Genres of the credit economy

mediating value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-century britain

How did banking, borrowing, investing, and even losing money - in other words, participating in the modern financial system - come to seem like routine activities of everyday life? "Genres of the Credit Economy" addresses this question by examining the history of financial instruments and representations of ...

Tulipmania

money, honor, and knowledge in the dutch golden age

In the 1630s, the Netherlands was gripped by tulipmania: a speculative fever unprecedented in scale and, as popular history would have it, folly. We all know the outline of the story - how otherwise sensible merchants, nobles, and artisans spent all they had (and much that ...

The bourgeois virtues

ethics for an age of commerce

For a century and a half the artists and intellectuals of Europe have scorned the bourgeoisie. And for a millennium and a half the philosophers and theologians of Europe have scorned the marketplace. The bourgeois life, capitalism, Mencken's "booboisie," and David Brooks' "bobos" all ...

Mapping paradise

a history of heaven on earth

Throughout history, humans have searched for paradise. When early Christians adopted the "Hebrew Bible", and with it the story of "Genesis", the "Garden of Eden" became an idyllic habitat for all mankind. Medieval Christians believed paradise was a place on earth, different from the world ...

The pure thoery of capital

"The Pure Theory of Capital", F. A. Hayek's long- overlooked, little-understood volume, was his most detailed work in economic theory. Originally published in 1941 when fashionable economic thought had shifted to John Maynard Keynes, Hayek's manifesto of capital theory is available again for ...

Dark hope

working for peace in Israel and Palestine

For decades, we've been shocked by images of violent clashes between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. But for all their power, those images leave us at a loss: from our vantage at home, it's hard for us to imagine ...

Reflections on the just

At the time of his death in 2005, French philosopher Paul Ricoeur was regarded as one of the great thinkers of his generation. In more than half a century of writing about the essential questions of human life, Ricoeur's thought encompassed a vast range ...

The legal analyst

a toolkit thinking about the Law

There are two kinds of knowledge law school teaches: legal rules on the one hand and tools for thinking about legal problems on the other. Although the tools are far more interesting and useful than the rules, they tend to be neglected in favor of ...

The medical malpractice myth

American health care is in crisis because of exploding medical malpractice litigation. Insurance premiums for doctors and malpractice lawsuits are skyrocketing, rendering doctors both afraid and unable to afford to practice medicine. Undeserving victims sue at the drop of a hat, egged on by greedy ...

The Microsoft case

antitrust, high technology, and consumer welfare

Microsoft was the defining antitrust case of our era, and will be the focus of scholarly discussion about the proper role of antitrust for years to come. This book tells the story of the litigation and shows how law, ideology, evidence, and economic theory influenced ...

Out of the pits

traders and technology from Chicago to London

From New York to Singapore, from Chicago to London, the trading floors of the world's financial markets are icons of global capitalism. Images of them are used on the news all the time--traders burying their heads in their hands when the market is down ...

Financial founding fathers

the men who made America rich

When you think of the founding fathers, you think of men like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin - exceptional minds and matchless statesmen who led the colonies to a seemingly impossible victory over the British and established the constitutional and legal framework for our ...

American taxation, american slavery

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the war for independence may have been long over, but the true conclusion to the American Revolution was still being written. The choices in the 1800 election could not have been starker: Federalist John Adams prized the need ...

The economics of attention

style and substance in the age of information

If economics is about the allocation of resources, then what is the most precious resource in our new information economy? Certainly not information, for we are drowning in it. No, what we are short of is the attention to make sense of that information. With ...

The roman stoics

self, responsibility, and affection

Roman Stoics of the imperial period developed a distinctive model of social ethics, one which adapted the ideal philosophical life to existing communities and everyday societal values. Gretchen Reydams- Schils's innovative book shows how these Romans - including such philosophers as Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Hierocles ...

Chicago

a geography of the city and its region

The geography of Chicago is central to its history and to its success as the nation#s now third largest metropolitan area. The first geography of the Windy City in more than fifty years, Chicago: A Geography of the City and Its Region is a ...

The global debate over constitutional property

lessons for american takings jurisprudence

Countries around the world are heatedly debating whether property should be a constitutional right. But American lawyers have largely ignored this debate, which is divided into two clear camps: those who believe making property a constitutional right undermines democracy by fostering inequality, and those who ...

The intelligibility of nature

how science makes sense of the world

Throughout the history of the Western world, science has possessed an extraordinary amount of authority and prestige. And while its pedestal has been jostled by numerous evolutions and revolutions, science has always managed to maintain its stronghold as the knowing enterprise that explains how the ...

Crime and punishment in Western Countries

1980-1999

The eight essays in this volume provide comprehensive, up-to-date summaries of cross national crime trends in Australia, Canada, England, Wales, the Netherlands, Scotland, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States. This book is an essential resource for sociologists, psychologists, criminal lawyers, justice scholars, and political scientists ...

Deforesting the earth

from Prehistory to global crisis, an abridgment

Published in 2002, "Deforesting the Earth" was a landmark study of the history and geography of deforestation. Now available as an abridgement, this edition retains the breadth of the original while rendering its arguments accessible to a general readership. Deforestation - the thinning, changing, and wholesale ...