Bøker utgitt av Johns Hopkins University Press

Philosopher Maurice Mandelbaum offers a broad-ranging essay on the roles of chance, choice, purpose, and necessity in human events. He traces the many changes these concepts have undergone, from the analyses of Hobbes and Spinoza, through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. Mandelbaum examines two contrary tendencies in the history of social theories. Some thinkers, he shows, have explained the character of institutions in terms of their individual purposes, whereas others have stressed relationships of necessity among society's institutions. Mandelbaum discusses chance, choice, and necessity at length and reaches some provocative conclusions about the ways in which they are interwoven in human affairs.

In the decades after 1404, traditionally maritime Venice extended its control over much of northern Italy. Citizens of Vicenza, the first city to come under Venetian rule, proclaimed their city "firstborn of Venice" and a model for the Venetian Republic's dominions on the terraferma.In Firstborn of Venice James Grubb tests commonplace attributes of the Renaissance state through a rich case study of society and politics in fifteenth-century Vicenza. Looking at relations between Venetian and local governments and at the location of power in Vicentine society, Grubb reveals the structural limitations of Venetian authority and the mechanisms by which local patricians deflected the claims of the capital. Firstborn of Venice explores issues that are political in the broadest sense: legal institutions and administrative practices, fiscal politics, the consolidation of elites, ecclesiastical management, and the contrasting governing ideologies of ruler and subjects.

At the time this book was published, new towns were cropping up as a matter of public policy in "advanced industrial countries," yet the United States abandoned this project and deemed new towns "inappropriate and impractical for the American situation." The purpose of this book is to inform planners and policy makers around the world about French new towns. It analyzes what French new towns tried to accomplish; the administrative, financial, and political reforms needed to secure implementation of the program; and the achievements of the new towns. The author's evaluation of French new towns is undertaken with an eye to international applicability.Chapter 1 examines the reasons for adopting a policy of new towns in France. Chapter 2 concerns the administrative structure by which new towns are built in France. Chapter 3 concentrates on major economic associations with new towns. Chapter 4 discusses the role of the private sector in the development of new towns. Chapter 5 examines the major accomplishment of the French new towns: the achievement of socially balanced communities.In the United States, new towns have been proposed as a means for integrating low-income families into suburbs that are otherwise closed to them. The French experience demonstrates that socially heterogeneous new communities can be developed, even within the framework of a market system, if a sufficiently high priority is placed on the effort.

This book examines in depth the form that ultraroyalism took in Toulouse.

Mandelbaum believes that views regarding history and man and reason pose problems for philosophy, and he offers critical discussions of some of those problems at the conclusions of parts 2, 3, and 4.

The French Revolution generated a wave of popular piety and religious excitement in both France and England, where millenarians--prophets of the millennium--attempted to interpret the Revolution as the fulfillment of the predictions of Daniel and St. John the Divine. This study discusses the millenarian ideal in the context of the intellectual and religious attitudes of the time. Rejecting interpretations of millenarianism that chalk it up to class struggle or mass hysteria, Garrett stresses the interaction between politics and religion, viewing the phenomenon as the interpretation, by a varied assortment of individuals, of coincident political events in eschatological terms. Faced with a change as significant as the French Revolution, people found in the prophetic books of the Bible an understanding of what was happening to them. If the Revolution was God's will, if its development had been foretold, then surely the final outcome would be beneficial, at least for the faithful. Political events became eschatological events, and dangers and misfortunes became simply the chastisements that a fallen world must undergo before the Second Coming of Jesus Christ can redeem it. Although some of the beliefs may now seem bizarre, Garrett shows that, at the time, they attracted many followers for whom these ideas were both reasonable and respectable. Focusing on the careers of three millenarians--Suzette Labrousse, Catherine Théot, and Richard Brothers--Garrett tries to understand these prophets as persons rather than dismiss them as fanatics. Their prominence resulted from their success in transmitting a new political consciousness through familiar religious imagery. While the Revolution gave urgency and tangible reality to millenarian convictions, Labrousse, Théot, and others were convinced, well before the Revolution, that they were the bearers of divine revelations and thus welcomed the Revolution as confirmation of their own missions.

Historical writing on the Renaissance has usually focused on the social extremes that co-existed in the great metropolitan centers--on either elites or the underclass. As a result, the world of the middling families and provincial societies remains largely unexplored. Daily experiences in the lesser cities are, however, no less rich and revealing than those of Florence, Venice, and Milan. In addition, writes historian James Grubb, these experiences offer new perspectives from which to reassess familiar assumptions about domestic life in the fifteenth century.Based on memoirs and other records left by thirteen merchant families from the Veneto cities of Verona and Vincenza, Provincial Families of the Renaissance is an engrossing study of daily lives that have until now been overlooked by scholars. Grubb examines the attitudes and experiences of families undistinguished in their modest means and local ambitions from the majority of their compatriots, uncovering a detailed historical landscape rich in social obligations, commercial activities, and religious beliefs.Grubb's comprehensive analysis of his subjects' compelling, if inconspicuous, lives investigates every significant aspect of private experience during the Renaissance: marriage, birth, death, household relations, work, land, social status, and spirituality. In reconstructing provincial life in the Veneto, Grubb discovers in his subjects an independence of mind that mediated their reception of metropolitan ideologies far more than the historiography of the Renaissance might suggest. These "unremarkable" provincials were agents of their own destiny, influenced in equal measures by prevailing attitudes, local customs, and personal convictions."James Grubb is exploring new terrain in this book. Distinguished by its clarity and eloquence, this is a superior work of historical writing and analysis that merits comparison with the best monographs on the social history of Renaissance Italy."--Gene Brucker, University of California at Berkeley

In four essays, Professor Mandelbaum challenges some of the most common assumptions of contemporary epistemology. Through historical analyses and critical argument, he attempts to show that one cannot successfully sever the connections between philosophic and scientific accounts of sense perception. While each essay is independent of the others, and the argument of each must therefore be judged on its own merits, one theme is common to all: that critical realism, as Mandelbaum calls it, is a viable epistemological position, even though some schools of thought hold it in low esteem.

In The Defense of Berlin, Jean Edward Smith discusses Berlin from the time of arrangements set during the war through 1962, with an emphasis on the effect that the crisis of division had on the city.

The old sense of community yielded to a new and equally compelling sense of place, and La Serenissima remained stable throughout the later Renaissance.

It sets banking-and panics-in the context of more generalized and recurrent crises involving territorial wars, competition for markets, and debates over interest rates and the question of usury.

In addition to undermining the continuity in the intellectual history of religious thought, Lightman exposes the religious origins of agnosticism.

The Sage in Harlem demonstrates how Mencken, through the example of his own work, his power as editor of the American Mercury, and his dedication to literary quality, was able to nurture the developing talents of black authors from James Weldon Johnson to Richard Wright.

William T. Walker, Presidential Studies Quarterly

Gellman shows how tenuous a government policy can be when so much of it depends on personal control and influence.

In exploring these modern philosophers of the animal and its instinctual life, the author inevitably rebiologizes them even against efforts to debiologize thinkers whose works can be studied profitably for their models of signification.

Looking at the work without novelistic expectations of the illusion of some "keyto unlock the mystery, Norris explores Joyce's rationale for committing his last human panorama-a bit sadder than Ulysses in its concern with aging, killing, and dying-to a form and language belonging to the deconstructive forces of the twentieth century.

Poetic Presence and Illusion allows readers who have read Krieger's earlier work to understand the development of his critical position.

Our reading of the poem, Krieger concludes, must be double: we must see the poem as a linear and chronological sequence reflecting real life, and we must read it as a circular, imitative, mutually implicative mode.

And he argues that, for all its brilliance, deconstruction has not yet been able to fulfill the social or academic functions of the older, aesthetic-based disciplines that it set out to deconstruct.

As he examines the conflict between the spatial and temporal, between vision-centered and word-centered metaphors, Krieger reveals how literary theory has been shaped by the attempts and the deceptive failures of language to do the job of the "natural sign."

In light of the shriveling of the tragic concept in the modern world and the reduction of a total view to the psychology of the protagonist, Krieger contends that the protagonist in a tragedy is now more appropriately designated a "tragic visionarythan a "tragic hero."

Having defined his critical position in these ways, Krieger relates it to other schools of criticism and applies its methods to the analysis of works by Shakespeare, Pope, Arnold, Hawthorne, and others.

Taken together, they chart a line of development with representative examples of what literary history calls romanticism, realism, modernism, and postmodernism, and thus they suggest a certain story about the continuity of the American novel.

Leopold and Lytton John Musselman, skilled botanists and the foremost authorities on these plants, this superior quality guide will appeal to residents of and visitors to the Adirondacks and northeastern mountains, including wildlife professionals, citizen scientists, backpackers, campers, photographers, bird watchers, artists, and wild food foragers.

With its shift away from Derrida's philosophical studies to his experimental texts, Ulmer's book aims to inaugurate a new movement in the American adaptation of contemporary French theory.

Sundquist's approach to the texts is psychoanalytic, but he does not attempt a clinical dissection of each writer; rather, he determines how personal crisis became material for engaging with larger questions of social and literary crisis.

Concerned not with the development of Arnold's ideas nor with their sources in classical antiquity and the Romantic period, he considers Arnold a self-conscious poet who, though sometimes successful, became increasingly unsuccessful in his efforts to imbue a landscape with meaning for individual or social man.

He recreates a landscape littered with unfamiliar issues, intractable problems, unattractive choices, and partial solutions, all of which influenced congressional decisions on matters as prosaic as military logistics or as abstract as the definition of federalism.