Listed here are recent publications, articles and books by CES faculty.
By Author
David Blackbourn
Niall Ferguson
Alison Frank
Stanley Hoffmann
Charles S. Maier
Cindy Skach
Judith Surkis
Daniel Ziblatt
By Publication Date
Stanley Hoffmann
Chaos and Violence: What Globalization, Failed States, and Terrorism Mean for U.S. Foreign Policy
Rowman & Littlefield, 2006, $22.95, ISBN: 0-7425-4071-5
Stanley Hoffmann is the Buttenwieser University Professor at Harvard University. He is also the Western Europe book review editor for Foreign Affairs. His previous books include World Disorders (Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), Gulliver Unbound (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), and America Goes Backwards (NYRB, 2004). He resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Renowned for his compassionate and balanced thinking on international affairs, Stanley Hoffmann reflects here on the proper place of the United States in a world it has defined almost exclusively by 9/11, the war on terrorism, and the invasion of Iraq. A true global citizen, Hoffmann offers an analysis that is uniquely informed by his place as a public intellectual with one foot in Europe, the other in America. In this brilliant collection of essays, many previously unpublished, he considers the ethics of intervention, the morality of human rights, how to repair our relationship with Europe, and the pitfalls of American unilateralism.
Niall Ferguson
The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West
The Penguin Press, 2006, $35.00, ISBN: 9781594201004
Niall Ferguson's most important book to date – a revolutionary reinterpretation of the modern era that resolves its central paradox: why unprecedented progress coincided with unprecedented violence and why the seeming triumph of the West bore the seeds of its undoing
From the conflicts that presaged the First World War to the aftershocks of the cold war, the twentieth century was by far the bloodiest in all of human history. How can we explain the astonishing scale and intensity of its violence when, thanks to the advances of science and economics, most people were better off than ever before — eating better, growing taller, and living longer? Wherever one looked, the world in 1900 offered the happy prospect of ever-greater interconnection. Why, then, did global progress descend into internecine war and genocide? Drawing on a pioneering combination of history, economics, and evolutionary theory, Niall Ferguson – one of Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People" – masterfully examines what he calls the age of hatred and sets out to explain what went wrong with modernity.
On a quest that takes him from the Siberian steppe to the plains of Poland, from the streets of Sarajevo to the beaches of Okinawa, Ferguson reveals an age turned upside down by economic volatility, multicultural communities torn apart by the irregularities of boom and bust, an era poisoned by the idea of irreconcilable racial differences, and a struggle between decaying old empires and predatory new states. Who won the war of the world? We tend to assume it was the West. Some even talk of the American century. But for Ferguson, the biggest upshot of twentieth-century upheaval was the decline of Western dominance over Asia.
A work of revelatory interpretive power, The War of the World is Niall Ferguson's masterwork.
Judith Surkis
Sexing the Citizen
Cornell University Press, 2006, $45.00, ISBN: 0801444640
Judith Surkis
is an Associate Professor of History and History & Literature
at Harvard. Her research focuses on modern French cultural and
intellectual history, as well as the history of gender, sexuality,
and empire.
This rich, wide-ranging cultural and intellectual history provides important new insights into how concerns about sexuality shaped the Third Republic's pedagogical projects. Educators, political reformers, novelists, academics, and medical professionals enshrined marriage as the key to eliminating the risks of social and sexual deviance posed by men-especially adolescents, bachelors, bureaucrats, soldiers, and colonial subjects. Debates on education reform and venereal disease reveal how seriously the social policies of the Third Republic took the need to control the unstable aspects of male sexuality. Surkis's compelling analyses of republican moral philosophy and Emile Durkheim's sociology illustrate the cultural weight of these concerns and provide an original account of modern French thinking about society. More broadly, Sexing the Citizen illuminates how sexual norms continue to shape the meaning of citizenship.
David Blackbourn
The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany
W. W. Norton, June 12, 2006, $29.95, ISBN 0393062120
David Blackbourn is Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard University. His previous books include Germany in the Long Nineteenth Century and Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary. He lives in Lexington, Massachusetts.
This absorbing work traces the rise of the German nation through the development of water and landscape. David Blackbourn begins his morality tale in the mid-1700s, with the epic story of Frederick the Great, who attempted by importing the great scientific minds of the West and by harnessing the power of his army to transform the uninhabitable marshlands of his scattered kingdom into a modern state. Chronicling the great engineering projects that reshaped the mighty Rhine, the emergence of an ambitious German navy, and the development of hydroelectric power to fuel Germany's convulsive industrial growth before World War I, Blackbourn goes on to show how Nazi racial policies rested on German ideas of mastery of the natural world. Filled with striking reproductions of paintings, maps, and photographs, this grand work of modern history links culture, politics, and the environment in an exploration of the perils faced by nations that attempt to conquer nature.
Charles S. Maier
Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors
Harvard University Press, April 2006, $27.95, ISBN 0-674-02189-4
Charles S. Maier is the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University, and the author of Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany.
Contemporary America, with its unparalleled armaments and ambition, seems to many commentators a new empire. Others angrily reject the designation. What stakes would being an empire have for our identity at home and our role abroad?
A preeminent American historian addresses these issues in light of the history of empires since antiquity. This elegantly written book examines the structure and impact of these mega-states and asks whether the United States shares their traits and behavior. Eschewing the standard focus on current U.S. foreign policy and the recent spate of pro- and anti-empire polemics, Charles S. Maier uses comparative history to test the relevance of a concept often invoked but not always understood. Marshaling a remarkable array of evidence--from Roman, Ottoman, Moghul, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, and British experience--Maier outlines the essentials of empire throughout history. He then explores the exercise of U.S. power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, carefully analyzing its economic and strategic sources and the nation's relationship to predecessors and rivals.
To inquire about empire is to ask what the United States has become as a result of its wealth, inventiveness, and ambitions. It is to confront lofty national aspirations with the realities of the violence that often attends imperial politics and thus to question both the costs and the opportunities of the current U.S. global ascendancy. With learning, dispassion, and clarity, Among Empires offers bold comparisons and an original account of American power. It confirms that the issue of empire must be a concern of every citizen.
Daniel Ziblatt
Structuring the State: The Formation of Italy and Germany and the Puzzle of Federalism
Princeton University Press, Cloth, March 2006, $39.50, ISBN: 0-691-12167-2
Daniel Ziblatt is Assistant Professor of Government and Social Studies and Faculty Associate at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University.
Germany's and Italy's belated national unifications continue to loom large in contemporary debates. Often regarded as Europe's paradigmatic instances of failed modernization, the two countries form the basis of many of our most prized theories of social science. Structuring the State undertakes one of the first systematic comparisons of the two cases, putting the origins of these nation-states and the nature of European political development in new light.
Daniel Ziblatt begins his analysis with a striking puzzle: Upon national unification, why was Germany formed as a federal nation-state and Italy as a unitary nation-state? He traces the diplomatic maneuverings and high political drama of national unification in nineteenth-century Germany and Italy to refute the widely accepted notion that the two states' structure stemmed exclusively from Machiavellian farsightedness on the part of militarily powerful political leaders. Instead, he demonstrates that Germany's and Italy's "founding fathers" were constrained by two very different pre-unification patterns of institutional development. In Germany, a legacy of well-developed sub-national institutions provided the key building blocks of federalism. In Italy, these institutions' absence doomed federalism. This crucial difference in the organization of local power still shapes debates about federalism in Italy and Germany today. By exposing the source of this enduring contrast, Structuring the State offers a broader theory of federalism's origins that will interest scholars and students of comparative politics, state-building, international relations, and European political history.
Alison Frank
Oil Empire Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia
Harvard Historical Studies, Hardcover, November 2005 $49.95 ISBN 0-674-01887-7
Alison Frank's first book, Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia (2005), explores the political, social, cultural and environmental history of oil production in the Habsburg Empire. Her current research focuses on the commodification of fresh air in the Alpine region of central Europe. She offers courses on the history of central Europe (with a special focus on the Habsburg Empire, Poland and Ukraine) and on the global history of the oil industry.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Austrian Empire ranked third among the world's oil-producing states (surpassed only by the United States and Russia), and accounted for five percent of global oil production. By 1918, the Central Powers did not have enough oil to maintain a modern military. How and why did the promise of oil fail Galicia (the province producing the oil) and the Empire?
In a brilliantly conceived work, Alison Frank traces the interaction of technology, nationalist rhetoric, social tensions, provincial politics, and entrepreneurial vision in shaping the Galician oil industry. She portrays this often overlooked oil boom's transformation of the environment, and its reorientation of religious and social divisions that had defined a previously agrarian population, as surprising alliances among traditional foes sprang up among workers and entrepreneurs, at the workplace, and in the pubs and brothels of new oiltowns.
Frank sets this complex story in a context of international finance, technological exchange, and Habsburg history as a sobering counterpoint to traditional modernization narratives. As the oil ran out, the economy, the population, and the environment returned largely to their former state, reminding us that there is nothing ineluctable about the consequences of industrial development.
Cindy Skach
Borrowing Constitutional Designs: Constitutional Law in Weimar Germany and the French Fifth Republic
Princeton University Press, Cloth, October 2005 $29.95 ISBN: 0-691-12345-4
Cindy Skach is Associate Professor of Government at Harvard University, where she is also Faculty Associate of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, the Davis Center for Russian Studies, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affair
After the collapse of communism, some thirty countries scrambled to craft democratic constitutions. Surprisingly, the constitutional model they most often chose was neither the pure parliamentary model found in most of Western Europe at the time, nor the presidential model of the Americas. Rather, it was semi-presidentialism--a rare model known more generally as the "French type." This constitutional model melded elements of pure presidentialism with those of pure parliamentarism. Specifically, semi-presidentialism combined a popularly elected head of state with a head of government responsible to a legislature.
Borrowing Constitutional Designs questions the hasty adoption of semi-presidentialism by new democracies. Drawing on rich case studies of two of the most important countries for European politics in the twentieth century--Weimar Germany and the French Fifth Republic--Cindy Skach offers the first theoretically focused, and historically grounded, analysis of semi-presidentialism and democracy. She demonstrates that constitutional choice matters, because under certain conditions, semi-presidentialism structures incentives that make democratic consolidation difficult or that actually contribute to democratic collapse. She offers a new theory of constitutional design, integrating insights from law and the social sciences. In doing so, Skach challenges both democratic theory and democratic practice. This book will be welcomed not only by scholars and practitioners of constitutional law but also by those in fields such as comparative politics, European politics and history, and international and public affairs.