Yale University Press: 2009 books

Liberalism is egalitarian in principle, but why doesn’t it do more to promote equality in practice? In this book, the distinguished political philosopher Michael Walzer offers a critique of liberal theory and demonstrates that crucial realities have been submerged in the evolution of contemporary liberal...

In this timely and important work, eminent political theorist John Dunn argues that democracy is not synonymous with good government. The author explores the labyrinthine reality behind the basic concept of democracy, demonstrating how the political system that people in the West generally view as straightforward...

By the time she was twenty-four, Virginia Woolf had suffered a series of devastating losses that later she would describe as “sledge-hammer blows,” beginning with the death of her mother when she was thirteen years old and followed by those of her half-sister, father, and brother. Yet vulnerable as...

Beautifully written and incisive, this is the first English biography of a major Scandinavian author who is ripe for rediscovery While largely unknown today, Danish writer and Darwin translator Jens Peter Jacobsen was the leading prose writer in Scandinavia in the late nineteenth century and part of...

The seeds of the swift and sweeping religious movement that turned great numbers of Europeans into Protestants in the early 1500s had been sown far back in the late Middle Ages. In this book, Steven Ozment traces the growth and dispersal of dissenting ideologies through three centuries to their...

T. S. Eliot writes the letters contained in this volume during a period of weighty responsibilities as husband and increasing demands as editor and publisher. He cultivates the support of prominent guarantors to secure the future of his periodical, The Monthly Criterion, even as he loyally looks after...

Renowned philosopher Kurt Flasch offers a full-scale reappraisal of the life and legacy of Meister Eckhart, the medieval German theologian, philosopher, and alleged mystic who was active during the Avignon Papacy of the fourteenth century and posthumously condemned as a heretic by Pope John XXII. Disputing...

Perhaps no other Shakespearean drama so engulfs its readers in the ruinous journey of surrender to evil as does Macbeth. A timeless tragedy about the nature of ambition, conscience, and the human heart, the play holds a profound grip on the Western imagination.

" Dream is a central image for Shakespeare, encompassing at once the terrors of the irrational and the creative powers of the imagination-one's deepest fears and highest aspirations. Used in the early plays as a verbal or structural device, dream becomes, in the tragedies and late romances, a transforming...

Since 1989, the Cold War has ended, new nations have emerged in Eastern Europe, and revolutionary struggles to establish liberal ideals have been waged against repressive governments throughout the world. Will the promise of liberalism be realized? What can liberals do to make the most of their opportunities...

This original and provocative book looks at an important constitutional freedom that today is largely forgotten: the right of assembly. While this right lay at the heart of some of the most important social movements in American history—abolitionism, women's suffrage, the labor and civil rights movements—courts...