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North-South trade agreements are really about foreign investment, driven by multinationals, and each one breeds the next.

I’ve developed an analytical framework in which politicians and bureaucrats mainly respond to demands from economic interest groups in deciding trade policy. Institutions and culture do matter, but only idiosyncratically....

Investing in Protection

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North-South trade agreements are really about foreign investment, driven by multinationals, and each one breeds the next.

The idea for the book was born from a conversation with Noboru Hatakeyama, a former top official in Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry—the (in)famous MITI—in the fall of...

Investing in Protection

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North-South trade agreements are about foreign investment, not trade.

One of the most notable developments in international trade after the end of the Cold War has been the explosion of preferential trade agreements (PTAs). In 1990, there were about...

Investing in Protection

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The TRC's public performance had a potency its written record cannot capture.

While most of my book is about the TRC as performance rather than artistic performances about the TRC, the final chapter returns to the aesthetic realm by examining Philip Miller’s...

Performing South Africa's Truth Commission

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The TRC's public performance had a potency its written record cannot capture.

Once at a dinner party, when I described my book as being about the performative dimensions of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, an attorney who was there quipped, “Well, that...

Performing South Africa's Truth Commission

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The Truth Commission's live performance had a power its written record cannot capture.

Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission is about the messy, uncertain process of transition from authoritarian to democratic rule, and the quasi-judicial ritual that South Africa used to help accomplish such...

Performing South Africa's Truth Commission

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Honor decided who could speak in the name of Mexican public opinion, and honor and free speech were intertwined.

There are two episodes, in chapters two and seven, that I hope will reward the patience of the reader. Two duels, one in 1880 and the other in 1894, mark...

The Tyranny of Opinion

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Honor decided who could speak in the name of Mexican public opinion, and honor and free speech were intertwined.

We tend to assume that freedom of speechnaturally accompanies other democratic rights. But the construction of the virtual and physical spaces where modern individuals could publicly and freely use their...

The Tyranny of Opinion

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Honor, not ideology or class, decided who could speak for Mexican public opinion.

Mexico emerged as a modern nation in the 1860s, after half a century of civil war, foreign invasion and political instability. In a new nation divided by ethnicity, class, religion...

The Tyranny of Opinion

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Carter's 1979 answer of humility and limits was the right one, and the conservative revolution was built during his presidency.

On page 149 I start to describe the Disco Demolition rally in Chicago that occurred just a few days before Jimmy Carter gave his speech. The rally is a wonderful...

What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?

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Carter's 1979 answer of humility and limits was the right one, and the conservative revolution was built during his presidency.

The book addresses broad questions of American national identity. Who are we as a nation: selfish individualists or citizens and members of a commonwealth? Can America be a nation with...

What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?

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Carter's 1979 call for humility and limits was the right answer, rejected to our peril.

I want a reader to enter a truly bizarre world: America in 1979. It was a period of disco and disco demolition, cocaine and divorce, an Iranian revolution and oil...

What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?

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Suburbia is where the human-wildlife interface actually happens, and sprawl sorts wildlife rather than reducing it.

The preface provides a perspective for the book, as well as an explanation of the structure of each chapter, so that might be the appropriate place to start browsing. The prologue...

Coyote at the Kitchen Door

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Suburbia, not wilderness, is where people and wildlife actually meet.

In much of the world, cities are expanding and growing to astronomical sizes. Along with the growth of cities comes the spread of suburbs. Suburban areas now dominate the perimeter...

Coyote at the Kitchen Door

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Suburbia is where the human-wildlife interface actually happens, and sprawl sorts wildlife rather than reducing it.

Coyote at the Kitchen Door: Living with Wildlife in Suburbia is about what the relatively recent phenomenon of wide-scale urban and suburban development means to the landscape, to wildlife, to...

Coyote at the Kitchen Door

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The spy is the representative figure in the genealogy of modernity.

Pistols! Treason! Murder! contains numerous original illustrations, which I scripted and storyboarded, and which were created by Dan Hallett. The one reproduced here, titled The Wounds of Giulio Cazzari, accompanies...

Pistols! Treason! Murder! The Rise and Fall of a Master Spy

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The spy is the representative figure in the genealogy of modernity.

Venice in the 1610s and 1620s was the first European state to undertake systematic surveillance of private individuals, and to entrust the supervision of such surveillance to a permanent committee,...

Pistols! Treason! Murder! The Rise and Fall of a Master Spy

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The spy, not the artist or the prince, is the representative figure of modernity.

Pistols! Treason! Murder! describes the short, disturbing and unprecedented career of a Venetian spy, Gerolamo Vano, who was executed for perjury in 1622. In the years immediately preceding his death, Vano...

Pistols! Treason! Murder! The Rise and Fall of a Master Spy

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No amount of humane handling justifies using animals at all, and veganism is the floor.

If a “just browsing” reader were to pick up Animals as Persons in a bookstore, I would hope that s/he would first encounter pages 26-28, where I first describe the...

Animals as Persons

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The moral question about animals is use, not treatment.

Animals as Persons can be understood as a reaction to and rejection of the paradigm of animal welfare that has dominated our thinking about the moral status of nonhuman animals...

Animals as Persons

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No amount of humane handling justifies using animals at all, and veganism is the floor.

For most of us, the central issue of animal ethics is our treatment of animals. We believe that animals have some moral value but that we are morally justified in...

Animals as Persons

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Macaulay was the first responsible European publicly to advocate civilizing slaughter, and the silence about it was complicity.

The introduction, the envoi, and two pictures may be worth several thousand words.The introduction surveys the book, and the envoi traces Macaulay’s impact to our times.The book’s dust jacket reproduces...

Macaulay

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Macaulay was the first responsible European publicly to advocate civilizing slaughter, and the silence about it was complicity.

The interaction of modern religion and its surrogates interests me. It’s often misleadingly called “belief versus unbelief.” In fact, all of us believe a lot. For centuries intelligent people, both...

Macaulay

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Macaulay was the first responsible European to publicly advocate civilizing slaughter.

Macaulay: The Tragedy of Power is a cultural biography of Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay (1800-1859). The eclipse of his reputation may suggest that there’s nothing deader than a dead empire....

Macaulay

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AA's most radical feature is its demand that men give up the habits of domination and dependence.

I’ve got two of these. The first is on pages 16-17, where I talk about what this book is not. Unlike most of the writings on the topic, The Language...

The Language of the Heart

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AA's most radical feature is its demand that men give up habits of domination and dependence.

Two phenomena led me to this project. A number of people close to me are recovering addicts of one sort or another, and when I attended meetings with them I...

The Language of the Heart

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AA's most radical feature is its demand that men give up the habits of domination and dependence.

My book is about that loosely defined cultural phenomenon known as “the recovery movement”—an agglomeration of self-help groups and practices that have grown out of Alcoholics Anonymous since its founding...

The Language of the Heart

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The 1743 Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman, reprinted as a novel, is substantially true.

The prologue of Birthright is the portion to which I devoted the most energy. If it does not capture the reader’s imagination, chances are that the rest of the book...

Birthright

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The 1743 Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman, reprinted as a novel, is substantially true.

Although the inspiration for five novels, Annesley’s ordeal has attracted scant attention from historians, in part because the principal primary source associated with his abduction is a volume, first published...

Birthright

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A 1743 memoir long read as a novel is substantially true.

Birthright sets out to recount, for the first time, the real-life saga of James Annesley, which not only captivated eighteenth-century Britain but inspired five novels, most famously Robert Louis Stevenson’s...

Birthright

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Without Sasha there might have been no Lenin, and the mechanism was family rather than doctrine.

In the book’s last chapter, I try to explain Vladimir’s development, showing how family history shapes people and how parents and siblings interact in complex ways.The Ulyanov family and its...

Lenin's Brother

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Without Lenin's brother Sasha there might have been no Lenin.

Lenin’s Brother follows my earlier work on Lavrov, Nechaev, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. The book allowed me to revisit Lenin’s entry into the revolutionary movement—a fateful moment. Most historians agree...

Lenin's Brother

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Without Sasha there might have been no Lenin, and the mechanism was family rather than doctrine.

Lenin’s Brother tells the tragic story of a brilliant young scientist and his turn to terrorism, and the history of the family that his actions devastated. During his senior year at...

Lenin's Brother

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The philosophers who insist most on the man/animal divide depend most heavily on animals for their arguments.

Throughout Western history, philosophers have suggested that what is human is determined by what we eat. Whether they think that we are what we eat (like Rousseau and Herder) or...

Animal Lessons

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The philosophers who insist most on the man/animal divide depend most on animals for their arguments.

Animal Lessons engages with, yet radically departs from, discussions of animal rights and animal welfare that dominate philosophical conversations about animals. I move away from the framework of animal rights...

Animal Lessons

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The philosophers who insist most on the man/animal divide depend most heavily on animals for their arguments.

Animal Lessons is about how philosophers throughout Western history have used animals to make the case that humans are special. Philosophers have argued that humans are so unique that they...

Animal Lessons

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Starbucks is typical, and what made it possible was the replacement of nonmarket civic life by consumption.

On page p. 90 of Everything but the Coffee there is the start of a rather long riff on bathrooms that captures the way in which corporate powers, posing as...

Everything but the Coffee

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Starbucks is typical, and what made it possible was the replacement of nonmarket civic life by consumption.

Starbucks is not really all that special or unique. Despite its claims of good deeds and better works, the company, at the end of the day, is typical—typical of how...

Everything but the Coffee

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Starbucks is not special but typical, filling the space left by vanished civic life.

Obviously, this isn’t the first book about Starbucks. But Everything but the Coffee is first to examine the company’s rise and fall and look ahead to its uncertain future in...

Everything but the Coffee

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Organizational toxicity is a clinical condition that spreads like a contagion, and it is treatable.

In my work with business leaders and their organizations, I bring an active counseling psychology perspective into play, working with executives one-on-one. Naturally, I entertain the possibility that highly intelligent...

Transforming Toxic Leaders

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Organizational toxicity is a clinical condition that spreads like a contagion.

I argue that a single-minded concentration on positive leadership alone is one-sided, skewed, and unable to address the psychology of high-level leaders and extremely complex organizational systems. A failure in...

Transforming Toxic Leaders

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Organizational toxicity is a clinical condition that spreads like a contagion, and it is treatable.

In my new book Transforming Toxic Leaders I speak from behind closed corporate doors to provide a unique view into the dark side of leadership. Based on executive coaching and...

Transforming Toxic Leaders

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Midlife anxiety is a Victorian invention, and the word midlife entered an English dictionary in 1895 to name it.

Midlife anxiety thrived in other forms of Victorian print culture as well. One good example is soap advertisements. At mid-century, an array of mass produced products were put on display...

Aging by the Book

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Midlife anxiety is a Victorian invention, not a twentieth-century one.

I became interested in writing about age as a “non-traditional” graduate student in my early forties. Not just self-conscious about being older than my classmates, I also couldn’t help but...

Aging by the Book

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Midlife anxiety is a Victorian invention, and the word midlife entered an English dictionary in 1895 to name it.

In an 1852 Punch cartoon, a middle-aged man looks in a mirror and says, “Good gracious! Is it possible?—No! Yes! No!—Yes! Yes, by Jupiter, it's a grey hair in my...

Aging by the Book

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You cannot explain how anyone sees a painting or understands a novel without first settling what a self is.

In the Prologue to my book, I offer a summary of my theory of the human self and explain the conceptual linkage between the definition of the human and the...

The Arts and the Definition of the Human

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You cannot explain how anyone sees a painting or understands a novel without first settling what a self is.

Looking at paintings and reading books, I suggest, are abilities to “penetrate,” culturally informed and culturally transformed by our mastery of language and our sense of the practices and history...

The Arts and the Definition of the Human

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You cannot explain how anyone sees a painting without first settling what a self is.

I show how looking at paintings and reading literature depend on how sensory perception and understanding are formed and transformed by the way in which we ourselves are first formed,...

The Arts and the Definition of the Human

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Since the late 1970s young people have gone from embodying the nation's future to being a generation of suspects.

I have always been concerned about the role that theory might play as a resource in providing both a language and a context for understanding and addressing important social issues....

Youth in a Suspect Society

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Since the late 1970s young people have gone from embodying the nation's future to being a generation of suspects.

Youth in a Suspect Society takes as its major organizing idea the notion that youth are under assault in ways that are entirely new. My assumption is that young people...

Youth in a Suspect Society

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Since the late 1970s young people have gone from the nation's future to a generation of suspects.

In many ways, Youth in a Suspect Society is motivated by a sense of outrage and a sense of hope. While youth have always represented an ambiguous category, they have within...

Youth in a Suspect Society

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Capitalism is a culture, not a natural or inevitable economic system.

I’d like my fresh reader to read the introduction carefully because it lays out my argument and makes the assertions that the text must back up. Many believe that capitalism...

The Relentless Revolution

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Capitalism is a culture, neither inevitable nor natural, so it takes a different shape in every country that adopts it.

A history does more than narrate events—it also reveals the decisive moments that give shape to a life or country. It permits consideration of turning points and alternative directions for...

The Relentless Revolution

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Capitalism is a culture, neither inevitable nor natural, so it takes a different shape in every country that adopts it.

The Relentless Revolution begins with the puzzle of why it took so long for capitalism to emerge. Defining capitalism as a cultural system based on a particular economy, I show...

The Relentless Revolution

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The first Chicago skyscrapers were plain as a perceptual strategy for a distracted crowd, cued by Whistler rather than engineering.

One of the most revered buildings in Chicago’s architectural history is also one of the strangest. Looming over the intersection of Dearborn and Jackson Streets, Burnham’s and Root’s Monadnock building,...

Chicago 1890

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The plainness of the first Chicago skyscrapers was a strategy for a distracted crowd, not structural honesty.

Although I was trained as a professional architect, I am principally an architectural historian, drawn especially to the social and political context of architecture and urbanism in nineteenth and early...

Chicago 1890

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The first Chicago skyscrapers were plain as a perceptual strategy for a distracted crowd, cued by Whistler rather than engineering.

This book is about the first skyscrapers in the world, those built in Chicago in the 1880s and 90s. The unprecedented sixteen-story buildings lining La Salle and Dearborn Streets gave...

Chicago 1890

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Belligerents fight on while clearly losing because they do not trust a settlement to hold.

The chapter on the American Civil War describes what may have been Lincoln’s finest moment as president. During the summer of 1864, Northern public support for the war was collapsing....

How Wars End

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Wars end on terms only when both sides trust a settlement to hold.

I started thinking about this book in the early 2000s. On the policy side, in 2002 the George W. Bush administration announced the National Security Strategy, sometimes called the Bush...

How Wars End

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Belligerents fight on while clearly losing because they do not trust a settlement to hold.

How Wars End starts with Carl von Clausewitz’s famous insight that war is politics by other means. War is not just an exercise in martial engineering, two waves of soldiers...

How Wars End

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In research universities the best scholars make the best leaders, and a hospital should be led by a doctor.

Why do experts make better leaders? I interviewed twenty-six presidents and deans in universities in the US and UK, including Amy Gutmann at U Penn, Lawrence Summers and Derek Bok, former...

Socrates in the Boardroom

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In research universities the best scholars make the best leaders, and a hospital should be led by a doctor.

There are literally thousands of books on leadership on the market. And one of the common criticisms about them is that they are often anecdotal and lack convincing evidence. Also, various...

Socrates in the Boardroom

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In organizations built on expert knowledge, experts make better leaders than managers.

Socrates in the Boardroom argues that it is experts, not managers that make the better leaders. This is a message that, recently, has been almost unfashionable. I go a step...

Socrates in the Boardroom

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Baroque and neobaroque are one continuing strategy, and its ideological value cannot be read off period or geography.

In the introduction I draw some close parallels between baroque manipulation of appearances and the control exerted by the Bush administration over the news media. The use of the media...

The Theater of Truth

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Baroque and neobaroque are one continuing strategy, and its ideological value cannot be read off period or geography.

The baroque, as I theorize it, be it as a stylistic marker or period in art history, may be difficult to recognize for those who thought they knew it well....

The Theater of Truth

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Baroque and neobaroque are not two styles but one continuing strategy.

The Theater of Truth: The Ideology of (Neo)baroque Aesthetics argues that seventeenth-century baroque and twentieth-century neobaroque aesthetics have to be understood as part of the same complex. Rather than a return...

The Theater of Truth

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The distance Americans keep from deaths in Iraq is manufactured, not natural.

Here in the U.S. we read and watch the news of countless deaths in Iraq and other war-torn countries around the world. We briefly take note of the incidents, sometimes...

Shoot an Iraqi

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The distance Americans keep from deaths in Iraq is manufactured, and only putting the trigger in their hands breaks it.

For Americans following media coverage of the past two Iraq wars, Saddam Hussein was something of a cliché, a ridiculous megalomaniacal figure whose very existence provided cover for two wars...

Shoot an Iraqi

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The distance Americans keep from deaths in Iraq is manufactured, and only putting the trigger in their hands breaks it.

I live in two worlds. I fled my native Iraq in 1991 during the Gulf War, and after almost two years in horrific refugee camps in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait,...

Shoot an Iraqi

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Hamsun's collaboration was continuous with his fiction, and Growth of the Soil reads differently once that is known.

Hamsun’s actions in the few short summer months of 1943 define him, clarifying his unreserved support of the Nazi program. He writes an admiring letter to Joseph Goebbels and sends...

Knut Hamsun

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Hamsun's collaboration was continuous with his fiction, and Growth of the Soil reads differently once that is known.

While searching for answers to Hamsun’s support for the Third Reich, I was struck by several things. First, I felt that the critical texts about Hamsun were too narrowly focused on his...

Knut Hamsun

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Hamsun's Nazi collaboration was continuous with his fiction, not a lapse beside it.

Knut Hamsun: The Dark Side of Literary Brilliance explains how and why the extraordinary Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun supported, enthusiastically and to the bitter end, the German occupation of Norway...

Knut Hamsun

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German thinkers from Leibniz to Nietzsche knew far more about their Ottoman neighbours than their published work admits.

The aspect of my research which took me most by surprise happened half-way through my writing of the book. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, for all his stunning complexity, notoriously dismissed...

The History of Islam in German Thought

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German thinkers from Leibniz to Nietzsche knew far more about their Ottoman neighbours than they admitted.

My book takes issue with a number of positions, the first of which being that a complete and coherent history of European thought can be written without reference to non-Europe....

The History of Islam in German Thought

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German thinkers from Leibniz to Nietzsche knew far more about their Ottoman neighbours than their published work admits.

This book is about the reception of the Muslim world in the works of eight major German thinkers, but differs from other histories of ideas on two points. First of...

The History of Islam in German Thought

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The Qing legal system was a working attempt at fairness, with layered safeguards and real penalties for failing judges.

There are many cases in my book that should be of particular interest to an inquisitive reader wanting to find out what happened, why, and what the punishment might have...

True Crimes in Eighteenth-Century China

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The Qing legal system was a working attempt at fairness, not worthless despotism.

The history of China’s interactions with Western cultures is fraught with misunderstandings, especially on the part of the West. Based on information supplied by pioneering Jesuit missionaries in China at...

True Crimes in Eighteenth-Century China

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The Qing legal system was a working attempt at fairness, with layered safeguards and real penalties for failing judges.

My book presents a sample of crime reports from eighteenth-century China in English translation. All are capital crimes. Since all capital crimes might carry the death penalty, detailed reports of...

True Crimes in Eighteenth-Century China

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Authenticity is a weapon in the fight over city space, and Jane Jacobs's urban village now belongs to gentrifiers.

Not surprisingly for a book about consuming authenticity, a lot of the writing revolves around food. Food is the new “art” in the urban cultural experience. This is true not...

Naked City

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Authenticity is not a property of places but a weapon in the fight over city space.

Naked City

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Authenticity is a weapon in the fight over city space, and Jane Jacobs's urban village now belongs to gentrifiers.

Are cities losing their soul? Stroll around the center of the world’s great cities, and you see the same gentrified neighborhoods, certified historic buildings, spectacular skyscrapers and new modern art...

Naked City

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Mutual-aid structure makes radical religious groups lethal, so governments should compete with them in providing benign services.

The final chapter of Radical, Religious, and Violent examines religious radicalism in a historical context. Having established earlier in the book why religious radicals can be lethal terrorists and especially...

Radical, Religious, and Violent

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Radical religious groups are lethal because of their mutual-aid structure, not their theology.

My book offers a fresh way of understanding insurgency and terrorism. I outline a constructive approach to confronting localized insurgencies like those in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the international terrorism...

Radical, Religious, and Violent

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Mutual-aid structure makes radical religious groups lethal, so governments should compete with them in providing benign services.

Why are the Taliban such a threat in Afghanistan? And why are violent radical Islamists such resilient terrorists? You won’t believe this but the answer is communism. I’m not kidding....

Radical, Religious, and Violent

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Film viewing is tactile contact between two bodies, the viewer's and the film's own.

The full-bodied, mutual suffusion of film and viewer is illustrated graphically and literally by The Big Swallow (James Williamson, 1901). The film begins with a medium-long shot of a gentleman...

The Tactile Eye

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Film viewing is tactile contact between two bodies, the viewer's and the film's own.

The Tactile Eye emerged as a response to my own craving for what anthropologist Paul Stoller calls “sensuous scholarship.” I was inspired by certain film and art history scholarship in...

The Tactile Eye

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Watching a film is tactile contact between two bodies, the viewer's and the film's own.

In Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep (2006), Gael García Bernal plays a frustrated artist with a penchant for quirky handmade objects and stop-motion animation who falls in love with...

The Tactile Eye

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Modern consumer society was born out of religious fervor rather than its defeat.

The idea that interiors reveal personalities is such a truism of contemporary culture that it is difficult to imagine that it was not always so. While the well-to-do in previous...

Household Gods

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Modern consumer society was born out of religious fervor rather than its defeat.

My book began as an inquiry into the origins of consumer demand. In the past two decades, economic historians have established that consumer demand provided an important catalyst for industrialization....

Household Gods

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Modern consumer society was born out of religious fervor rather than its defeat.

Household Gods is a history of the British love-affair with the domestic interior from the age of mass manufacture to modernism. In no other country was domesticity so celebrated and...

Household Gods

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Without civic friendship embodied in laws and customs, only a sham justice of the powerful can reign.

In the book’s preface I dive into what I has been much overlooked in the modern period: the importance of friendship, how it seems to differ for women, and not...

On Civic Friendship

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Without civic friendship embodied in laws and customs, only a sham justice of the powerful can reign.

Despite the major transformation of consciousness occasioned by the 20th century women’s movement, and on a scale that suggests powerful historical forces are at work, the modern political state is...

On Civic Friendship

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Justice depends on civic friendship, a reciprocal good will built into laws and customs.

Historically speaking, theorizing the nature of the political state from a feminist point of view is in its earliest stages. So my book offers a novel feminist account of the...

On Civic Friendship

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Routine protection orders, sought whether or not the woman wants one, amount to a state-imposed de facto divorce.

In many jurisdictions, the moment a misdemeanor domestic violence arrest enters the system, prosecutors routinely seek a protection order banning the alleged assailant from the home, whether or not the...

At Home in the Law

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Routine protection orders, sought whether or not the woman wants one, amount to a state-imposed de facto divorce.

The image of the home as a place of coercion and abuse has gained ground in our culture. The notion that the home shields subordination within its walls is becoming...

At Home in the Law

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Domestic violence law turned the home from a man's castle into the place where the crime is.

At Home in the Law argues that the past 40 years have witnessed important transformations in the legal idea of what the home is. For centuries the familiar adage, a...

At Home in the Law

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Critical Theory's real American reception came after the New Left imploded, in the seminar room.

In the wake of 1968, Herbert Marcuse and, by extension, his former colleagues from the Frankfurt School became forever linked with the student protests of that era. While most of...

The Frankfurt School in Exile

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Critical Theory took hold in America in the seminar room, not the streets of 1968.

In a letter of June 29, 1940, Max Horkheimer eloquently developed one of the metaphors that became central to the history of Critical Theory in America. Writing to the actress...

The Frankfurt School in Exile

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Critical Theory's real American reception came after the New Left imploded, in the seminar room.

My book aims to challenge what I consider to be some pervasive views about the Frankfurt School during its period of exile in the United States and to re-evaluate the...

The Frankfurt School in Exile

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Modern money is bank credit, therefore debt, and debt has replaced God as the guarantee of human cooperation.

Capital growth begins with borrowing for investment. For all economic activity is limited by the supply of money: there is always so much more that could be done, if only...

Theology of Money

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