In the years immediately following Napoleon's defeat, French thinkers in all fields set their minds to the problem of how to recover from the long upheavals that had been set into motion by the French Revolution. Many challenged the Enlightenment's e...

The Victorian period in Britain was an "age of reform". It is therefore not surprising that two of the era's most eminent intellects described themselves as reformers. Both William Whewell and John Stuart Mill believed that by reforming philosophy –...

Restitution is the body of law concerned with taking away gains that someone has wrongfully obtained. The operator of a Ponzi scheme takes money from his victims by fraud and then invests it in stocks that rise in value. Or a company pays a sharehold...

Every morning Chicagoans wake up to the same stark headlines that read like some macabre score: "13 shot, 4 dead overnight across the city" and nearly every morning the same elision occurs: what of the nine other victims? As with war, much of our foc...

Before publishing his pioneering book "How the Other Half Lives" – a photojournalistic investigation into the poverty of New York's tenement houses, home to three quarters of the city's population – Jacob Riis (1849-1914) spent his first years in the...

This beautifully illustrated volume presents new ways of thinking about the concept of "being Roman" – with a particular emphasis on the way people in the provinces and on the periphery of the empire reacted to the state of being a Roman subject. Acc...

In his foundational work "The Restoration of the Self", noted psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut boldly challenges what he called "the limits of classical analytic theory" and the Freudian orthodoxy. Here Kohut proposes a "psychology of the self" as a theory...

The recent financial crisis and the difficulty of using mainstream macroeconomic models to accurately monitor and assess systemic risk have stimulated new analyses of how we measure economic activity and the development of more sophisticated models i...

Paul R. Katz has composed a fascinating account of the fate of Chinese religions during the modern era by assessing mutations of communal religious life, innovative forms of religious publishing, and the religious practices of modern Chinese elites t...

"Reel to Reel", Alan Shapiro's twelfth collection of poetry, moves outward from the intimate spaces of family and romantic life to embrace not only the human realm of politics and culture but also the natural world, and even the outer spaces of the c...