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The Invention of Enterprise: Entrepreneurship from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern Times (The Kauffman Foundation Series on Innovation and Entrepreneurship #10)
by David S. Landes, Joel Mokyr & William J. BaumolA sweeping global history of entrepreneurial innovationWhether hailed as heroes or cast as threats to social order, entrepreneurs—and their innovations—have had an enormous influence on the growth and prosperity of nations. The Invention of Enterprise gathers together, for the first time, leading economic historians to explore the entrepreneur's role in society from antiquity to the present. Addressing social and institutional influences from a historical context, each chapter examines entrepreneurship during a particular period and in an important geographic location.The book chronicles the sweeping history of enterprise in Mesopotamia and Neo-Babylon; carries the reader through the Islamic Middle East; offers insights into the entrepreneurial history of China, Japan, and Colonial India; and describes the crucial role of the entrepreneur in innovative activity in Europe and the United States, from the medieval period to today. In considering the critical contributions of entrepreneurship, the authors discuss why entrepreneurial activities are not always productive and may even sabotage prosperity. They examine the institutions and restrictions that have enabled or impeded innovation, and the incentives for the adoption and dissemination of inventions. They also describe the wide variations in global entrepreneurial activity during different historical periods and the similarities in development, as well as entrepreneurship's role in economic growth. The book is filled with past examples and events that provide lessons for promoting and successfully pursuing contemporary entrepreneurship as a means of contributing to the welfare of society.The Invention of Enterprise lays out a definitive picture for all who seek an understanding of innovation's central place in our world.
The Invention of Everything Else: A Novel
by Samantha HuntNikola Tesla spends the last days of his extraordinary life at the Hotel New Yorker &“in this surreal historical novel [that] dazzles in the details&” (The New Yorker). It is 1943, and legendary inventor Nikola Tesla occupies a forbidden room on the 33rd floor of the Hotel New Yorker, stealing electricity. Broke, forgotten, and suffering from a weak heart, his only consolations are his memories and his daily walks to Bryant Park. Louisa, a young hotel chambermaid, is determined to befriend him. And as she helps him on his daily walks, she wins his affection through a shared love of pigeons. Little by little, he confides in her the tragic and tremendous story of his life. Meanwhile, Louisa&’s father is embarking on an unlikely mission to travel back in time to find his beloved late wife. A &“sophisticated pastiche of science fiction, fantasy, melodrama, and historical anecdote,&” The Invention of Everything Else is both a heartfelt story of love and death and an homage to one of history's most visionary scientists (Elle).
The Invention of Fire: A Novel
by Bruce HolsingerThe author of the acclaimed medieval mystery A Burnable Book once again brings fourteenth-century London alive in all its color and detail in this riveting thriller featuring medieval poet and fixer John Gower—a twisty tale rife with intrigue, danger mystery, and murder.Though he is one of England’s most acclaimed intellectuals, John Gower is no stranger to London’s wretched slums and dark corners, and he knows how to trade on the secrets of the kingdom’s most powerful men. When the bodies of sixteen unknown men are found in a privy, the Sheriff of London seeks Gower’s help. The men’s wounds—ragged holes created by an unknown object—are unlike anything the sheriff’s men have ever seen. Tossed into the sewer, the bodies were meant to be found. Gower believes the men may have been used in an experiment—a test for a fearsome new war weapon his informants call the “handgonne,” claiming it will be the “future of death” if its design can be perfected.Propelled by questions of his own, Gower turns to courtier and civil servant Geoffrey Chaucer, who is working on some poems about pilgrims that Gower finds rather vulgar. Chaucer thinks he just may know who commissioned this new weapon, an extremely valuable piece of information that some will pay a high price for—and others will kill to conceal. . .
The Invention of Free Labor
by Robert J. SteinfeldExamining the emergence of the modern conception of free labor--labor that could not be legally compelled, even though voluntarily agreed upon--Steinfeld explains how English law dominated the early American colonies, making violation of al labor agreements punishable by imprisonment. By the eighteenth century, traditional legal restrictions no longer applied to many kinds of colonial workers, but it was not until the nineteenth century that indentured servitude came to be regarded as similar to slavery.
The Invention of God
by Thomas RömerWho invented God? When, why, and where? Thomas Römer seeks to answer these enigmatic questions about the deity of the great monotheisms--Yhwh, God, or Allah--by tracing Israelite beliefs and their context from the Bronze Age to the end of the Old Testament period in the third century BCE, in a masterpiece of detective work and exposition.
The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality
by Hanno SauerWhat makes us moral beings? How do we decide what is good and what is evil? In the vein of Sapiens comes a grand history of our universal moral values at the moment of their greatest crisis.How did we learn to distinguish good from evil? Have we always been capable of doing so? And will we still be in the world to come? In this breathtaking book, ethics expert Hanno Sauer offers a great universal history of morality in the era of its darkest crisis. He finds that morality existed long before there was talk of God, religion, or philosophy. Its history is, first of all, the fruit of a process of natural selection, going back to the dawn of humanity, in the forests of East Africa which, five million years ago, thinned out owing to climate change. Among the early humans that came down from the trees, there were also our ancestors, who adapted to open spaces by organizing themselves into large groups. Under the pressure of environmental factors, morality emerges as the foundation for cooperation, a quality that is as precarious as it is essential to the survival of the species. Moving between paleontology and genetics, psychology and cognitive science, philosophy and evolutionism, Sauer traces a genealogy of morality and along the journey, marks the main moral transformations in the history of humanity. In the end, he concludes that millions of years of stratifications has led to the moral crisis of our present—and the only way to build a future together is to retrace our history.
The Invention of Heterosexual Culture
by Louis-Georges TinThe rise of heterosexual culture and the resistance it met from feudal lords, church fathers, and the medical profession. Heterosexuality is celebrated—in film and television, in pop songs and opera, in literature and on greeting cards—and at the same time taken for granted. It is the cultural and sexual norm by default. And yet, as Louis-Georges Tin shows in The Invention of Heterosexual Culture, in premodern Europe heterosexuality was perceived as an alternative culture. The practice of heterosexuality may have been standard, but the symbolic primacy of the heterosexual couple was not. Tin maps the emergence of heterosexual culture in Western Europe and the significant resistance to it from feudal lords, church fathers, and the medical profession. Tin writes that before the phenomenon of "courtly love" in the early twelfth century, the man-woman pairing had not been deemed a subject worthy of more than passing interest. As heterosexuality became a recurrent theme in art and literature, the nobility came to view it as a disruption of the feudal chivalric ethos of virility and male bonding. If feudal lords objected to the "hetero" in heterosexuality and what they saw as the associated dangers of weakness and effeminacy, the church took issue with the “sexuality,” which threatened the Christian ethos of renunciation and divine love. Finally, the medical profession cast heterosexuality as pathology, warning of an epidemic of “lovesickness.” Noting that the discourse of heterosexuality does not belong to heterosexuals alone, Tin offers a groundbreaking history that reasserts the cultural identity of heterosexuality.
The Invention of Heterosexuality
by Jonathan Ned KatzHeterosexuality, assumed to denote a universal sexual and cultural norm, has been largely exempt from critical scrutiny. In this boldly original work, Jonathan Ned Katz challenges the common notion that the distinction between heterosexuality and homosexuality has been a timeless one. Building on the history of medical terminology, he reveals that as late as 1923, the term "heterosexuality" referred to a "morbid sexual passion," and that its current usage emerged to legitimate men and women having sex for pleasure. Drawing on the works of Sigmund Freud, James Baldwin, Betty Friedan, and Michel Foucault, The Invention of Heterosexuality considers the effects of heterosexuality's recently forged primacy on both scientific literature and popular culture. "Lively and provocative."--Carol Tavris, New York Times Book Review. "A valuable primer ... misses no significant twists in sexual politics."--Gary Indiana, Village Voice Literary Supplement. "One of the most important--if not outright subversive--works to emerge from gay and lesbian studies in years."--Mark Thompson, The Advocate.
The Invention of Hugo Cabret
by Brian SelznickOrphan, clock keeper, thief: Hugo lives in the walls of a busy Paris train station, where his survival depends on secrets and anonymity. Combining elements of picture book, graphic novel, and film, Caldecott Honor artist Selznick breaks open the novel form to create an entirely new reading experience in this intricate, tender, and spellbinding mystery.
The Invention of Humanity: Equality and Cultural Difference in World History
by Siep StuurmanFor much of history, strangers were seen as barbarians, seldom as fellow human beings. The notion of common humanity had to be invented. Drawing on global thinkers, Siep Stuurman traces ideas of equality and difference across continents and civilizations, from antiquity to present-day debates about human rights and the “clash of civilizations.”
The Invention of Humboldt: On the Geopolitics of Knowledge (Routledge Studies in Global Latin America)
by Mark Thurner Jorge Cañizares-EsguerraThe Invention of Humboldt is a game-changing volume of essays by leading scholars of the Hispanic world that explodes many myths about Alexander von Humboldt and his world. Rather than ‘follow in Humboldt’s footsteps,’ this book outlines the new critical horizon of ‘post-Humboldtian’ studies: the archaeology of all that lies buried under the Baron’s epistemological footprint. Contrary to the popular image of Humboldt as a solitary ‘adventurer’ and ‘hero of science’ surrounded by New World nature, The Invention of Humboldt demonstrates that the Baron’s opus and practice was largely derivative of the knowledge communities and archives of the Hispanic world. Although Humboldtian writing has invented a powerful cult that has served to erase the sources of his knowledge and practice, in truth Humboldt did not ‘invent nature,’ nor did he pioneer global science: he was the beneficiary of Iberian natural science and globalization. Nor was Humboldt a pioneering, ‘postcolonial’ cultural relativist. Instead, his anthropological views of the Americas were Orientalist and historicist and, in most ways, were less enlightened than those of his Creole contemporaries. This book will reshape the landscape of Humboldt scholarship. It is essential reading for all those interested in Alexander von Humboldt, the Hispanic American enlightenment, and the global history of science and knowledge.
The Invention of Infinity: Essays on Husserl and the History of Philosophy (Contributions to Phenomenology #124)
by Claudio MajolinoThis book covers Husserl’s stance on the philosopher and the history of philosophy, whether or not such a history is part of the philosophical attitude itself, and if so, how Husserl’s phenomenology might weigh in on such matters. Firstly, this text spells out some of the manifold ways in which the history of philosophy works its way in Husserl’s phenomenology, showing how concepts, methods and problems drawn from various Ancient and Modern philosophical traditions (Platonism, Aristotelianism, Sophistry, Stoicism, Scholasticism, Modern Rationalism) are transformed and embedded within transcendental phenomenology itself. Secondly, it shows how a better understanding of the distinctive patterns by means of which Husserl’s phenomenology confronts the history of philosophy could be extremely significant for historians of philosophy who are interested in learning something entirely new about the unexplored horizons of such concepts, methods and problems. Finally, based on such twofold historical and philosophical approach and thanks to a substantial reinterpretation of some key phenomenological concepts such as “multiplicity”, “constitution”, “attitude” and “variation”, this book provides a novel and original reading of Husserl’s overall philosophical project in its full meaning and scope. By doing so, this volume appeals to both students and researchers and critically engages in mainstream interpretations of phenomenology, suggesting a unique take on the idea of transcendental phenomenology as a whole.
The Invention of International Order: Remaking Europe after Napoleon
by Professor Glenda SlugaThe story of the women, financiers, and other unsung figures who helped to shape the post-Napoleonic global orderIn 1814, after decades of continental conflict, an alliance of European empires captured Paris and exiled Napoleon Bonaparte, defeating French military expansionism and establishing the Concert of Europe. This new coalition planted the seeds for today's international order, wedding the idea of a durable peace to multilateralism, diplomacy, philanthropy, and rights, and making Europe its center. Glenda Sluga reveals how at the end of the Napoleonic wars, new conceptions of the politics between states were the work not only of European statesmen but also of politically ambitious aristocratic and bourgeois men and women who seized the moment at an extraordinary crossroads in history.In this panoramic book, Sluga reinvents the study of international politics, its limitations, and its potential. She offers multifaceted portraits of the leading statesmen of the age, such as Tsar Alexander, Count Metternich, and Viscount Castlereagh, showing how they operated in the context of social networks often presided over by influential women, even as they entrenched politics as a masculine endeavor. In this history, figures such as Madame de Staël and Countess Dorothea Lieven insist on shaping the political transformations underway, while bankers influence economic developments and their families agitate for Jewish rights.Monumental in scope, this groundbreaking book chronicles the European women and men who embraced the promise of a new kind of politics in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, and whose often paradoxical contributions to modern diplomacy and international politics still resonate today.
The Invention of International Relations Theory: Realism, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the 1954 Conference on Theory
by Nicolas GuilhotThe 1954 Conference on Theory, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, featured a who's who of scholars and practitioners debating the foundations of international relations theory. Assembling his own team of experts, all of whom have struggled with this legacy, Nicolas Guilhot revisits a seminal event and its odd rejection of scientific rationalism.Far from being a spontaneous development, these essays argue, the emergence of a "realist" approach to international politics, later codified at the conference, was deliberately triggered by the Rockefeller Foundation. The organization was an early advocate of scholars who opposed the idea of a "science" of politics, pursuing, for the sake of disciplinary autonomy, a vision of politics as a prerational and existential dimension that could not be "solved" by scientific means. As a result, this nascent theory was more a rejection of behavioral social science than the birth of one of its specialized branches. The archived conversations reproduced here, along with unpublished papers by Hans Morgenthau, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Paul Nitze, speak to this defensive stance. International relations theory is critically linked to the context of postwar liberalism, and the contributors explore how these origins have played out in political thought and American foreign policy.
The Invention of Madness: State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute)
by Emily BaumThroughout most of history, in China the insane were kept within the home and treated by healers who claimed no specialized knowledge of their condition. In the first decade of the twentieth century, however, psychiatric ideas and institutions began to influence longstanding beliefs about the proper treatment for the mentally ill. In The Invention of Madness, Emily Baum traces a genealogy of insanity from the turn of the century to the onset of war with Japan in 1937, revealing the complex and convoluted ways in which “madness” was transformed in the Chinese imagination into “mental illness.” ? Focusing on typically marginalized historical actors, including municipal functionaries and the urban poor, The Invention of Madness shifts our attention from the elite desire for modern medical care to the ways in which psychiatric discourses were implemented and redeployed in the midst of everyday life. New meanings and practices of madness, Baum argues, were not just imposed on the Beijing public but continuously invented by a range of people in ways that reflected their own needs and interests. Exhaustively researched and theoretically informed, The Invention of Madness is an innovative contribution to medical history, urban studies, and the social history of twentieth-century China.
The Invention of Market Freedom
by Eric MacgilvrayHow did the value of freedom become so closely associated with the institution of the market? Why did the idea of market freedom hold so little appeal before the modern period and how can we explain its rise to dominance? In The Invention of Market Freedom, Eric MacGilvray addresses these questions by contrasting the market conception of freedom with the republican view that it displaced. After analyzing the ethical core and exploring the conceptual complexity of republican freedom, MacGilvray shows how this way of thinking was confronted with, altered in response to, and finally overcome by the rise of modern market societies. By learning to see market freedom as something that was invented, we can become more alert to the ways in which the appeal to freedom shapes and distorts our thinking about politics.
The Invention of Medicine: From Homer to Hippocrates
by Robin Lane FoxA preeminent classics scholar revises the history of medicine.Medical thinking and observation were radically changed by the ancient Greeks, one of their great legacies to the world. In the fifth century BCE, a Greek doctor put forward his clinical observations of individual men, women, and children in a collection of case histories known as the Epidemics. Among his working principles was the famous maxim "Do no harm." In The Invention of Medicine, acclaimed historian Robin Lane Fox puts these remarkable works in a wider context and upends our understanding of medical history by establishing that they were written much earlier than previously thought. Lane Fox endorses the ancient Greeks' view that their texts' author, not named, was none other than the father of medicine, the great Hippocrates himself. Lane Fox's argument changes our sense of the development of scientific and rational thinking in Western culture, and he explores the consequences for Greek artists, dramatists and the first writers of history. Hippocrates emerges as a key figure in the crucial change from an archaic to a classical world. Elegantly written and remarkably learned, The Invention of Medicine is a groundbreaking reassessment of many aspects of Greek culture and city life.
The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science: Costa & Royal Society Prize Winner
by Andrea WulfWINNER OF THE 2015 COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARDWINNER OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY SCIENCE BOOK PRIZE 2016'A thrilling adventure story' Bill Bryson'Dazzling' Literary Review 'Brilliant' Sunday Express'Extraordinary and gripping' New Scientist'A superb biography' The Economist'An exhilarating armchair voyage' GILES MILTON, Mail on Sunday Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) is the great lost scientist - more things are named after him than anyone else. There are towns, rivers, mountain ranges, the ocean current that runs along the South American coast, there's a penguin, a giant squid - even the Mare Humboldtianum on the moon. His colourful adventures read like something out of a Boy's Own story: Humboldt explored deep into the rainforest, climbed the world's highest volcanoes and inspired princes and presidents, scientists and poets alike. Napoleon was jealous of him; Simon Bolívar's revolution was fuelled by his ideas; Darwin set sail on the Beagle because of Humboldt; and Jules Verne's Captain Nemo owned all his many books. He simply was, as one contemporary put it, 'the greatest man since the Deluge'.Taking us on a fantastic voyage in his footsteps - racing across anthrax-infected Russia or mapping tropical rivers alive with crocodiles - Andrea Wulf shows why his life and ideas remain so important today. Humboldt predicted human-induced climate change as early as 1800, and The Invention of Nature traces his ideas as they go on to revolutionize and shape science, conservation, nature writing, politics, art and the theory of evolution. He wanted to know and understand everything and his way of thinking was so far ahead of his time that it's only coming into its own now. Alexander von Humboldt really did invent the way we see nature.
The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science: Costa & Royal Society Prize Winner
by Andrea WulfWINNER OF THE 2015 COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARDWINNER OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY PRIZE 2016'Dazzling' Literary Review 'Brilliant' Sunday Express'Extraordinary and gripping' New Scientist'A superb biography' The Economist'An exhilarating armchair voyage' GILES MILTON, Mail on Sunday Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) is the great lost scientist - more things are named after him than anyone else. There are towns, rivers, mountain ranges, the ocean current that runs along the South American coast, there's a penguin, a giant squid - even the Mare Humboldtianum on the moon. His colourful adventures read like something out of a Boy's Own story: Humboldt explored deep into the rainforest, climbed the world's highest volcanoes and inspired princes and presidents, scientists and poets alike. Napoleon was jealous of him; Simon Bolívar's revolution was fuelled by his ideas; Darwin set sail on the Beagle because of Humboldt; and Jules Verne's Captain Nemo owned all his many books. He simply was, as one contemporary put it, 'the greatest man since the Deluge'.Taking us on a fantastic voyage in his footsteps - racing across anthrax-infected Russia or mapping tropical rivers alive with crocodiles - Andrea Wulf shows why his life and ideas remain so important today. Humboldt predicted human-induced climate change as early as 1800, and The Invention of Nature traces his ideas as they go on to revolutionize and shape science, conservation, nature writing, politics, art and the theory of evolution. He wanted to know and understand everything and his way of thinking was so far ahead of his time that it's only coming into its own now. Alexander von Humboldt really did invent the way we see nature.Recorded by arrangement with Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC; (P)2015 Highbridge, a division of Recorded Books
The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself
by Andrew Pettegree&“A fascinating account of the gathering and dissemination of news from the end of the Middle Ages to the French Revolution&” and the rise of the newspaper (Glenn Altschuler, The Huffington Post). Long before the invention of printing, let alone the daily newspaper, people wanted to stay informed. In the pre-industrial era, news was mostly shared through gossip, sermons, and proclamations. The age of print brought pamphlets, ballads, and the first news-sheets. In this groundbreaking history, renowned historian Andrew Pettegree tracks the evolution of news in ten countries over the course of four centuries, examining the impact of news media on contemporary events and the lives of an ever-more-informed public. The Invention of News sheds light on who controlled the news and who reported it; the use of news as a tool of political protest and religious reform; issues of privacy and titillation; the persistent need for news to be current and for journalists to be trustworthy; and people&’s changing sense of themselves and their communities as they experienced newly opened windows on the world. &“This expansive view of news and how it reached people will be fascinating to readers interested in communication and cultural history.&” —Library Journal (starred review)
The Invention of Paris
by Eric Hazan David FernbachThe Invention of Paris is a tour through the streets and history of the French capital under the guidance of radical Parisian author and publisher Eric Hazan. Hazan reveals a city whose squares echo with the riots, rebellions and revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Combining the raconteur's ear for a story with a historian's command of the facts, he introduces an incomparable cast of characters: the literati, the philosophers and the artists--Balzac, Baudelaire, Blanqui, Flaubert, Hugo, Maney, and Proust, of course; but also Doisneau, Nerval and Rousseau. It is a Paris dyed a deep red in its convictions. It is haunted and vitalized by the history of the barricades, which Hazan retells in rich detail. The Invention of Paris opens a window on the forgotten byways of the capital's vibrant and bloody past, revealing the city in striking new colors.
The Invention of Party Politics
by Gerald LeonardThis ambitious work uncovers the constitutional foundations of that most essential institution of modern democracy, the political party. Taking on Richard Hofstadter's classic The Idea of a Party System, it rejects the standard view that Martin Van Buren and other Jacksonian politicians had the idea of a modern party system in mind when they built the original Democratic party.Grounded in an original retelling of Illinois politics of the 1820s and 1830s, the book also includes chapters that connect the state-level narrative to national history, from the birth of the Constitution to the Dred Scott case. In this reinterpretation, Jacksonian party-builders no longer anticipate twentieth-century political assumptions but draw on eighteenth-century constitutional theory to justify a party division between "the democracy" and "the aristocracy." Illinois is no longer a frontier latecomer to democratic party organization but a laboratory in which politicians use Van Buren's version of the Constitution, states' rights, and popular sovereignty to reeducate a people who had traditionally opposed party organization. The modern two-party system is no longer firmly in place by 1840. Instead, the system remains captive to the constitutional commitments on which the Democrats and Whigs founded themselves, even as the specter of sectional crisis haunts the parties' constitutional visions.
Invention of Peace
by Michael HowardThroughout history the overwhelming majority of human societies have taken war for granted and made it the basis for their legal and social structures. Not until the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century did war come to be regarded as an unmitigated evil and one that could be abolished by rational social organization, and only after the massive slaughter of the two world wars did this become the declared objective of civilized states. Nevertheless, war in one form or another continues unabated. In this elegantly written book, a preeminent military historian considers why this is so. Is war in some sense still a necessary element in international order? Are war and peace in fact complementary? Does not peace itself breed the conditions that will ultimately lead to war? And if nuclear weapons have made war ultimately suicidal for mankind, what can be done about it? Having devoted half a century largely to studying these questions, Michael Howard offers us his reflections. Unless they can be answered, he notes, the twenty-first century is unlikely to be any more peaceful than the centuries that preceded it.
The Invention of Peter
by George E. DemacopoulosOn the first anniversary of his election to the papacy, Leo the Great stood before the assembly of bishops convening in Rome and forcefully asserted his privileged position as the heir of Peter the Apostle. This declaration marked the beginning of a powerful tradition: the Bishop of Rome would henceforth leverage the cult of St. Peter, and the popular association of St. Peter with the city itself, to his advantage. In The Invention of Peter, George E. Demacopoulos examines this Petrine discourse, revealing how the link between the historic Peter and the Roman Church strengthened, shifted, and evolved during the papacies of two of the most creative and dynamic popes of late antiquity, ultimately shaping medieval Christianity as we now know it. By emphasizing the ways in which this rhetoric of apostolic privilege was employed, extended, transformed, or resisted between the reigns of Leo the Great and Gregory the Great, Demacopoulos offers an alternate account of papal history that challenges the dominant narrative of an inevitable and unbroken rise in papal power from late antiquity through the Middle Ages. He unpacks escalating claims to ecclesiastical authority, demonstrating how this rhetoric, which almost always invokes a link to St. Peter, does not necessarily represent actual power or prestige but instead reflects moments of papal anxiety and weakness. Through its nuanced examination of an array of episcopal activity--diplomatic, pastoral, political, and administrative--The Invention of Peter offers a new perspective on the emergence of papal authority and illuminates the influence that Petrine discourse exerted on the survival and exceptional status of the Bishop of Rome.
The Invention of Power: Popes, Kings, and the Birth of the West
by Bruce Bueno de MesquitaIn the tradition of Why Nations Fail, this book solves one of the great puzzles of history: Why did the West become the most powerful civilization in the world?Western exceptionalism—the idea that European civilizations are freer, wealthier, and less violent—is a widespread and powerful political idea. It has been a source of peace and prosperity in some societies, and of ethnic cleansing and havoc in others.Yet in The Invention of Power, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita draws on his expertise in political maneuvering, deal-making, and game theory to present a revolutionary new theory of Western exceptionalism: that a single, rarely discussed event in the twelfth century changed the course of European and world history. By creating a compromise between churches and nation-states that, in effect, traded money for power and power for money, the 1122 Concordat of Worms incentivized economic growth, facilitated secularization, and improved the lot of the citizenry, all of which set European countries on a course for prosperity. In the centuries since, countries that have had a similar dynamic of competition between church and state have been consistently better off than those that have not.The Invention of Power upends conventional thinking about European culture, religion, and race and presents a persuasive new vision of world history.