Examines "Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Charles Darwin, and Karl Marx--heirs of the Enlightenment who embodied its highest ideals about progress--and shows how their thoughts, over time and in the hands of their followers and opponents, transformed the very n…
"This panoramic book tells the story of how revolutionary ideas from the Enlightenment about freedom, equality, evolution, and democracy have reverberated through modern history and shaped the world as we know it today. A testament to the enduring power of ideas, The Shape of th…
Authors Montgomery and Chirot make the case that to read the works of the great thinkers is to gain insight into the ideas shape how we think and what we believe. They provide portraits of heirs of the Enlightenment that embodied its highest ideals about progress: Adam Smith, Th…
"In modernizing Russia, obshchestvennostʹ, an indigenous Russian word, began functioning as an indispensable term to illuminate newly emerging active parts of society and their public identities. This volume approaches various phenomena associated with obshchestvennostʹ across t…
From Bitcoin to Apple Pay, big changes seem to be afoot in the world of money. Yet the use of coins and paper bills has persisted for 3,000 years. In How would you like to pay?, leading anthropologist Bill Maurer narrates money's history, considers its role in everyday life, and…
by Law, John
fromScience and cultural theory
While much recent social science and humanities work has been a revolt against simplification, this volume explores the contrast between simplicity and complexity to reveal that this dichotomy, itself, is too simplistic. John Law and Annemarie Mol have gathered a distinguished p…
For well over half a century, since the first credible warnings of petroleum depletion were raised in the 1950s, contemporary industrial civilization has been caught in a remarkable paradox: a culture more focused on problem solving than any other has repeatedly failed to deal w…
"Knowledge is a big subject, says Stuart Firestein, but ignorance is a bigger one. And it is ignorance--not knowledge--that is the true engine of science. Most of us have a false impression of science as a surefire, deliberate, step-by-step method for finding things out and gett…
