Too often we think of the modern political state as a universal institution, the inevitable product of History rather than a specific creation of a very particular history. Bertrand Badie and Pierre Birnbaum here persuasively argue that the origin of the state is a social fact, arising out of the peculiar sociohistorical context of Western Europe. Drawing on historical materials and bringing sociological insights to bear on a field long abandoned to jurists and political scientists, the authors lay the foundations for a strikingly original theory of the birth and subsequent diffusion of the...

Jacques Le Goff is a prominent figure in the tradition of French medieval scholarship, profoundly influenced by the "Annales" school, notably, Bloch, Febvre, and Braudel, and by the ethnographers and anthropologists Mauss, Dumezil, and Levi-Strauss. In building his argument for "another Middle Ages" ("un autre moyen age"), Le Goff documents the emergence of the collective "mentalite" from many sources with scholarship both imaginative and exact.
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In The Birth of Purgatory, Jacques Le Goff, the brilliant medievalist and renowned Annales historian, is concerned not with theological discussion but with the growth of an idea, with the relation between belief and society, with mental structures, and with the historical role of the imagination. Le Goff argues that the doctrine of Purgatory did not appear in the Latin theology of the West before the late twelfth century, that the word purgatorium did not exist until then. He shows that the growth of a belief in an intermediate place between Heaven and Hell was closely...

To write this history of the imagination, Le Goff has recreated the mental structures of medieval men and women by analyzing the images of man as microcosm and the Church as mystical body; the symbols of power such as flags and oriflammes; and the contradictory world of dreams, marvels, devils, and wild forests.
"Le Goff is one of the most distinguished of the French medieval historians of his generation . . . he has exercised immense influence."-Maurice Keen, "New York Review of Books"
"The whole book turns on a fascinating blend of the brutally materialistic and the generously...

From a wealth of vivid autobiographical writings, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie reconstructs the extraordinary life of Thomas Platter and the lives of his sons. With masterful erudition, Le Roy Ladurie deepens and expands the historical contexts of these accounts and, in the process, brings to life the customs, perceptions, and character of an age poised at the threshold of modernity.
"Le Roy Ladurie paints a remarkably contemporary picture of life in the sixteenth century. . . . It's a good story, told with a deft narrative touch." Michael S. Kimmel, "The Nation"
"Le Roy Ladurie is a...

Maxime Rodinson has long been known in Europe as one of the foremost interpreters of Arab history and thought. In this concise overview of the Arab people and their distinctive culture, the author discusses the extend to which Arabs can be defined by religion, language, or race; surveys the Arab diaspora; examines modern Arab nationalism; and questions the degree to which it is possible to generalize about the Arab people and their "personality."

This text is the second of three volumes looking at the history of France. This volume examines how and why events and figures become part of a people's collective memory. It emphasizes the shared aspects of French history and cultural instrumental in the development of a national identity. It includes 14 essays on subjects ranging from Proust's Remembrance of Things Past to the Tour de France.

This volume, the third part of Realms of Memory, focuses on the emblems that signify Frenchness to people around the world. It includes 13 essays on cultural icons from Joan of Arc to Descartes; the national motto of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity; the tricolour flag; and the French language itself. The closing essay on commemoration provides an overview of the series.

"My task is piecing together a puzzle... I hope to reconstitute the existence of a person whose memory has been abolished.... I want to re-create him, to give him a second chance... to become part of the memory of his century."

With these words, Alain Corbin embarks on a journey that is part history and part metaphysics: recreating the life and world of a man about whom nothing is known except for his entries in the civil registries and historical knowledge about the times in which he lived. Risen from death and utter obscurity is Louis-Francois Pinagot, a forester and clog maker...