Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2024 -

Drawing from extensive ethnographic and participatory research in Montes de Maria, Colombia, Lederach's book examines campesinos' historical struggle to defend land, life, and territory and build peace in Colombia. Lederach (anthropology, Creighton Univ.) criticizes traditional peace building approaches, referred to as "hurry peace," that focus on state-centric and top-down domestic and/or international interventions. According to Lederach, haste/hurry peace perpetuates social inequality, violates human dignity, disrupts relations, and undermines local agency and participation. In contrast to these approaches, Lederach advances a theory of slow peace, which "offers a relational framework for peacebuilding as a multispecies, multigenerational, and permanent social process for liberation." The last two chapters provide powerful, compelling examples of how social leaders created and sustained intercultural spaces for dialogue and coalition-building in their struggle to build slow peace in Colombia. This beautifully written book is a must read for academic and nonacademic readers interested in peace building processes at the grassroots level.Summing Up: Essential. All readership levels.

Green (emer., philosophy, Univ. of Oxford, England) is the most original and profound scholar of the philosophy of law in the generation after Joseph Raz. This marvelous collection of 15 essays--some of them new and several rewritten--demonstrates Green's wide-ranging interests as well as his erudition, originality, and wit. His engagement with leading thinkers in jurisprudence--e.g., Aquinas, Hume, Bentham, Hart, Kelsen, and Raz--provides him with material that he shapes into his own distinctive and compelling legal positivist approach, which appreciates the connections between law and morality and the virtues and vices of the rule of law. The book is divided into three sections--"Law as Such," "Law and Morality," and "The Demands of Law"--and its essays are marked by analytical rigor and clarity so that even upper-level university students, in addition to scholars, will find them a trove of arguments and insights. A signal virtue of the entire collection is that the essays challenge conventional views and make the reader think. Every scholar working in the field would benefit from engaging with Green's distinctive way of thinking. This superb collection of essays in general jurisprudence belongs in every library concerned with the intersection of law and philosophy. The introduction alone is worth the price of admission.Summing Up: Essential. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.

Beard (Western Washington Univ.) encourages readers to think past identity politics and toward identification politics: the process by which people construct, develop, negotiate, and abandon who they think of as part of their "we." Drawing on thinkers such as James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, and Sylvia Rivera, Beard reminds readers that while political identifications are not entirely up for grabs, historically unencumbered, or matters of individual choice, neither are they permanently fixed. Everyone is capable of imagining and establishing new relationships, alliances, and collectives and of directing that capability toward political action. Considering private capacities for intimate attachment thus helps people contemplate their public capacities for political solidarity and contestation. Beard's account of politics pushes its readers to question and think beyond the limited categories of demographics and "interest groups" that dominate most contemporary political analyses. If We Were Kin speaks particularly and powerfully to racial and gender politics in the United States. In doing so, it makes substantial theoretical additions to today's most urgent conversations about political freedom and transformation.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; practitioners.

Moyn (law and history, Yale Univ.) has written a provocative book that situates the current backlash against liberalism, as well as the lack of full-throated defenses of it, within the transformation that liberalism underwent during the Cold War. Prior to the Cold War, liberalism was an affirmative, future-oriented movement with roots firmly within the Enlightenment and its commitments to individual freedom and societal progress. The horrors of the 1930s and 1940s, however, drove Cold War liberalism into a defensive pose. In response to the attempts of Soviet Marxism to situate itself as a legitimate offspring of the Enlightenment, Cold War liberals undertook a reevaluation, leading to a purging of liberalism's more progressive positions and ambitions. Cold War liberalism, thus, became more pragmatic, pessimistic, and fearful. Although the book is organized around chapters devoted to Judith Shklar, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Hannah Arendt, and Lionel Trilling, it is a more capacious intellectual history that surveys a wider array of thinkers from this pivotal era. While it is likely to generate controversy, it may be one of the most important recent contributions to the understanding of current predicaments.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals.

This outstanding and thought-provoking analysis, including each of Machiavelli's major works, should be required reading not only for students of the Renaissance and Machiavelli but also for students of international relations. Lynch (Missouri State Univ.) shows that Machiavelli means to "stretch the meaning of war" (p. 142) to include a wide range of human activities, including his own spiritual warfare with the Church. While Black's Machiavelli (CH, Jul'23, 60-3304) presents Machiavelli's Florentine Histories as a conservative reaction compared to The Prince and The Discourses, Lynch's detailed studies show the unity of all three works. While the author agrees with Pedulla's On Niccolo Machiavelli (CH, May'24, 61-2605) on the utility of domestic political conflict for Machiavelli, he gives it a much deeper meaning and thus shows its true novelty. Lynch focuses on civil-military authority and the relation of the excellent captain to the excellent human being. Whereas Plato tried to lead men away from politics toward philosophy, Machiavelli tries to show that the true way to the freedom of philosophizing is the study of war in the widest sense. Even such a short review must single out Lynch's brilliant analysis of the self-knowledge of Cesare Borgia.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels.

Breaking with Athens (CH, Nov'05, 43-1484) established Colmo (emer., Dominican Univ.) as a leading scholar and student of the political philosophy of Alfarabi. This new book of 18 essays explores and develops some of the most important strands of his earlier inquiry. These essays on major thinkers from ancient Greece to modern America exemplify a breadth and depth of thought possible only for a serious, lifelong scholar of the history of political thought. Their intelligent organization into three sections gives the book unity and coherence. Particularly impressive is the section "Theory and Practice." It confronts a fundamental question: if philosophy cannot provide clear and definitive answers to life's most important questions and thus ends, at best, in Socratic ignorance, what guidance is philosophy to the active life of human beings? It is here that Alfarabi seems to part company with his teachers Plato and Aristotle. In so doing, he prepares the way for modern political philosophy. Colmo's essay "East Meets West: Alfarabi and Hobbes" is particularly apposite on this point. The final essay, "About Subjectivity," nicely ties the book's diverse studies together. Reason's Inquisition will prove valuable to any serious scholar of the history of political philosophy. Very highly recommended.Summing Up: Essential. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.

In explaining the rapidly growing economic inequality in the US since 1980, Remington (emer., Emory Univ.) focuses in great detail and with abundant empirical evidence on conservative policy choices regarding tax cuts, hidden incomes, antitrust enforcement, anti-union laws, privatization, rent-seeking opportunities, and the financialization of the economy. However, the resulting economic and status insecurities are blamed on foreigners, immigrants, minorities, liberals, coastal elites, and other scapegoats by demagogues seeking unlimited power. This has led to polarization, extremism, authoritarianism, conspiratorial thinking, and destabilization of democratic institutions in the process. Separate chapters show how market transitions in Russia and China also increased inequality, accompanied by heightened autocracy rather than the democratization many hoped for. Germany, however, both after WW II and following reunification in the 1990s, more consistently pursued "prosperity for all" through its social market policies, resulting in much less inequality and its pernicious authoritarian correlates. Preserving and enhancing democracy in the US requires a return to policies that promote more balanced and egalitarian growth and expand public goods and services. An ambitious and important work from a distinguished scholar.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels.

Dupuy (emer., Ecole Polytechnique, France) explores the logical and moral reasoning implicit in state-held nuclear weapons. This brilliant analysis is as frightening as it is illuminating. Dupuy assesses policy, words of candidates and politicians, and real-time war events (including Russia and Ukraine), giving nuance to them with theological and moral arguments. Chapter 3 presents a stunning analytical examination of the logic of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). It is only successful by not working; the threatened mutual destruction is an empty threat. But this leads to the metaphysics of MAD and Dupuy's claim of "projective time," in which agents act on conditions that determine their behavior, avoiding both complacency (the catastrophe won't happen) and fatalism (the catastrophe will happen). Nuclear deterrence, which keeps the catastrophe from occurring, is possible in projective time, which leverages the indeterminacy of the future. So it is possible to supply rational foundations for the effectiveness of nuclear deterrence, and as Dupuy concludes, "this is terrifying" (p. 138).Summing Up: Essential. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals.