"Beyond Moral Fundamentalism"

New from Oxford University Press: Beyond Moral Fundamentalism: Toward a Pragmatic Pluralism by Steven Fesmire.

About the book, from the publisher:

While complex global problems cry out for solutions devised with moral sensitivity and responsibility, a more common mentality tends to prevail, one that assumes those going the right way (“us”) are endangered by others (“them”) going the wrong way. Philosopher Steven Fesmire calls this approach “moral fundamentalism,” the idea that only we have access to the right diagnosis and prescription to our problems. Moral fundamentalism causes us to oversimplify, neglect broader context, take refuge in dogmatic absolutes, ignore possibilities for common ground, assume privileged access to the right way to proceed, and shut off honest inquiry. Moral fundamentalism--exacerbated by social media silos--also makes the worst of native impulses toward social bonding and antagonism. This depletes social capital and makes it impossible to debate and achieve superordinate goals, such as public health, justice, security, sustainability, peace, and democracy.

Drawing from John Dewey's pluralistic and pragmatic approach, Fesmire develops an alternative to the oversimplification of moral fundamentalism and the arbitrariness of relativism. He proposes a “pragmatic pluralism” that can be applied to complex ethical, political, educational, and policy problems--without flattening variability among values or presuming that abstract theories determine what we ought to do. He argues that the single-right-way premise that logically underlies moral fundamentalism is both unwarranted and constrictive, and that grand philosophical quests for unifying principles can still be accommodated within a wider pluralistic approach. In an engaging style, Fesmire shows the reader a new perspective on the challenges and promises of democratic decision-making in societies that are struggling to grow beyond moral fundamentalism.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Passionate Work"

New from Stanford University Press: Passionate Work: Choreographing a Dance Career by Ruth Horowitz.

About the book, from the publisher:

Corps de ballet literally means the "body" of the ballet company, and it refers to the group of dancers who are not principals. Another large group of dancers puts together portfolios of work, often across several dance companies. These categories of dancers typically don't have name recognition and yet comprise the majority of professional dancers today. The ways that they stitch together careers, through dedication, grit, and no small amount of skill – and the reasons they have for doing so without the promise of fame or fortune – are telling of broader trends that shape the precarious labor of professional dance, and creative careers more generally. In Passionate Work, dance hobbyist and sociologist, Ruth Horowitz captures their stories. When creative labor is studied, it is often thought of in opposition to more conventional work, and the primary metric that distinguishes them is passion. Professional creatives are not working in the traditional sense because they are following their passion. By tracing the careers of such dancers, Horowitz troubles the binary understanding of passion and work. A career in dance requires both, and approaching her subjects through this lens allows her to explore their strategies for sustaining passion through the ups and downs of a career. Horowitz explores how dancers evaluate the rewards and challenges of a notoriously underpaid, and uncertain profession. Horowitz considers major dimensions of a career in a performing art, documenting each stage in a dancer's life. Above all, she shines a light on the strategies used to achieve a sense of biographical continuity in a world often marked by discontinuity and rupture.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Heat, a History"

New from the University of California Press: Heat, a History: Lessons from the Middle East for a Warming Planet by On Barak.

About the book, from the publisher:

Shifts the conversation from abstract “global warming” to the deeply human impacts of heat—and how our efforts to keep cool have made the problem worse.

Despite the flames of record-breaking temperatures licking at our feet, most people fail to fully grasp the gravity of environmental overheating. What acquired habits and conveniences allow us to turn a blind eye with an air of detachment? Using examples from the hottest places on earth, Heat, a History shows how scientific methods of accounting for heat and modern forms of acclimatization have desensitized us to climate change.

Ubiquitous air conditioning, shifts in urban planning, and changes in mobility have served as temporary remedies for escaping the heat in hotspots such as the twentieth-century Middle East. However, all of these measures have ultimately fueled not only greenhouse gas emissions but also a collective myopia regarding the impact of rising temperatures. Identifying the scientific, economic, and cultural forces that have numbed our responses, this book charts a way out of short-term thinking and towards meaningful action.

Visit On Barak's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Global Sweatshops"

New from Oxford University Press: Global Sweatshops: A Feminist Theory of Exploitation and Resistance by Mirjam Müller.

About the book, from the publisher:

Sweatshop labour is characterized by low wages, long hours, and systematic health and safety hazards. Most of the workers in the sweatshops of the garment industry are women, many of them migrant women. Philosopher Mirjam Müller asks: Why are sweatshops so resistant to emancipatory transformation? How should we think about the relationship between class, gender, and race on the factory floor of sweatshops? What insights can be drawn from this for understanding the systematic relation between capitalism, gender oppression, and racial oppression? Does sweatshop labour raise distinct normative concerns compared to other forms of wage labour?

Müller answers these questions by developing a feminist critique of working conditions in the global textile industry that draws on work in feminist, Marxist, post-/decolonial, and critical race theory. She shows how sweatshop labour is embedded in historically specific structures of global capitalism that raise unique normative concerns. The book provides a normative and practical account that highlights spaces of resistance, as well as the responsibility of actors implicated in sweatshop labour relations to work towards structural change.

Based on this analysis, Müller argues that sweatshop workers are structurally vulnerable to exploitation in virtue of their position as gendered, racialized, and migrant workers within global supply chains. While this exploitation benefits powerful actors along global supply chains, it also creates spaces of resistance and structural transformation.

Visit Mirjam Müller's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Greatest of All Plagues"

New from Princeton University Press: The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought from Plato to Marx by David Lay Williams.

About the book, from the publisher:

Economic inequality is one of the most daunting challenges of our time, with public debate often turning to questions of whether it is an inevitable outcome of economic systems and what, if anything, can be done about it. But why, exactly, should inequality worry us? The Greatest of All Plagues demonstrates that this underlying question has been a central preoccupation of some of the most eminent political thinkers of the Western intellectual tradition.

David Lay Williams shares bold new perspectives on the writings and ideas of Plato, Jesus, Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx. He shows how they describe economic inequality as a source of political instability and a corrupter of character and soul, and how they view unchecked inequality as a threat to their most cherished values, such as justice, faith, civic harmony, peace, democracy, and freedom. Williams draws invaluable insights into the societal problems generated by what Plato called “the greatest of all plagues,” and examines the solutions employed through the centuries.

An eye-opening work of intellectual history, The Greatest of All Plagues recovers a forgotten past for some of the most timeless books in the Western canon, revealing how economic inequality has been a paramount problem throughout the history of political thought.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Searching for Dr. Harris"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Searching for Dr. Harris: The Life and Times of a Remarkable African American Physician by Margaret Humphreys.

About the book, from the publisher:

This is the untold story of Dr. J. D. Harris, an African American physician whose life and career straddled enormous changes for Black professionals and the practice of medicine. Born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Harris served as a contract surgeon to the Union army and transitioned to a similar post under the Freedmen's Bureau, treating Black troops and freedpeople in Virginia. Margaret Humphreys not only narrates what we know about Harris but offers context to his remarkable journey, including how incredible it was that a young man born into freedom in a slave state learned to read when literacy for Black people was illegal. He was one of very few African Americans to become a doctor before Howard Medical School opened in the 1870s, a fact that both reveals the structural barriers to medical education for Black Americans and highlights how those structures weakened in the 1860s.

Drawing on census records, court records, Civil War and Reconstruction documents from the National Archives, African American newspapers, and more, this book is a revealing look at the history not only of medicine in the southern United States but also of race and citizenship during one of the nation's most tumultuous eras.

The Page 69 Test: Marrow of Tragedy.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Working for Debt"

New from Columbia University Press: Working for Debt: Banks, Loan Sharks, and the Origins of Financial Exploitation in the United States by Simon Bittmann.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the early twentieth century, wage loans became a major source of cash for workers all over the United States. From Black washerwomen to white foremen, Illinois roomers to Georgia railroad men, workers turned to labor income as collateral for borrowing capital. Networks of companies started profiting from payday and property advances, exposing debtors to the grim prospects of garnishments of their wages and possessions in order to mitigate the risk of default. Progressive and later New Deal reformers sought to eradicate these practices, denouncing “loan sharks” and “financial slavery” as major threats to a new credit democracy. They proposed fair credit as a universal solution to move past industrial poverty and boost consumer freedom―but in doing so, reformers, lenders, and bankers limited credit access to the white middle-class constituencies seen as worthy of protection against extortion.

Working for Debt explores how the fight against wage loans divided the American credit market along class, race, and gender lines. Simon Bittmann argues that the moral and political crusades of Progressive Era reformers helped create the exclusionary credit markets that favored white male breadwinners. The politics of credit expansion served to obscure the failures of U.S. capitalism, using the “loan shark” as a scapegoat for larger, deeper depredations. As credit became a core feature of U.S. capitalism, the association of legitimate borrowing with white middle-class households and the financial exclusion of others was entrenched. Blending economic sociology with business, labor, and social history, this book shows how social stratification shaped credit markets, with enduring consequences for class, race, and gender inequalities.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Racialized Commodities"

New from Oxford University Press: Racialized Commodities: Long-distance Trade, Mobility, and the Making of Race in Ancient Greece, c. 700-300 BCE by Christopher Stedman Parmenter.

About the book, from the publisher:

Between c. 700-300 BCE, the ancient Greeks developed a vivid imaginary of the world's peoples. Ranging from the light-skinned, "gray-eyed Thracians" of the distant north to the "dark-skinned Ethiopians" of the far south, as the poet Xenophanes described them around 540 BCE, Greeks envisioned a world populated by human groups with distinct physiognomies. Racialized Commodities traces how Greece's "racial imaginary"--a confluence of thinking about cultural geography, commodity production, and human physiognomy--emerged from cross-cultural trade between Greece and its Mediterranean neighbors during the Archaic and Classical Periods. It adopts the model of a "commodity biography" to investigate how trade led to the entanglement of cultures, bodies, and things in Archaic and Classical Greece. For merchants, the racial imaginary might be used to play up the "exotic" provenance of their goods to consumers. It might also circulate practical information about customs, pricing, navigation, and doing business in foreign ports.

Archaic Greek attempts to explain foreign bodies were rarely pejorative, and Racialized Commodities begins with some of their earliest images of African peoples, described by Greeks as Egyptians or Ethiopians, before seeking to explain what changed in the early Classical Period. As the Persian Empire loomed and Greek cities became increasingly dependent on enslaved labor, negative stereotypes of Thracians and Scythians became widespread and coalesced into the charged idea of the barbarous--the "barbarian."

--Marshal Zeringue

"Reworking Citizenship"

New from Stanford University Press: Reworking Citizenship: Race, Gender, and Kinship in South Africa by Brady G'sell.

About the book, from the publisher:

n scenes reminiscent of the apartheid era, 2021 saw South Africa's streets filled with mass protests. While the country is lauded for its peaceful transition to democracy with citizenship for all, those previously disenfranchised, particularly women, remain outraged by their continued poverty and marginalization. As one black woman protester told a reporter, reflecting on the end of apartheid: "We didn't get freedom. We only got democracy." What obligations do states have to support their citizens? What meaning does citizenship itself hold? Blending archival and ethnographic methods, Brady G'sell tracks how historic resistance to racial and gendered marginalization in South Africa animate present-day contentions that regardless of voting rights, without jobs to support their families, the poor majority remain excluded from the nation. Through long-term fieldwork with impoverished black African, Indian, and coloured (mixed race) women living in the city of Durban, she reveals women's everyday efforts to rework political institutions that exclude them. Informed by her interlocutors, G'sell retheorizes citizenship as not solely tied to individual rights, but dependent on the security of social (often kinship) relations. She forwards the concept of relational citizenship as a means to reimagine political belonging amidst a world of declining wage labor and eroding state-citizen covenants.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Technology and the Rise of Great Powers"

New from Princeton University Press: Technology and the Rise of Great Powers: How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition by Jeffrey Ding.

About the book, from the publisher:

A novel theory of how technological revolutions affect the rise and fall of great powers

When scholars and policymakers consider how technological advances affect the rise and fall of great powers, they draw on theories that center the moment of innovation—the eureka moment that sparks astonishing technological feats. In this book, Jeffrey Ding offers a different explanation of how technological revolutions affect competition among great powers. Rather than focusing on which state first introduced major innovations, he investigates why some states were more successful than others at adapting and embracing new technologies at scale. Drawing on historical case studies of past industrial revolutions as well as statistical analysis, Ding develops a theory that emphasizes institutional adaptations oriented around diffusing technological advances throughout the entire economy.

Examining Britain’s rise to preeminence in the First Industrial Revolution, America and Germany’s overtaking of Britain in the Second Industrial Revolution, and Japan’s challenge to America’s technological dominance in the Third Industrial Revolution (also known as the “information revolution”), Ding illuminates the pathway by which these technological revolutions influenced the global distribution of power and explores the generalizability of his theory beyond the given set of great powers. His findings bear directly on current concerns about how emerging technologies such as AI could influence the US-China power balance.

Visit Jeffrey Ding's website.

--Marshal Zeringue