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This volume brings together contributions that resemble spotlights thrown on the past twenty-five years of science and technology studies. It covers a broad range: history of science; science and politics; science and contemporary democracy; science and the public; science and the constitution; science and metaphors; and science and modernity and provides a critical overview of how the field of science and technology studies has emerged and developed.
In this celebrated analysis of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Michael J. Colacurcio presents a view of the author as America's first significant intellectual historian. Colacurcio shows that Hawthorne's fiction responds to a wide range of sermons, pamphlets, and religious tracts and debates--a variety of moral discourses at large in the world of provincial New England. Informed by comprehensive historical research, the author shows that Hawthorne was steeped in New England historiography, particularly the sermon literature of the seventeenth century. But, as Colacurcio shows, Hawthorne did not merely borrow from the historical texts he deliberately studied; rather, he is best understood as having written history. In The Province of Piety, originally published in 1984 (Harvard University Press), Hawthorne is seen as a moral historian working with fictional narratives--a writer brilliantly involved in examining the moral and political effects of Puritanism in America and recreating the emotional and cultural contexts in which earlier Americans had lived.
"A timely study of contemporary American literature that highlights the everpresence of Puritan myths in American identity and culture"--
Michael Herb proposes a new paradigm for understanding politics in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. He critiques the theory of the rentier state and argues that we must put political institutions—and specifically monarchism—at the center of any explanation of Gulf politics. All in the Family provides a compelling and fresh analysis of the importance of monarchism in the region, and points out the crucial role of the ruling families in creating monarchal regimes. It addresses the issue of democratization in the Middle Eastern monarchies, arguing that the prospects for the gradual emergence of constitutional monarchy are better than is often thought.
This book analyzes the relationship between Western and Islamic political ideas. The focus is on the similarities and differences between Western liberal democracy and shura - often seen as the Islamic counterpart to Western democracy. This is the first work to provide a direct and detailed comparison between the two systems of ideas, as given expression in the concrete political systems which have emerged.
In colonial Egypt, the state introduced legal reforms that claimed to liberate Egyptians from the inhumanity of pre-colonial rule and elevate them to the status of human beings. These legal reforms intersected with a new historical consciousness that distinguished freedom from force and the human from the pre-human, endowing modern law with the power to accomplish but never truly secure this transition. Samera Esmeir offers a historical and theoretical account of the colonizing operations of modern law in Egypt. Investigating the law, both on the books and in practice, she underscores the centrality of the "human" to Egyptian legal and colonial history and argues that the production of "juridical humanity" was a constitutive force of colonial rule and subjugation. This original contribution queries long-held assumptions about the entanglement of law, humanity, violence, and nature, and thereby develops a new reading of the history of colonialism.