Virginia Tech, the Pulse nightclub, and a Maryland newsroom all had prior reports of stalking, domestic violence, or harassment of women. And in dozens of other incidents—from North America to Norway to New Zealand—an increasing number of misogynist incel (involuntary celibate) and male supremacist attackers have explicitly targeted and killed women, blaming feminism or sexual frustration with women as motivation for their attacks.

Yet, despite all evidence, the bright red thread of misogyny running through these attacks is barely acknowledged by the media or even experts—and this failing leaves us powerless to stop the violence. In Man Up, Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a leading expert on extremism, addresses this crucial oversight head-on, revealing how an epidemic of misogyny—both online and off—and a patriarchal backlash are driving an exponential rise in mass and far-right violence. She also offers essential strategies that all of us—including parents, teachers, and counselors—can use to fight the rising tide of violence, beginning with recognizing the misogyny that pervades our everyday lives.

Visit Cynthia Miller-Idriss's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Extreme Gone Mainstream.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Unrefined: How Capitalism Reinvented Sugar"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Unrefined: How Capitalism Reinvented Sugar by David Singerman.

About the book, from the publisher:

A surprising look at how modern capitalism changed sugar from a natural food to a scientific commodity.

Sugar is everywhere in the western diet, blamed for epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and other modern maladies. Our addiction to sweetness has a long and unsavory history. Over the past five hundred years, sugar has shaped empires, made fortunes for a few, and brought misery for millions of workers both enslaved and free. How did sugar become a defining modern food and an essential global commodity?

In Unrefined, David Singerman recasts our thinking about this crucial substance in the history of capitalism. Before the nineteenth century, sugar’s value depended on natural qualities: its color, its taste, where it was grown, and who had made it. But beginning around 1850, a combination of plantation owners, industrialists, and scientists set out to redefine sugar itself. Deploying the tools and rhetoric of science, they transformed not just how sugar was produced or traded but even how people thought about it. By changing sugar into a pure chemical object, these forces stripped power from workers and enabled—and obscured—new kinds of fraud, corruption, and monopoly.

Taking us to unexplored spaces in the world of sugar, from laboratories and docks to refineries and the halls of Congress, Singerman illuminates dark intersections of the histories of corruption, science, and capitalism.

Visit David Singerman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Fighting with the Past"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Fighting with the Past: How Seventeenth-Century History Shaped the American Civil War by Aaron Sheehan-Dean.

About the book, from the publisher:

Civil War Americans, like people today, used the past to understand and traverse their turbulent present. As Aaron Sheehan-Dean reveals in this fascinating work of comparative intellectual history, nineteenth-century Americans were especially conversant with narratives of the English Civil Wars of the 1600s. Northerners and Southerners alike drew from histories of the English past to make sense of their own conflict, interpreting the events of the past in drastically different ways. Confederates, for example, likened themselves to England’s Royalists (also known as Cavaliers), hoping to preserve a social order built on hierarchy and claiming the right to resist what they perceived as radicals' assaults on tradition. Meanwhile, conservative Northerners painted President Lincoln as a tyrant in the mold of English Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, while radical abolitionists drew inspiration from Cromwell and sought to rebuild the South as Cromwell had attempted with Ireland.

Surveying two centuries of history-making and everyday engagement with historical thought, Sheehan-Dean convincingly argues that history itself was a battlefront of the American Civil War, with narratives of the past exercising surprising agency in interpretations of the nineteenth-century present. Sheehan-Dean’s discoveries provide an entirely fresh perspective on the role of historical memory in the Civil War era and offer a broader meditation on the construction and uses of history itself.

Visit Aaron Sheehan-Dean's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Fruitfulness of Normative Concepts"

New from Oxford University Press: The Fruitfulness of Normative Concepts by Matthew Lindauer.

About the book, from the publisher:

Can philosophical concepts do real work in improving our world? Should we, when evaluating competing understandings of concepts like 'justice' and 'solidarity,' take into account whether these different understandings can actually help us to fight injustice and promote solidarity between people? The Fruitfulness of Normative Concepts is the first book-length attempt to argue that the answer to both of these questions is an emphatic “yes.” In doing so, it provides a bold new defense of a tight relationship between theory and practice. Drawing on cutting-edge scientific research, the book also demonstrates that we now have the tools to evaluate the practical value of normative concepts.

Moral and political philosophers should be and have often been, explicitly or implicitly, interested in a number of dimensions of fruitfulness that Matthew Lindauer delineates, and it is an empirical question whether a given concept is fruitful in these ways. These dimensions of fruitfulness include the extent to which moral and political concepts (i) motivate the right kinds of behavior when internalized (Motivational Fruitfulness), (ii) prevent the wrong kinds of behavior (Prevention Fruitfulness), (iii) help us fight back against problematic social phenomena such as bias and discrimination (Resilience Fruitfulness), (iv) are capable of achieving consensus to a sufficient extent among people committed to cooperation and peaceful coexistence (Consensus Fruitfulness), and (v) can serve as useful guides in solving practical problems that we need to solve (Guidance Fruitfulness). Lindauer's research establishes that, rather than merely clearing the way for philosophical work to be done, empirical research is an important part of the philosophical enterprise, is continuous with traditional a priori research methods, and will be required to resolve at least some important debates in moral and political philosophy.

Visit Matthew Lindauer's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Politics of Sanctuary"

New from Cornell University Press: The Politics of Sanctuary by Vojislava Filipcevic Cordes.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Politics of Sanctuary examines sanctuaries as spaces where activists oppose what they see as an unjust restrictive regime trapping immigrants in conditions of legal liminality. Drawing on her fieldwork in New York City, Vojislava Filipcevic Cordes explores the politics of immigrant exclusions, and depicts how immigrants in sanctuary cities stake claims for their rightful presence. She argues for a more inclusive political life of expanded urban citizenship for undocumented immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees through the mechanisms of sanctuary practice. Blending a participant-observation case study of the immigrant-organized New Sanctuary Coalition with urban politics and theory, The Politics of Sanctuary also offers ideas for how ways sanctuary practices, supported by governance and social-service arrangements, can promote legitimate claims to immigrant urban membership and belonging.

Vojislava Filipcevic Cordes holds a Ph.D. in Urban Planning, with concentrations in Sociology and Political Science, from Columbia University. She was a Paul E. Raether Postdoctoral Fellow in Urban and Global Studies at Trinity College and a Research Associate to the late Benjamin Barber at Urban Consortium, Fordham University, New York. She is the author of New York in Cinematic Imagination: The Agitated City (2020), which was shortlisted during deliberation for the 2021 Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Book Award. In May 2022, Filipcevic Cordes received a Faculty Teaching Excellence Award from John Jay College, Sociology Department, where she taught from 2017 to 2021.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Serpent's Tale"

New from Columbia University Press: The Serpent's Tale: Kundalini, Yoga, and the History of an Experience by Sravana Borkataky-Varma and Anya Foxen.

About the book, from the publisher:

There is a standard narrative that recurs throughout popular writings on yoga and tantra, from South Asian texts to Western esoteric thought: Kuṇḍalinī is the Serpent Power. She rests coiled at the base of the spine. If awakened, this divine feminine energy rises toward the crown of the head. Some are apprehensive of Kuṇḍalinī’s intense power, fearing physical and psychological turmoil. Others seek it out, hungry for experiences, both spiritual and sensual. But what does this story leave out? What are its cultural and historical roots? What do the many ways of experiencing Kuṇḍalinī tell us about this elusive phenomenon?

The Serpent’s Tale traces the intricate global histories of Kuṇḍalinī, from its Sanskrit origins to its popularity in the West. Sravana Borkataky-Varma and Anya Foxen explore its symbolic link with the serpent, its fraught connections to sexuality, and its commercialization in the form of Kuṇḍalinī yoga. Ranging from esoteric texts to global gurus, from the cliffs of California to the charnel grounds of Assam, they show that there has never been one single “authentic” model of Kuṇḍalinī but a multiplicity of visions. Bridging the gaps between textual and historical analysis and the complexities of embodied practice, Borkataky-Varma and Foxen reflect on the narration and transmission of experiences, including their own. Lively, accessible, and nuanced, The Serpent’s Tale offers rich insights for scholars, practitioners, and all readers drawn to Kuṇḍalinī.

Visit Sravana Borkataky-Varma's website and Anya Foxen's website.

12 Yoga Questions with Anya Foxen, part 1 and part 2.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The House of David"

New from Oxford University Press: The House of David: Salvation, Scandal, and Survival in a Modern American Commune by Evelyn Sterne.

About the book, from the publisher:

In 1903, after seven years traveling the country as itinerant preachers, Benjamin and Mary Purnell moved to Benton Harbor, Michigan, where they founded a commune. Their settlement soon blossomed into a vibrant religious colony and booming business enterprise. They called it the House of David, and its members--hailing from across the United States and around the world--were Christian Israelites, members of a millennialist faith who seek to assemble the remnants of the lost tribes of Israel in a new Jerusalem. Once gathered, they believed, this community of 144,000 would never die. Over the next six decades about two thousand believers moved to Benton Harbor. They accepted stringent rules that included relinquishing all assets, practicing celibacy, and renouncing meat, hair-cutting, and traditional family ties--all in exchange for community, economic security, and the promise of immortality. Working in the commune's multiple business enterprises, they sought refuge from the abuses of industrial capitalism at a time of widespread social and economic upheaval, even as they brilliantly seized on the opportunities the modern economy had to offer. They also eagerly embraced popular culture by running a successful amusement park, performing in touring musical groups, and playing on barnstorming baseball teams that were the delight of audiences nationwide. The House of David thrived into the 1960s and lingers on as a tiny remnant today despite early decades characterized by a steady stream of financial and sexual scandals, a torrent of litigation, and obsessive coverage in the press.

In her study of this distinctive and little-known group, Evelyn Sterne reveals a larger story about religion and social change during a pivotal era in modern American history. Drawing upon extensive archival sources, many consulted for the first time, she sheds light on a host of questions, examining who joined this Christian Israelite community and why, and showing what their choices reveal about the strategies that immigrants and native-born Americans embraced at a time of disorienting economic, social, and cultural change. Sterne considers the critics who worked tirelessly to discredit the Michigan commune and what their efforts tell us about the limits of religious toleration and debates over what counts as "religion." Finally, she unveils how the House of David weathered decades of scandals to survive, becoming one of the longest-lasting intentional communities in American history.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Empire of Manners"

New from Stanford University Press: Empire of Manners: Ottoman Sociability and War-Making in the Long Eighteenth Century by James Grehan.

About the book, from the publisher:

It is easy to believe that manners are empty gestures, little more than social artifice or practiced etiquette whose sole purpose is to project civility and facilitate social interaction. But if we look more closely, they can tell us much more than we might first suppose, revealing what conventional accounts of state, economy, and religion often ignore. With this book, James Grehan offers a panoramic view of manners and sociability across the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire, from the Balkans to the Middle East to North Africa. Studying chronicles, biographical dictionaries, and travel accounts, he throws new light on the inner dynamics of Ottoman society during a transitional period in Ottoman history which has too often been misunderstood.

Empire of Manners proposes a new way of thinking about the history of manners, arguing that violence and war-making, as much as civility and etiquette, have a central role in shaping them. The eighteenth century proved to be a turning point in this paradoxical relationship between violence and manners as war-making turned into a substantially more complex and costly enterprise, leaving a deeper and wider social footprint. The interplay between violence and manners, an unlikely couple, unexpectedly narrates the Ottoman path to the modern age.

The Page 99 Test: Twilight of the Saints.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Wide Net of Solidarity"

New from Duke University Press: A Wide Net of Solidarity: Antiracism and Anti-Imperialism from the Americas to the Globe by Anne Garland Mahler.

About the book, from the publisher:

In A Wide Net of Solidarity, Anne Garland Mahler traces the impact of the Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas (LADLA, Liga Antimperialista de las Américas) on racial justice and anti-extractive struggles from the early twentieth century to the present. Founded in 1925 in Mexico City by a group of multinational activists, LADLA brought together trade unions, agrarian organizations, and artist groups across fourteen chapters in the Americas, with highest activity in the Greater Caribbean and United States. Within two years, LADLA activists joined the League Against Imperialism, formed at the 1927 Brussels Congress, where they met with US Black activists and anticolonial leaders from Africa and Asia. Drawing on extensive archival research, Mahler uncovers LADLA’s role in fostering Black, Indigenous, and immigrant-led resistance movements while positioning these struggles within a broader hemispheric and global struggle against the racialized accumulation of capital. By unearthing LADLA’s multiracial analysis of capitalist exploitation as well as its emphasis on mutual solidarity across difference, Mahler shows us how the organization provides vital insight for social movements fighting racial and economic injustice today.

Visit Anne Garland Mahler's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Orienting to Chance"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Orienting to Chance: Probabilism and the Future of Social Theory by Michael Strand and Omar Lizardo.

About the book, from the publisher:

Explores the implications of chance and uncertainty in social theory and offers a new interpretation of the sociological canon.

Since the founding of the discipline, sociologists have endeavored to understand the structures of groups, organizations, and societies, and how these entities condition our behavior. While some of the foundational theorists saw these processes as largely deterministic, sociological theory has increasingly insisted on the importance of culture in shaping our position in and responses to social groups. In Orienting to Chance, sociologists Michael Strand and Omar Lizardo aim to show that the social order bears an unmistakable link to chance and urge us to think about how it conditions our actions.

Strand and Lizardo provide a sweeping overview of a new social theory framework that they call probabilism. Using examples of probabilism in sociology, particularly in the work of Max Weber, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Pierre Bourdieu, they describe probabilism’s place in multiple fields of science. As the authors argue, their effort at redefinition and recovery helps position sociology as a field of the future, while also keeping it grounded in core issues of action, structure, culture, inequality, and inequity. By sharing these groundbreaking insights and revealing wider theoretical claims about mortality, fate, and technology in the contemporary era, Strand and Lizardo demonstrate how probabilism is an essential intervention for understanding the inevitable role of uncertainty in social life.

Visit Michael Strand's website and Omar Lizardo's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Information Animal"

New from Oxford University Press: The Information Animal: Humans, Technology and the Competition for Reality by Alicia Wanless.

About the book, from the publisher:

Depending on the news you read, new tools like AI will either save or destroy us. But our response to emerging technology's 'unprecedented' threats actually follows a pattern as old as civilisation. From ancient Athens to COVID-19, social media to spam, Alicia Wanless shows how humans have always consumed information, whether accurate or not.

First a new technology changes how information is shared, broadening its availability and accelerating how fast it travels. Then, as more people engage with this new content, fresh ideas arise, often challenging prevailing beliefs. Some use the new tools to promote their views, win power or simply profit, adding to the mounting information pollution. Competition and conflict follow. We scramble--in vain--to control information flows and use of the new technology.

With democracies worldwide lurching from crisis to crisis, knee-jerk reactions to information conflict won't suffice. What's needed is an understanding of our nature as 'information animals', in a millennia-long relationship with technology--and of how a content-saturated world impacts the political battle for hearts and minds.

Visit Alicia Wanless's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Listeners Like Who?"

New from Princeton University Press: Listeners Like Who?: Exclusion and Resistance in the Public Radio Industry by Laura Garbes.

About the book, from the publisher:

How public radio has perpetuated racial inequality since its founding—and how journalists of color are challenging white dominance in the workplace and on the public airwaves

National Public Radio was established in 1970 with a mission to provide programming for all Americans, yet the gap between public radio’s pluralistic mandate and its failure to serve marginalized communities has plagued the industry from the start. Listeners Like Who? takes readers inside the public radio industry, revealing how the network’s sound and listenership are reflections of its inherent whiteness, and describing the experiences of the nonwhite journalists who are fighting for change.

Drawing on institutional archives, oral histories, and original in-depth interviews with journalists of color in public radio, Laura Garbes shows that when NPR and its affiliate stations first began its appeals for donations from “listeners like you,” it was appealing to white, well-educated donors. She discusses how this initial focus created a sustainable financial model in the face of government underfunding, but how these same factors have alienated broad swaths of nonwhite and working-class audiences and limited the creative freedoms of nonwhite public radio workers. Garbes tells the stories of the employees of color who are disrupting the aesthetic norms and narrative practices embedded in the industry.

Centering sound in how we think about the workplace and organizational life, Listeners Like Who? provides insights into the media’s role in upholding racial inequality and the complex creative labor by nonwhite journalists to expand who and what gets heard on public radio.

Visit Laura Garbes's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Gilded Age Entrepreneur"

New from Cornell University Press: Gilded Age Entrepreneur: The Curious Life of American Financier Albert Benton Pullman by Simon Cordery.

About the book, from the publisher:

Simon Cordery's Gilded Age Entrepreneur illuminates the fascinating and chaotic business world of Albert Pullman. The influential but little-known older brother of George Pullman and the craftsman of the family, Albert designed the first luxurious Pullman railroad cars and hosted promotional trips to show them off. In those heady early days, he met national business and political leaders and hired the first Pullman porters.

Albert and George made a formidable team, but as the Pullman Company grew, Albert's role shrank. He turned to his own investment portfolio, often with disastrous results. Beginning with the industrial laundry that cleaned sleeping-car linens, Albert appeared before the Supreme Court after a catastrophic insurance investment, ran afoul of federal banking regulations, and failed in an attempt to corner wheat futures. With evermore unsuccessful speculations, Albert was tempted by extralegal land sales and entered the silver-mining game. Finally, his own family in crisis and his relationship with George shattered, Albert Pullman launched into one last round of adventurous investments with mixed results.

Gilded Age Entrepreneur demonstrates that Albert Pullman embodied the small-time investors who were legion after the Civil War. From banking and insurance to manufacturing and mining, a host of hopeful dreamers like Albert Pullman fueled the circulation of capital by forging political connections, creating and losing businesses, issuing shares, and longing for profit.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Devout and Defiant"

New from the University of Virginia Press: Devout and Defiant: How Pilgrims Shaped the Franco-German Borderlands in the Age of Revolutions by Kilian Harrer.

About the book, from the publisher:

How Catholic pilgrims in an era of revolution challenged state authority and redefined the practice of their faith

In the days of the French Revolution, as zealous government officials sought to sweep away the vestiges of a less enlightened age, they made a concerted effort to clamp down on religious “superstition” and to fix modern territorial boundaries. Catholic pilgrims on the western edge of German-speaking Europe, however, refused to let worldly barriers stand in the way of their devotional practices. As Kilian Harrer reveals in this groundbreaking book, pilgrimage became a form of transgressive devotion that spurred religious renewal.

By the hundreds of thousands, pilgrims exposed the limits of state authority as they traveled to shrines and holy sites across the borderlands that stretched from Luxembourg in the north to Alsace and Switzerland in the south. These Catholics evaded passport controls, crossed provocatively into Protestant territories, and went abroad to visit shrines beyond the reach of anticlerical officials. Pilgrims and pilgrimage organizers reshaped the politics of religion by grappling with shifting borders, dramatic regime change, and police repression. In the end, they reoriented Catholicism itself as they boldly confronted the state-led policing of borders and worship.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Good Change"

New from Stanford University Press: Good Change: The Rise and Fall of Poland’s Illiberal Revolution by Stanley Bill and Ben Stanley.

About the book, from the publisher:

Few countries serve as a more useful case study for understanding the global tension between liberal and illiberal conceptions of democracy than Poland. Under the populist Law and Justice (PiS) –led government, a large part of the Polish electorate welcomed the party's "Good Change"—as it described its program—despite accusations of democratic backsliding. PiS offered voters neglected by previous governments a combination of economic redistributionism and cultural traditionalism, supplemented with narratives of bolstering Poland's national prestige and sovereignty. Yet after eight years of success, it was defeated in the October 2023 elections by a "pro-democratic" coalition. The history of PiS shows both the strengths and weaknesses of democratic illiberalism as a challenge to liberal democracy. Bill and Stanley analyze the course and causes of the party's successes and failures. The authors deftly outline PiS's assault on democratic institutions, its paradigm-changing redistributive programs, cultural backlash agenda, politics of history, and the reasons for its fall from power. Poland's democracy has proven resilient to the specter of autocratization, but its future development under a new government raises fresh questions. This essential book considers what the rise and fall of Poland's illiberal government reveals about the future of liberal democracy and its ongoing transformations in the twenty-first century.

Stanley Bill is Professor of Polish Studies, University of Cambridge. He is Chair of the Cambridge Committee for Russian and East European Studies (CamCREES).

Ben Stanley is Associate Professor at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, SWPS University.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Communism, Cold War, and Revolution"

New from Oxford University Press: Communism, Cold War, and Revolution: The Indonesian Communist Party in West Java, 1949-1966 by Matthew Woolgar.

About the book, from the publisher:

During the 1950s and first half of the 1960s the Indonesian Communist Party grew from a few thousand members to become the third largest communist party in the world, before it was annihilated in a violent purge in 1965-6 that saw perhaps half a million alleged communists killed.

Whilst a growing body of scholarship has analysed the anti-communist violence of 1965-6, much less has been written about the Party's experience and significance in the preceding decade and a half. Communism, Cold War, and Revolution: The Indonesian Communist Party in West Java, 1949-1966 is the first major study of the Party during that period to be written since the end of the Cold War. The book examines the Party's development at the intersection of world communism, a global Cold War and Indonesia's revolution. It shows that the Party represented both a revolutionary organisation and a vibrant movement, which was both linked to international networks and deeply intertwined with Indonesia's social fabric. In this book, Matthew Woolgar introduces the term 'archipelagic communism' to encapsulate the ability of the Party to achieve impressive growth amid a growing pluralism in global communism and a context of extreme local cultural and social diversity.

Woolgar takes the case study of West Java - a populous and diverse province, which had a substantial communist presence - as an entry point for examining these developments. The study draws on a wide array of sources, ranging from interviews and government documents to newly available Party archives, to recreate Party life in unprecedented depth.

The study traces the dialogue that communist leaders engaged in with foreign comrades but also argues that key to the Party's growth were activist energies at the grassroots and the Party's efforts to navigate social, cultural, and ethnic cleavages within Indonesian society. It shows how the Party became entangled with trade unionism, land conflicts, struggles for women's rights, youth activism, and cultural activities. It also delineates how conservative elites, backed by Western governments, used counter-revolutionary violence to destroy the Communist Party and institute a wide-ranging reshaping of Indonesian society: removing labour rights, reversing land reforms, enforcing a patriarchal state ideology, and reinforcing markers of ethnic and religious difference.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Ruin Dwellers"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Ruin Dwellers: Progress and Its Discontents in the West German Counterculture by Jake P. Smith.

About the book, from the publisher:

Traces the shifting dynamics within leftist activism in 1970s and ’80s Europe and its experiments in art, life, and politics.

The Ruin Dwellers takes readers into the urban spaces of youth revolts during the 1970s and ’80s in West Germany and elsewhere in western and central Europe. Whereas earlier generations of leftist activists were primarily oriented toward the utopian future, participants in the youth movements of the 1970s and ’80s developed a more complex set of temporal practices that sought to scramble the borders between the past, present, and future.

Examining a rich corpus of radical texts and practices, historian Jake P. Smith shows that squatters and their leftist allies in this period engaged in social, cultural, and aesthetic experiments with modes of autonomous living. Smith brings to life the real and imagined landscapes conjured in squatted houses and street protests; in art, dress, music, graffiti, and film; and in philosophical, poetic, and political texts. In so doing, he offers an eye-opening look at anarchic world-making practices that found new ways of imagining an emancipated future through inhabiting the fractured past.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Driven to Their Knees"

New from Princeton University Press: Driven to Their Knees: Humiliation in Contemporary Politics by Roxanne L. Euben.

About the book, from the publisher:

How the rhetoric of humiliation defines the powerful and the powerless in modern politics

Humiliation pervades our politics, from images of stripped Palestinian men in Gaza to mocking chants at MAGA rallies. It suffuses pictures and videos, speaks through bodies as well as words, and is expressed by those with too much power as well as by those with too little. In Driven to Their Knees, Roxanne Euben takes readers from conflicts in the Arabic-speaking world to America’s divided public square, advancing a theory of humiliation rooted in the ways people articulate and enact it. Euben analyzes some of the most conspicuous yet least studied Arabic expressions of humiliation, drawing on sources ranging from Qurʾānic commentary by Islamists to videos, poetry, songs, and tweets from the 2011 Egyptian revolution.

Driven to Their Knees reveals what the language of humiliation says—and also how it works. This groundbreaking book shows how humiliation expresses the imposition of impotence by those with undeserved power, and the way it converts relations of power into crises of virility. Humiliation rhetoric defines both the humiliated and the humiliator and issues an urgent call for a remedy in the viscerally charged language of emasculation. For Donald Trump and Usama bin Laden alike, this means driving their enemy to his knees for all to see, and then boasting about it to compound the degradation. But for others, humiliation galvanizes their struggle to “stand erect,” uniting them in a refusal to be bowed low. Humiliation is not just about power but is itself a powerful language that does far more than reflect contemporary politics. The language of humiliation remakes the very world in which we live.

Marshal Zeringue

"Reforming Social Services in New York City"

New from Cornell University Press: Reforming Social Services in New York City: How Major Change Happens in Urban Welfare Policies by Thomas J. Main.

About the book, from the publisher:

Reforming Social Services in New York City examines efforts across six decades to respond to poverty, joblessness, and homelessness through the establishment and periodic restructuring of the city's Human Resources Administration (HRA) and related social welfare agencies.

As Thomas J. Main shows through archival research and interviews with key figures, the HRA has been the focus of several mayoralties. The John Lindsay administration's creation of the HRA in 1966 was a classic liberal effort to fight poverty; Rudy Giuliani brought dramatic change by implementing work-oriented welfare reform; and the Bill de Blasio administration attempted to install a progressive social welfare agenda within the city's social service agencies to reduce inequality. Reforming Social Services in New York City tells the story of these efforts, assessing the strategies employed and the success of their outcomes, concluding that major nonincremental change in urban welfare policy is not only possible but has been effective.

Thomas J. Main is Professor at the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College, City University of New York. He is the author of The Rise of Illiberalism, The Rise of the Alt-Right, and Homelessness in New York City.

--Marshal Zeringue