Princeton University Press strana 12 z 24

A philosopher examines the complicated phenomenon of gaslighting“Gaslighting” is suddenly in everyone’s vocabulary. It’s written about, talked about, tweeted about, even sung about (in “Gaslighting” by The Chicks). It’s become shorthand for being manipulated by someone who insists that up is down, hot is cold, dark is light—someone who isn’t just lying about such things, but trying to drive you crazy. The term has its origins in a 1944 film in which a husband does exactly that to his wife, his crazy-making efforts symbolized by the rise and fall of the gaslights in their home. In this timely and provocative book, Kate Abramson examines gaslighting from a philosophical perspective, investigating it as a distinctive moral phenomenon.Gaslighting, Abramson writes, is best understood as a form of interpersonal interaction, a particular way of fundamentally undermining someone. The gaslighter, Abramson argues, aims to make his target experience herself as incapable of reasoning, perceiving, or reacting in ways that would allow her to form appropriate beliefs, perceptions, or emotions in the first place. He seeks not only to induce in her this unmoored sense of herself but also to make it a reality. Using examples and analysis, Abramson gives an account of gaslighting and its immorality, and argues that such a discussion can help us understand other aspects of social life—from racism and sexism to the structure of interpersonal trust.

A constitutionalist reading of Plato’s political thoughtPlato famously defends the rule of knowledge. Knowledge, for him, is of the good. But what is rule? In this study, Melissa Lane reveals how political office and rule were woven together in Greek vocabulary and practices that both connected and distinguished between rule in general and office as a constitutionally limited kind of rule in particular. In doing so, Lane shows Plato to have been deeply concerned with the roles and relationships between rulers and ruled. Adopting a longstanding Greek expectation that a ruler should serve the good of the ruled, Plato’s major political dialogues—the Republic, the Statesman, and Laws—explore how different kinds of rule might best serve that good. With this book, Lane offers the first account of the clearly marked vocabulary of offices at the heart of all three of these dialogues, explaining how such offices fit within the broader organization and theorizing of rule. Lane argues that taking Plato’s interest in rule and office seriously reveals tyranny as ultimately a kind of anarchy, lacking the order as well as the purpose of rule. When we think of tyranny in this way, we see how Plato invokes rule and office as underpinning freedom and friendship as political values, and how Greek slavery shaped Plato’s account of freedom. Reading Plato both in the Greek context and in dialogue with contemporary thinkers, Lane argues that rule and office belong at the center of Platonic, Greek, and contemporary political thought.

A provocative case for the inherently political nature of languageIn The Politics of Language, David Beaver and Jason Stanley present a radical new approach to the theory of meaning, offering an account of communication in which political and social identity, affect, and shared practices play as important a role as information. This new view of language, they argue, has dramatic consequences for free speech, democracy, and a range of other areas in which speech plays a central role.Drawing on a wealth of disciplines, The Politics of Language argues that the function of speech—whether in dialogue, larger group interactions, or mass communication—is to attune people to something, be it a shared reality, emotion, or identity. Reconceptualizing the central ideas of pragmatics and semantics, Beaver and Stanley apply their account to a range of phenomena that defy standard frameworks in linguistics and philosophy of language—from dog whistles and covert persuasion to echo chambers and genocidal speech. The authors use their framework to show that speech is inevitably political because all communication is imbued with the resonances of particular ideologies and their normative perspectives on reality.At a time when democracy is under attack, authoritarianism is on the rise, and diversity and equality are being demanded, The Politics of Language offers a powerful new vision of the language of politics, ideology, and protest.

A cultural and literary history of mountains in classical antiquityThe mountainous character of the Mediterranean was a crucial factor in the history of the ancient Greek and Roman world. The Folds of Olympus is a cultural and literary history that explores the important role mountains played in Greek and Roman religious, military, and economic life, as well as in the identity of communities over a millennium—from Homer to the early Christian saints. Aimed at readers of ancient history and literature as well as those interested in mountains and the environment, the book offers a powerful account of the landscape at the heart of much Greek and Roman culture. Jason König charts the importance of mountains in religion and pilgrimage, the aesthetic vision of mountains in art and literature, the place of mountains in conquest and warfare, and representations of mountain life. He shows how mountains were central to the way in which the inhabitants of the ancient Mediterranean understood the boundaries between the divine and the human, and the limits of human knowledge and control. He also argues that there is more continuity than normally assumed between ancient descriptions of mountains and modern accounts of the picturesque and the sublime. Offering a unique perspective on the history of classical culture, The Folds of Olympus is also a resoundingly original contribution to the literature on mountains.

Why liberalism is all you need to lead a good, fun, worthy, and rewarding life—and how you can become a better and happier person by taking your liberal beliefs more seriouslyWhere do you get your values and sensibilities from? If you grew up in a Western democracy, the answer is probably liberalism. Conservatives are right about one thing: liberalism is the ideology of our times, as omnipresent as religion once was. Yet, as Alexandre Lefebvre argues in Liberalism as a Way of Life, many of us are liberal without fully realizing it—or grasping what it means. Misled into thinking that liberalism is confined to politics, we fail to recognize that it’s the water we swim in, saturating every area of public and private life, shaping our psychological and spiritual outlooks, and influencing our moral and aesthetic values—our sense of what is right, wrong, good, bad, funny, worthwhile, and more. This eye-opening book shows how so many of us are liberal to the core, why liberalism provides the basis for a good life, and how we can make our lives better and happier by becoming more aware of, and more committed to, the beliefs we already hold.A lively, engaging, and uplifting guide to living well, the liberal way, Liberalism as a Way of Life is filled with examples from television, movies, stand-up comedy, and social media—from Parks and Recreation and The Good Place to the Borat movies and Hannah Gadsby. Along the way, you’ll also learn about seventeen benefits of being a liberal—including generosity, humor, cheer, gratitude, tolerance, and peace of mind—and practical exercises to increase these rewards.You’re probably already waist-deep in the waters of liberalism. Liberalism as a Way of Life invites you to dive in.

A wide-ranging account of American and French understandings of merit, talent, and intelligence over the past two centuriesHow have modern democracies squared their commitment to equality with their fear that disparities in talent and intelligence might be natural, persistent, and consequential? John Carson tells the fascinating story of how two nations wrestled scientifically with human inequalities and their social and political implications. Surveying a broad array of political tracts, philosophical treatises, scientific works, and journalistic writings, Carson chronicles the gradual embrace of the IQ version of intelligence in the United States, while in France, the birthplace of the modern intelligence test, expert judgment was consistently prized above such quantitative measures. He also reveals the crucial role that determinations of, and contests over, merit have played in both societies—they have helped to organize educational systems, justify racial hierarchies, classify army recruits, and direct individuals onto particular educational and career paths. A contribution to both the history of science and intellectual history, The Measure of Merit illuminates the shadow languages of inequality that have haunted the American and French republics since their inceptions.

A reckoning with psychological and ecological crises from a poet whose work has been praised as “beautiful and riveting” (Los Angeles Review of Books)A poetic representation of PTSD and its evocative bewilderments, Paula Bohince’s mesmerizing new collection, A Violence, is written at inflection points: a waking from dissociation borne from a harrowing childhood; a breakdown; and a struggle toward wholeness by means of mystified recollection amid ecological disturbances. Praised for poems that “reward enormously upon first encounter, and only more so upon subsequent reads” (The Rumpus), Bohince is here alert to surprise, the enthralling image “rushing through such wreckage a brain becomes.” Contemplating vulnerability and resilience in the entwined human and natural worlds, with a voice precise and powerful, A Violence is a haunting collection that builds symphonically to recover a self “gone away,” where the ordinary is imbued with transcendental significance.

A collection of wry and fiercely intelligent sonnets from a widely praised poetAaron Fagan’s Atom and Void is a dazzling and haunting meditation on existence and impermanence. This collection of sonnets delves into the fragility of perception, the boundaries between self and other, and the ways language fractures and recombines to illuminate meaning. Drawing on influences as diverse as physics, art, and philosophy, the poems balance precision with abstraction, creating a space where the reader encounters the immediacy of experience alongside its inevitable fading. What emerges is a deeply personal yet universal reckoning with the nature of being—its joys, its terrors, and the unrelenting beauty of its transience. These poems do not seek to provide answers but to embody the questions that shape our lives. The result is a work that both disrupts and comforts, holding the reader in a delicate balance of wonder and disquiet. With its thematic range and lyrical precision, Atom and Void is an extraordinary contribution to contemporary poetry.

A penetrating account of how, over many decades, conservative backlash to the administrative state led to the rise of a strongman presidency that threatens American democracyIn Trajectory of Power, leading political scientists William Howell and Terry Moe provide a sweeping account of the historical rise of presidential power, arguing that it has now grown to the point where, in the wrong hands, it threatens to subvert American democracy and replace it with a de facto system of strongman rule, whether led by Donald Trump or someone else. The book shows that, for much of the twentieth century, Republican and Democratic presidents pursued power in very similar ways and almost always within democratic bounds. But Republican presidents since Ronald Reagan, in a transformation that has grown increasingly extreme over time, have gone beyond the “normal” incentives that have traditionally shaped presidential behavior—and still shape the behavior of Democratic presidents—to pursue a presidency of such expansive unilateral power, and with such disregard for basic democratic requirements, that it puts democracy at serious risk. Trajectory of Power traces this divergence in approach to the backlash of conservatives against the administrative state, and to their epiphany that a war on big government could only be waged through a presidency of extraordinary power. With this vision in mind, Reagan’s Justice Department pioneered the Unitary Executive Theory, which justified vast expansions of unilateral presidential power and was further radicalized over the decades as the Republican Party became more ideologically extreme, more populist, more anti-system, and ultimately more supportive of a strongman presidency. Timely, urgent, and original, Trajectory of Power reveals how the presidency has been profoundly transformed during the modern era—and why it now puts our democracy in imminent danger.

A timely new critique of capitalism’s persistent failure to value natureCapitalism is typically treated as a force for relentless commodification. Yet it consistently fails to place value on vital aspects of the nonhuman world, whether carbon emissions or entire ecosystems. In Free Gifts, Alyssa Battistoni explores capitalism’s persistent failure to value nature, arguing that the key question is not the moral issue of why some kinds of nature shouldn’t be commodified, but the economic puzzle of why they haven’t been. To understand contemporary ecological problems from biodiversity collapse to climate change, she contends, we have to understand how some things come to have value under capitalism—and how others do not. To help us do so, Battistoni recovers and reinterprets the idea of the free gift of nature used by classical economic thinkers to describe what we gratuitously obtain from the natural world, and builds on Karl Marx’s critique of political economy to show how capitalism fundamentally treats nature as free for the taking. This novel theory of capitalism’s relationship to nature not only helps us understand contemporary ecological breakdown, but also casts capitalism’s own core dynamics in a new light.Battistoni addresses four different instances of the free gift in political economic thought, each in a specific domain: natural agents in industry, pollution in the environment, reproductive labor in the household, and natural capital in the biosphere. In so doing, she offers new readings of major twentieth-century thinkers, including Friedrich Hayek, Simone de Beauvoir, Garrett Hardin, Silvia Federici, and Ronald Coase. Ultimately, she offers a novel account of freedom for our ecologically troubled present, developing a materialist existentialism to argue that capitalism limits our ability to be responsible for our relationships to the natural world, and imagining how we might live freely while valuing nature’s gifts.

A new account of global justice that recovers anticolonial thought for resisting a neocolonial agePoliticians and activists today turn to the language of decolonization to call attention to such issues as cultural and linguistic decline, exploitative foreign investment, and global institutions dominated by superpowers. But does anticolonial thought really provide a model for reimagining world politics? The history of decolonization has not resulted in the liberating transformations that many envisioned. In Postcolonial Global Justice, Shuk Ying Chan proposes a new account of postcolonial global justice centered around the value of social equality. Drawing on the thought of Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, and Jawaharlal Nehru, Chan argues that a central theme in anticolonial thought is the rejection of hierarchy and the embrace of equality. These ideas from decolonization, she suggests, give us tools for critiquing contemporary global hierarchies and for rejecting postcolonial nationalism more concerned with policing its citizens than promoting their freedom and equality. Following the wave of postcolonial state-founding in the twentieth century, many in the West saw decolonization as largely accomplished—and yet global politics continue to feature hierarchies that resemble colonial relations. Chan investigates these new and persistent colonial hierarchies across three areas of contemporary world politics: international investment, cultural imperialism, and global governance. Exploring the changes needed to move toward a new, more equal postcolonial world order, Chan offers a vision of global justice rooted in the unrealized egalitarian aspirations of anticolonial thinker-activists, prompting us to rethink what decolonization may mean today.

A new way to tackle the real politics of climate change through asset revaluationIt’s no secret that the Paris Agreement and voluntary efforts to address climate change are failing. Governments have spent three decades crafting international rules to manage the climate crisis yet have made little progress on decarbonization. In Existential Politics, Jessica Green explains why this is unsurprising: governments have misdiagnosed the political problem of climate change, focusing relentlessly on measuring, reporting, and trading emissions. This technical approach of “managing tons” ignores the ways that climate change and climate policy will revalue assets, creating winners and losers. Policies such as net zero, carbon pricing, and offsets all cater to the losers—owners of fossil assets. Ultimately, Green contends, climate change is a political problem. Climate politics should be understood as existential—creating conflicts that arise when some actors face the prospect of the devaluation or elimination of their assets or competition from the creation of new ones. Fossil asset owners, such as oil and gas companies and electric utilities, stand to lose trillions in the energy transition. Thus, they are fighting to slow decarbonization and preserve the value of their assets. Green asset owners, who will be the basis of the decarbonized economy, are fewer in number and relatively weak politically. Green proposes using international tax, finance, and trade institutions to create new green asset owners and constrain fossil asset owners, reducing their clout. Domestic investments in green assets, facilitated by global trade rules, can build the political power of green asset owners.

From acclaimed folklorist and historian Adrienne Mayor, an enchanting collection of the ancient myths that emerged out of the wonders—and disasters—of the natural worldMythopedia is a fun, fact-filled A-Z treasury of myths inspired by natural events. Bringing together fifty legends from antiquity to the present, this delightfully entertaining book takes you around the world to explore sunken kingdoms and lost cities, accursed mountains and treacherous terrains, and lethal lakes and singing sand dunes, explaining the historical background and latest science underlying each tale. As soon as humans invented language, they told stories to explain mysterious things they observed around them—on land, in the seas, and in the skies. Even though these tales are expressed in poetic or supernatural language, they contain surprisingly accurate insights and even eyewitness descriptions of catastrophic events millennia ago. Drawing on her unique insights as a pioneer in the exciting new field of geomythology, Adrienne Mayor describes how cultural memories of tsunamis, volcanic disasters, and other massive geological events can reach back thousands of years as the stories were preserved, elaborated, told, and retold across generations. She shows how geomythology is expanding our understanding of our planet’s history over eons, revealing the human desire to explain nature and weave imaginative stories intertwined with keen observation, rational speculation, and memory. With captivating drawings by Michele Angel, Mythopedia is a compendium of many marvels, from the Hindu monkey god Hanuman and his army of bridge-building primates to the terrifying sand demon Shensha shen of China, the gnawing glaciers of Austria, and the vengeful fish-headed snake god Nyami Nyami of Africa’s Zambezi River. Features a cloth cover with an elaborate foil-stamped design

Virginia Woolf’s first fully realized work of fiction—published in its final, revised form for the first timeA beguiling trio of fantastical and farcical anti-fairy tales about a giantess who builds a magical “cottage of one’s own,” battles a silver-scaled sea monster, and defies governesses and gravity alikeIn 1907, eight years before she published her first novel, a twenty-five-year-old Virginia Woolf drafted three interconnected comic stories chronicling the adventures of a giantess named Violet—a teasing tribute to Woolf’s friend Mary Violet Dickinson. But it was only in 2022 that Woolf scholar Urmila Seshagiri discovered a final, revised typescript of the stories. The typescript revealed that Woolf had finished this mock-biography, making it her first fully realized literary experiment and a work that anticipates her later masterpieces. Published here for the first time in its final form, The Life of Violet blends fantasy, fairy tale, and satire as it transports readers into a magical world where the heroine triumphs over sea-monsters as well as stifling social traditions. In these irresistible and riotously plotted stories, Violet, who has powers “as marvelous as her height,” gleefully flouts aristocratic proprieties, finds joy in building “a cottage of one’s own,” and travels to Japan to help create a radical new social order. Amid flights of fancy such as a snowfall of sugared almonds and bathtubs made of painted ostrich eggs, The Life of Violet upends the marriage plot, rejects the Victorian belief that women must choose between virtue and ambition, and celebrates women’s friendships and laughter. A major literary discovery that heralds Woolf’s ambitions to revolutionize fiction and sheds new light on her great themes, The Life of Violet is first and foremost a delight to read. This volume features a preface, afterword, notes, and photographs that provide rich historical, literary, and biographical context.

An epic deep history of the Indigenous peoples of North America, covering more than 20,000 years of astonishing diversity, adaptation, resilience, and continuityNative America presents an infinitely surprising and fascinating deep history of the continent’s Indigenous peoples. Kenneth Feder, a leading expert on Native American history and archaeology, draws on archaeological, historical, and cultural evidence to tell the ongoing story, more than 20,000 years in the making, of an incredibly resilient and diverse mixture of peoples, revealing how they have ingeniously adapted to the many changing environments of the continent, from the Arctic to the desert Southwest. Richly illustrated, Native America introduces close to a hundred different peoples, each with their own language, economic and social system, and religious beliefs. Here, we meet the Pequot, Tunxis, Iroquois, and Huron of the Northeast; the Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, and Apache of the Southwest; the Hidatsa, Mandan, and Lakota of the Northern Plains; the Haida, Kwakiutl, Nootka, and Salish of the Northwest Coast; the Tule River and Mohave of Southern California; the Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole of the Southeast; and the Inuit and Kalaallit of the Arctic. We learn about hunters of enormous Ice Age beasts; people who raised stone toolmaking to the level of art; a Native American empire ruled by a king and queen, with a huge city at its center and colonies hundreds of miles away; a society that made the desert bloom by designing complex irrigation networks; brilliant architects who built fairy castles in sandstone cliffs; and artists who produced beautiful and moving petroglyphs and pictographs that reflect their deep thinking about history, the sacred, the land, and the sky. Native America is not about peoples of the past, but vibrant, living ones with an epic history of genius and tenacity—a history that everyone should know.

The relationship between colonial pluralism and nationalist civil war in former British coloniesWhy do some communities fight civil wars over national self-rule while others do not? In Legacies of British Rule, Matthew Lange offers insight into this question through a rigorous multimethod and comparative analysis that pinpoints the combined impact of precolonial statehood and British colonialism. During transitions from empire to nation-state, postcolonial officials in places with large and long-standing precolonial states commonly try to build a unified nation around the dominant community in ways that discriminate against and exclude smaller communities. While such national chauvinism can fuel reactions leading to nationalist civil war, a history of British colonialism intensifies these reactions by increasing sensitivity to national chauvinism and empowering communities to act. Consequently, nationalist civil wars are three times more common in former British colonies than in other former overseas colonies. And yet, Lange finds that British colonialism exerts a very different effect on places with a limited history of precolonial statehood; in an environment with little national chauvinism, British colonialism deters nationalist civil war by promoting more inclusive postcolonial states that strengthen plurinationalism and limit fear and anger over reduced communal autonomy. Lange’s account provides valuable new insights into the roots of nationalist civil war, broad patterns of conflict, and the mixed effects of colonialism and pluralism.