Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942) was a wide-ranging thinker whose ideas affected almost every branch of the social sciences. And nowhere is this impact more evident or more persistent than on the study of myth, ritual, and religion. He articulated as never before or since a program of seeing myths as part of the functional, pragmatic, or performed dimension of culture--that is, as part of activities that did certain tasks for particular human communities. Spanning his entire career, this anthology brings together for the first time the important texts from his work on myth. Ivan Strenski's...

America is entering a new age of economic discord, warns Robert E. Kuenne. In addition to a panoply of other structural economic troubles, the nation must now confront unprecedented demands for the kind of "distributive justice" that will meet the needs of the elderly, handicapped, and impoverished. Furthermore, American society faces the pressing problems of the disadvantaged with no explicit code of economic justice. Claims to various kinds of government entitlements are based increasingly on appeals to "economic justice," but no real national agreement exists on what that expression...

For this vivid description of the world of a Florentine patrician, Mark Phillips draws on Marco Parenti's private letters, ricordanze or diaries, and public history or memoir. When Cosimo de' Medici died in 1464, Parenti foresaw a return to liberty and began to write a history, but his political hopes and his literary ambitions foundered when the Medici party won a decisive victory over their patrician enemies in 1466. Despite this setback, Parenti's historical Memoir, recently rediscovered by Mark Phillips, is our best witness to this major crisis in Florentine politics.

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Assume that a nation is pursuing a given foreign policy and that we are concerned with the way in which it will act in the future. We may want to make a forecast--but then to what extent is the present policy of a nation a valid guide to its future behavior? Or we may want to influence the nation to change its course--can we succeed? In other words, will the policy change or persist in the face of new conditions or negative feedback? Kjell Goldmann identifies the factors that may have an impact on whether a specific foreign policy is likely to endure or to change and develops them into a...

The crusade against nuclear weapons in Great Britain, West Germany, France, and the Netherlands in the early 1980s dwarfed all previous protest movements in Western Europe in the postwar period. What produced the demonstrations against NATO's decision in December 1979 to base 572 cruise and Pershing II missiles in five West European countries? What generated the widespread support that the demonstrators enjoyed? Contrary to the frequent claim that such political movements are a symptom of governmental crisis in the advanced industrial democracies, Thomas Rochon develops the idea that they...

Anyone interested in the entire sweep of political thought over the last hundred years will find in Norberto Bobbio's Ideological Profile of Twentieth-Century Italy a masterful, thought-provoking guide. Home to the largest communist party in a democratic society, Italy has been a unique place politically, one where Christian democrats, liberals, fascists, socialists, communists, and others have co-existed in sizable numbers. In this book, Bobbio, who himself played an outstanding role in the development of Italian civic culture, follows each of the major ideologies, explaining how...

To the Other Shore tells the story of a small but influential group of Jewish intellectuals who immigrated to the United States from the Russian Empire between 1881 and the early 1920s--the era of "mass immigration." This pioneer group of Jewish intellectuals, many of whom were raised in Orthodox homes, abandoned their Jewish identity, absorbed the radical political theories circulating in nineteenth-century Russia, and brought those theories with them to America. When they became leaders in the labor movement in the United States and wrote for the Yiddish, Russian, and...

Whereas modern criticism has emphasized the unity and sense of permanence in The Canterbury Tales, John Ganim alerts us to a dialectically opposing dimension that Chaucer's poetics shares with the popular culture of the late Middle Ages: his celebration of the ephemeral and his sense of performance. Ganim uses the concept of theatricality to illuminate Chaucer's manipulations of the forms of popular culture and high literary discourse. He calls upon recent work in semiotics and social history to question Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the "carnivalesque" and the "dialogic," at the same time...

One of the most original and engaging composers of the twentieth century, Leos Janacek is now regarded as one of its major musical dramatists. His operas have become a regular part of the repertory, but a full understanding of their diverse subjects and backgrounds has been hampered by the lack of source materials in English. John Tyrrell has here selected and translated the chief literary documents relating to the genesis and early performances of each of the composer's nine operas and presented them in the form of a compelling documentary narrative. Janacek was a vigorous letter-writer...

This book combines the tools of political science, sociology, and labor history to offer a wide-ranging analysis of how unions have participated in politics in Britain, Germany, and the United States. Rather than focus exclusively on national union federations, Gary Marks investigates variations among individual unions both within and across these countries. By examining the individual unions that make up union movements, he probes beyond national descriptions of British laborism, German socialism, and American business unionism while bringing the analysis closer to the actual experiences...