Harvard University Press: 1090 books

With Deng Xiaoping’s blessing, Mao’s successors scoured the globe for fresh ideas to launch domestic prosperity and global economic power. Yet China’s government did not publicize its engagement with Western-style innovations, claiming instead that economic reinvention was the Party’s achievement alone. Julian Gewirtz sets forth the truer story.

Every day, Internet users interact with technologies designed to undermine their privacy. Social media apps, surveillance technologies, and the Internet of Things are all built in ways that make it hard to guard personal information. And the law says this is okay because it is up to users to protect...

No document depicts the Constitutional Convention’s charismatic figures, crushing disappointments, and miraculous triumphs with the force of Madison’s Notes. But how reliable is this account? Drawing on digital technologies and textual analysis, Mary Sarah Bilder reveals that Madison revised to a far greater extent than previously recognized.

A deft blend of autobiography, history, and criticism, Writing Was Everything emerges as a reaffirmation of literature in an age of deconstruction and critical dogma. It stands as clear testimony to Kazin's belief that "literature is not theory but, at best, the value we can give to our experience, which in our century has been and remains beyond the imagination of mankind."

At his death in 2010, the Anglo-American analytic philosopher John Haugeland left an unfinished manuscript summarizing his life-long engagement with Heidegger’s Being and Time. As illuminating as it is iconoclastic, Dasein Disclosed is not just Haugeland’s Heidegger—this sweeping reevaluation is a major contribution to philosophy in its own right.

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.

Religious freedom is recognized as a basic human right, guaranteed by nearly all national constitutions. Anna Su charts the rise of religious freedom as an ideal firmly enshrined in international law and shows how America’s promotion of the cause of individuals worldwide to freely practice their faith advanced its ascent as a global power.

Leland de la Durantaye helps us understand Beckett’s strangeness and notorious difficulty by arguing that Beckett’s lifelong campaign was to mismake on purpose—not to denigrate himself, or his audience, or reconnect with the child or savage within, but because he believed that such mismaking is in the interest of art and will shape its future.

Randall Collins traces the movement of philosophical thought in ancient Greece, China, Japan, India, the medieval Islamic and Jewish world, medieval Christendom, and modern Europe. What emerges from this history is a social theory of intellectual change, one that avoids both the reduction of ideas...

Ranging from the coffeehouses of Aleppo to the salons of Paris, from Calcutta to London, Paulo Lemos Horta introduces the poets and scholars, pilgrims and charlatans who made largely unacknowledged contributions to Arabian Nights. Each version betrays the distinctive cultural milieu in which it was produced.

Heinz Rutha, pioneer of a youth movement that emphasized male bonding in its quest to reassert German dominance over Czechoslovakia, was arrested in 1937 for corrupting male adolescents. This led to an international scandal. Cornwall’s biography is the first to tackle the long-taboo intersection of youth, homosexuality, and fascist nationalism.

Written by authors who are themselves Deaf, this unique book illuminates the life and culture of Deaf people from the inside, through their everyday talk, their shared myths, their art and performances, and the lessons they teach one another. Padden and Humphries employ the capitalized "Deaf"...

This book brings together Wollheim's broad and abiding concerns to illuminate human thought at its furthest reaches of introspection and expression. Interweaving philosophy, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics, these essays reveal the critical connections between ideas and disciplines too often regarded as separate and distinct.

Opposing a long-standing orthodoxy of the Western philosophical tradition running from ancient Greek thought until the late nineteenth century, Frege argued that psychological laws of thought—those that explicate how we in fact think—must be distinguished from logical laws of thought—those that...