Böcker utgivna av Harvard University Press

This first English translation of lectures Claude Lévi-Strauss delivered in Tokyo in 1986 synthesizes his ideas about structural anthropology, critiques his earlier writings on civilization, and assesses the dilemmas of cultural and moral relativism, including economic inequality, religious fundamentalism, and genetic and reproductive engineering.

Critics warn that corporate leaders have too much influence over American politics. Mark Mizruchi worries they exert too little. American CEOs have abdicated their civic responsibilities in helping the government address national challenges, with grave consequences for society. A sobering assessment of the dissolution of America’s business class.

Gathering all of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s writings on Japan, this sustained meditation follows his dictum that to understand one’s own culture, one must see it from another’s point of view. For Lévi-Strauss, Japan occupied a unique place among world cultures. This English translation presents one of France’s most public figures at his most personal.

The father of Indian independence, Gandhi was also a political theorist who challenged mainstream ideas. Sovereignty, he said, depends on the consent of citizens willing to challenge the state nonviolently when it acts immorally. The culmination of the inner struggle to recognize one’s duty to act is the ultimate “Gandhian moment.”

Long before GPS and Google Earth, humans traveled vast distances using environmental clues and simple instruments. What else is lost when technology substitutes for our innate capacity to find our way? Illustrated with 200 drawings, this narrative—part treatise, part travelogue, and part navigational history—brings our own world into sharper view.

Neil Gross shows that the U.S. academy’s liberal reputation has exerted a self-selecting influence on young liberals, while deterring promising conservatives. His study sheds new light on both academic life and American politics, where the conservative movement was built in part around opposition to the “liberal elite” in higher education.

Famous as the catalyst of the fight or flight response, adrenaline has also received forensic attention as a perfect, untraceable poison—and rumors persist of its power to revive the dead. True to the spirit of its topic, Adrenaline is a stimulating journey that reveals the truth behind adrenaline’s scientific importance and popular appeal.

Extension of presidential leadership in foreign affairs to war powers has destabilized our constitutional order and deranged our foreign policy. Stephen M. Griffin shows unexpected connections between the imperial presidency and constitutional crises, and argues for accountability by restoring Congress to a meaningful role in decisions for war.

Color can attract mates, intimidate enemies, and distract predators. But it can also conceal animals from detection. It is an adaptation to the visual features of the environment but also to the perceptual and cognitive capabilities of other organisms. Judy Diamond and Alan Bond reveal factors at work in the evolution of concealing coloration.

A comprehensive survey of the evolutionary science of human sexual behavior, Evolution and Human Sexual Behavior invites us to imagine human sex from the vantage point of our primate cousins, in order to underscore the role of evolution in shaping all that happens, biologically and behaviorally, when romantic passions are aroused.

The radical black left has largely disappeared from the struggle for equality and justice. Michael Dawson examines the causes and consequences, and argues that the conventional left has failed to take race seriously as a force in reshaping American institutions and civil society. Black politics needs to find its way back to its radical roots.

Legal scholars expect to resolve religious dilemmas according to principles of equality, neutrality, or separation of church and state. But such abstractions fail to do justice to the clashing values in today’s pluralistic society. Marc DeGirolami explains why conflicts implicating religious liberty are so emotionally fraught and deeply contested.

From the Sino-Japanese War to the Communist Revolution, a cache of letters from one of China’s prominent families, the Lius of Shanghai, sheds light on a tumultuous era. Sherman Cochran and Andrew Hsieh show how the family confronted war, civil unrest, and social upheaval, and how—in the midst of it all—they built a vast business empire.

A searching meditation on our all-too-human capacity for inhumanity, Evil Men confronts atrocity head-on—how it looks and feels, what motivates it, how it can be stopped. James Dawes’s unflinchingly honest account, drawing on firsthand interviews, is not just about the things Japanese war criminals did, but about what it means to befriend them.

Commentators call the United States an empire: occasionally a benign empire, sometimes an empire in denial, often a destructive empire. In American Umpire Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman asserts instead that America has performed the role of umpire since 1776, compelling adherence to rules that gradually earned broad approval, and violating them as well.

More than 50 years after independence, Algerian Chronicles, with its prescient analysis of the dead end of terrorism, appears here in English for the first time. Published in France in 1958—the year the war caused the collapse of the Fourth French Republic—it is one of Albert Camus’ most political works: an exploration of his commitment to Algeria.

A contentious debate lingers over whether Franklin Delano Roosevelt turned his back on the Jews of Hitler’s Europe. FDR and the Jews reveals a concerned leader whose efforts on behalf of Jews were far greater than those of any other world figure but whose moral leadership was tempered by the political realities of depression and war.

Jeremy Bernstein guides readers through high-energy physics from early twentieth-century atomic models to leptons, mesons, quarks, and the newly discovered Higgs boson, drawing them into the excitement of a universe where 80 percent of all matter has never been identified. From molecules to galaxies, the more we discover, the less we seem to know.

Though often invoked by pro-life supporters, Thomas Aquinas in fact held that human life begins after conception, not at the moment of union. But in following the twists and turns of Aquinas’ thinking about the beginning and end of human life, Fabrizio Amerini reaches a nuanced interpretation that will unsettle both sides in the abortion debate.

Originally published in 1965, Contraception received unanimous acclaim from all quarters as the first thorough, scholarly, objective analysis of Catholic doctrine on birth control. More than ever this subject is of acute concern to a world facing serious population problems, and the author has written an important new appendix examining the development of and debates over the doctrine in the past twenty years.

Douglas Baird takes stock of the current state of contract doctrine and in the process reinvigorates the classic framework of Anglo-American contract law, showing that Oliver Wendell Holmes’s set of principles, properly understood, continue to provide the best guide to contracts for a new generation of students, practitioners, and judges.

Slaughter in battle was once seen as a legitimate way to settle disputes. When pitched battles ceased to exist, the law of victory gave way to the rule of unbridled force. Whitman explains why ritualized violence was more effective in ending carnage, and why humanitarian laws that view war as evil have led to longer, more barbaric conflicts.

In 1482 Francesco Berlinghieri produced the Geographia, a book of over 100 folio leaves describing the world in Italian verse interleaved with lavishly engraved maps. Roberts demonstrates that the Geographia represents the moment of transition between printing and manuscript culture, while forming a critical base for the rise of modern cartography.

Europe's financial crisis cannot be blamed on the Euro, James contends in this probing exploration of the whys, whens, whos, and what-ifs of European monetary union. The current crisis goes deeper, to conundrums that were debated but not resolved at the time of the Euro's invention. And, Euro or no Euro, these clashes will continue into the future.

With more people living alone today than at any time in U.S. history, Ferguson investigates loneliness in American fiction, from its mythological beginnings in Rip Van Winkle to the postmodern terrors of 9/11. At issue is the dark side of a trumpeted American individualism. Ferguson shows that we can learn, from our literature, how to live alone.

Barber shows how arguments for states' rights from John C. Calhoun to the present offend common sense, logic, and bedrock constitutional principles. The Constitution is a charter of positive benefits, not a contract among separate sovereigns whose function is to protect people from the central government, when there are greater dangers to confront.

Obama's 2008 victory, coming amid the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s, opened the door to major reforms. But he quickly faced skepticism from supporters and fierce opposition from Republicans. What happened? Skocpol surveys the political landscape to help us to understand Obama's triumphs and setbacks and see where we might be headed next.

Bioluminescence is everywhere on earth-most of all in the ocean, from angler fish in the depths to flashing dinoflagellates at the surface. Wilson and Hastings explore the natural history, evolution, and biochemistry of the diverse array of organisms that emit light and offer an evolutionary explanation for their sporadic distribution and rarity.

This comic, serious inquiry into the nature of art takes its technical vocabulary from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. It is ridiculous to think of poems, paintings, or films as distinct from other things in the world, including people. Talking about art should be contiguous with talking about other relevant matters.

Renaissance debates about politics and gender led to pioneering forms of poor relief, devised to help women get a start in life. These included orphanages for illegitimate children and forced labor in workhouses, but also women's shelters and early forms of maternity benefits, unemployment insurance, food stamps, and credit union savings plans.