Stanford University Press Blog

Democracy and Its Threats

A recommended reading list based around the theme of democracy.

By Architect of the Capitol - aoc.gov, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

 

With other Association of University Presses members, we recognize that there has been and continues to be a great deal of public discussion of the state of democratic institutions around the world.  To facilitate this always vital conversation we've assembled a brief reading list for those interested in learning more about democracy and its precarity.

 

American Apocalypse

The Six Far-Right Groups Waging War on Democracy

Rena Steinzor

A thorough analysis of the right-wing interests contributing to the downfall of American democracy

The war on American democracy is at a fever pitch. Such a corrosive state of affairs did not arise spontaneously up from the people but instead was pushed, top-down, by six private sector special interest groups—big business, the House Freedom Caucus, the Federalist Society, Fox News, white evangelicals, and armed militias. In American Apocalypse Rena Steinzor argues that these groups are nothing more than well-financed armies fighting a battle of attrition against the national government, with power, money, and fame as their central motivations. 

The book begins at the end of Lyndon Johnson's presidency, when the modern regulatory state was born. Agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration ensured that everything from our air to our medicine was safe. But efforts to thwart this "big government" agenda began swiftly, albeit in the shadows. Business leaders built a multi-billion dollar presence in the Capitol, and the rest of the six interest groups soon followed. 

While the groups do not coordinate their attacks, and sometimes their short-term goals even conflict, their priorities fall within a surprisingly tight bullseye: the size and power of the administrative state. In the near-term, their campaigns will bring the crucial functions of government to a halt, which will lead to immediate suffering by the working classes, and a rapid deterioration of race relations. Over the long-term, as the prevalence of global pandemics and climate crises increase, an incapacitated national government will usher in unimaginable harm.

This book is the first to conceptualize these groups together, as one deconstructive and awe-inspiring force. Steinzor delves into each of their histories, mapping the strategies, tactics, and characteristics that make them so powerful. She offers the most comprehensive story available about the downfall of American democracy, reminding us that only by recognizing what we are up against can we hope to bring about change.

 

Mightier Than the Sword

Civilian Control of the Military and the Revitalization of Democracy

Alice Hunt Friend

"Alice Hunt Friend is one of the most provocative and insightful scholar-practitioners writing on American civil-military relations today. This book makes a convincing case for a Big Idea—that we cannot improve civil-military relations by only focusing on the military side of the equation. Civilian scholars and the uniformed will read this book—but every would-be civilian policymaker needs to read it."
—Peter D. Feaver, Duke University 

The civilian role in managing the military has never been more important. Today, civilian leadership of defense policy is challenged by the blurring line between war and competition and the speed of machine decision-making on the battlefield. Moreover, the legitimacy of political leaders and civil servants has been undermined by a succession of foreign policy failures and by imbalances of public faith in the military on the one hand and disapproval of civilian institutions on the other. A central question emerges: What does appropriate and effective civilian control of the military look like?

Combining scholarly expertise and firsthand civilian experience in the Department of Defense, Friend argues that civilians combine authoritative status, institutional functions, and political expertise to ensure that democratic preferences over the use of force prevail. Friend focuses on the ways political context shapes whether and how civilian controllers—the civilians in professional and institutional positions with the responsibility for defense matters—exercise control over the military and each other. Mightier Than the Sword provides insights that enrich civil-military relations scholarship, as well as lessons aimed at revitalizing American democracy.

The Soil Where MAGA Grows

Why America Needs Good Government

RENA STEINZOR

The U.S. Capitol building by National Park Service/Tom Engberg - NPGallery, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons 

 

As polls in the battleground states shift and sway, and pundits warn that the margin will be razor thin, escaping anxiety over the 2024 election has become impossible. If Donald Trump becomes the 47^th president and commands the military to round up the “bad” people, as well as millions of illegal immigrants of color, will the constitutional guiderails of the country as hold? President Obama once characterized this paralyzing deadlock as a “fever” that would break after the 2012 election. Instead, it has deepened and spread.

The most common approach of the two parties and the legion of consultants who advise them is to focus on the motivations of distinct groups within the electorate. Examining how Democrats lost white working-class voters or whether Republicans have alienated suburban women may be useful in some contexts, but the methodology considers symptoms, not causes.

American Apocalypse, The Six Far-right Groups Waging War on Democracy » digs down to the roots of what spawned and nurtures MAGA, identifying the six amply funded, well organized, and rabidly private sector groups that produced the drastic revamp of a Republican Party controlled by Trump. The six include big business, the Tea Party (or, as it is known today, the House Freedom Caucus), the Federalist Society, Fox News, white evangelicals, and armed militia. Although the six do not appear to collaborate, they are well-financed armies fighting—and increasingly winning—parallel wars of attrition against government.

Maimonides and of Philosophy

Reflections on The Guide to the Perplexed

LENN E. GOODMAN

Portrait of Moses Maimonides. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons

 

In the decades I’ve spent studying the Rambam’s Guide to the Perplexed I’ve found that I learn more from it every time I open it. In recent years that means I learn from Maimonides’ insights in the Guide continuously. Every day brings new insights; and that experience has often persisted well into the night. The Guide is that rich, and Maimonides’ insights entrusted to it are that profound. The responses of my students and colleagues and those of other philosophers, generalists, and Maimonides specialists in the literature that has emerged since the Guide’s first appearance in Arabic in the late 12^th century – commentaries, essays, scholarly articles, and popular pieces, tightly focused studies, and broad reactions – show me that I am not alone in continuing to learn from Maimonides over eight centuries that have passed since he wrote this philosophical masterwork.

It was in 1970, as a young philosopher on a visit to Oxford, that I was first confronted with the need to grapple with the Guide. I’d only a couple of years earlier completed my Oxford D. Phil. on Islamic philosophy. My new university, the University of Hawaii, committed to comparative studies in philosophy, had sent me to Europe to gather Arabic books to enrich their library holdings in that field. I was returning home, when David Patterson, the founding president of the Oxford Centre for Post-graduate Hebrew Studies, reached out to ask me to contribute a volume for a series on Jewish thought that he was editing.

Given my philosophical roots and commitments, Maimondes was the perfect focus. I spent the next six years immersed in the Guide. Viking published my Rambam, a collection of readings from the Guide and from Maimonides’ pioneering work on Jewish virtue ethics, the Eight Chapters, in 1976. I wanted a fresh translation from the original Arabic throughout, and a distinctive feature of my book was my decision to motivate what Maimonides had to teach us by stating the problems and laying out the issues that his arguments intended to address but that he typically left unstated, on the assumption that those tormented by a philosophical crux did not need to have the problem stated for them.

I knew, of course, that the core biblical idea of creation had been problematized for Maimonides’ contemporaries, if they were at all versed in the Arabic philosophical literature. For Aristotle had taken the world to be eternal. He had marked the transition between mythic and philosophical thinking by the shift from questions about where the world came from to what seemed to him a more scientific question: what was it made from – and moving on to the purely philosophical, metaphysical question: what does it mean for a thing to be.

On the importance of dreams in the digital age

Subjective experience, semantics, and machine analysis as a tool

MAJA GUTMAN MUŠIČ

 

Dreams matter.

This overarching premise, of almost mantric proportions, has historically guided the endeavors of thinkers and scholars striving to understand the nature and workings of dreams. Traditionally, the study of dream content has been situated within philosophy, religious studies, and, later, analytical psychology. However, recent advancements in data science and computational linguistics have disrupted its compartmentalized status. By advancing the study of dreams into the field of computationally measurable observation, where their content is scientifically validated and analyzed using various theories, dreams have gained renewed interest. Today, more than ever, the question arises: Why exactly do dreams matter?

 

Dreams and Qualia

In his widely discussed essay, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?", Thomas Nagel discusses the elusive nature of subjective experience. Rooted in our first-person perspective, we are eternally limited by the inability to fully experience the existence of another being. In the philosophy of mind, this subjective experience is known as qualia—a term that encapsulates the realization that while I, as an individual, know and feel my existence, I can only observe and imagine the subjective experiences of others. Just as I will never know what it is like to be a bat (or any other sentient being), I will never fully perceive someone else's dreams. Even if scientific advancements allow us to externalize and replay someone's dreams in a strictly cinematic sense, as suggested in Wim Wenders' science fiction movie "Until the End of the World," the direct experience of perceiving them as our own would forever remain beyond our grasp.

Unraveling the Global Phenomenon of Mega-Science

A Journey Across the Century of Scientific Advancement

DAVID P. BAKER and JUSTIN J.W. POWELL

Credit: IceCube/NSF. Original photo taken by Martin Wolf. All Rights Reserved. Used with permission.

 

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world witnessed an extraordinary surge in scientific discovery, particularly focused on understanding the novel coronavirus and developing effective interventions. This rapid pace of research, which saw an exponential increase in the number of studies published on the virus within months, was not a stroke of luck, but rather the result of decades of investment in global scientific infrastructure. It required the collaborative efforts of thousands of scientists worldwide sharing their knowledge and engaging in the now-typical ways of mega-science. Previous mega-science projects, from the Manhattan Project to the Human Genome Project, were more locally-based and were conducted over many years, not months.

In 2020 alone, over three million articles were published in leading scientific journals, showcasing the extensive capacity for new discovery facilitated by highly-networked scientists across the globe. This phenomenon was not something foreseen by early skeptics, who predicted the stabilization of scientific progress—and growth to limits. Instead, it was and is propelled by a cultural transformation—the education revolution—creating an increasingly symbiotic relationship between higher education and science systems. This educational paradigm shift laid the groundwork for mega-science. Universities transformed from centers of learning to also becoming hubs of scientific inquiry. As ever more individuals pursued higher education (today, two-fifths of each cohort of youth worldwide participate in postsecondary education), universities evolved to prioritize research alongside teaching; they also attend to their third mission of helping to solve wicked problems of society and environment. This cultural process lies behind not only more people attending schooling for ever-longer phases of their lives than ever before but also, throughout the twentieth century and onwards, a steady inclusion of greater numbers of youth and young adults in universities and other postsecondary organizations across the world. In and of itself though, growing attendance alone could not have been the midwife to the mega-science we witness today. Also required was a concurrent influence of the culture of the education revolution on the very essence of what it means to be a university—and how this organizational form provides the crucial, well-resourced forum for the exchange of ideas and research for everyone devoted to scientific discovery.

A Stalinist Textbook for the Modern College Classroom?

Introducing a New Primary Source for the Study of History from Medieval Kyiv Rus’ to the Soviet Union

DAVID BRANDENBERGER

In 2023, Vladimir Putin mandated a new patriotic history curriculum for the Russian public schools that rewrites key elements of twentieth- and twenty-first century history in order to reinforce his rule and justify the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Many commentators have judged this historical revisionism to be dramatic enough to evoke associations with the rewriting of history that took place under Joseph Stalin during the 1930s. And indeed, the similarity of these curricular materials turns out to be more than just rhetorical, insofar as both instill a belief in statism and authority, as well as intense suspicion of those who would oppose Moscow, whether foreign or domestic.

Amid all this nostalgia for the Stalinist past, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Russian publishers have rereleased some of the most famous textbooks of the period to flank the new public school curriculum. Coincidentally, I’ve also just published a critical edition of perhaps the most important of those texts with Stanford University Press—Andrei Shestakov’s 1937 Short History of the USSR. Aside from drawing attention to the scholarly merits of the book, I’d like outline here several ways in which this central piece the Stalinist canon can play a constructive role in college-level classrooms today.

 

Stalin’s Usable Past: A Critical Edition of the 1937 Short History of the USSR, edited by David Brandenberger (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2024).

 

Presidential Immunity and the Supreme Court

Stanford University Press authors weigh in on Trump v. United States

Exterior of the United States Supreme Court By USCapitol, Public Domain, Via Wikimedia Commons

     

In light of the Supreme Court's recent decision on presidential immunity, we have gathered a small selection of responses from our authors. 

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David M. Driesen, author of The Specter of Dictatorship: Judicial Enabling of Presidential Power »

The Specter of Dictatorship» reveals how the U.S. Supreme Court's presidentialism threatens our democracy and what to do about it.

The Supreme Court’s immunity decision provides another example of how autocrats defeat checks and balances by capturing apex courts. We’ve seen the same thing act as a prelude to the loss of democracy in Hungary and many other countries.

If Trump is elected, this opinion offers him opportunities to rapidly vanquish democracy. The dissent pointed out that the Court’s rulings allow the President to order Navy Seals to assassinate a political rival or initiate a coup without fear of criminal sanction.  Steven Bannon has claimed that Trump will use the Insurrection Act to put down demonstrators if he is elected, and Trump has confirmed this, saying that he plans to establish a dictatorship for one day. This ruling frees Trump to order troops (or a paramilitary force drawn from immigration agencies if the military refuses) to fire upon demonstrators without fear of any consequences, which would go a long way toward establishing the fear necessary to sustain a dictatorship.  

            Trump has promised to follow the pattern of autocrats around the world by using investigation and prosecution of innocent political opponents to sideline them. A constitutional custom has long prohibited Presidents from making decisions about whom to investigate or prosecute. Functional democracies always obey such norms. This custom led the Department of Justice (DOJ) to resist Trump’s requests to investigate or prosecute Trump’s political opponents during his first term when there was no evidence of any crimes.

            But the immunity decision undermines the constitutional norm against presidential direction of prosecution. Justice Roberts stated that “the President may discuss potential investigations and prosecutions with his Attorney General and other DOJ officials.” His opinion identifies investigative and prosecutorial decisionmaking as part of the executive power vested in the President, without any mention of the norm aimed at preventing its abuse.

            Trump’s Supreme Court has become an enemy of the Constitution and the rule of law. It now resembles the courts that have hastened the end of democracies in many countries after an elected autocrat has appointed many of their members.

Another Archive of Feelings

Reflections on Before Trans

RACHEL MESCH

  Before Trans: Three Gender Stories from Nineteenth-Century France »
 by Rachel Mesch, now available in paperback

 

I did not set out to write a history of trans identities in nineteenth-century France. In fact, at first I thought I was writing a book about marriage. I wanted to examine the intellectual partnerships between certain women writers I had studied in my earlier books and their devoted husbands. It wasn’t long before I noticed that the women in those partnerships were far more interesting than the men. As my research continued, I realized that two of those writers whom I had always treated as women identified deeply with masculinity. The plot thickened, and a different project was born: Before Trans: Three Gender Stories from Nineteenth-Century France », reissued by Stanford University Press in paperback this Spring.

As a cisgender heterosexual scholar, I hesitated at the outset of my research to use the term transgender to refer to my first subject, the explorer-turned writer Jane Dieulafoy. I had studied Dieulafoy in my previous book, which was about modern women who could balance femininity with feminism in French women’s magazines at the turn of the century. Dieulafoy always stood out, in a well-tailored men’s suit, as the exception who proved the rule.

As I began to write about Dieulafoy, I found that, in 2015-– light years ago in terms of the history of trans studies– readers frequently misunderstood what I meant. They kept assuming that I was analyzing someone who wore pants as an idiosyncratic feminist act. I realized that in order to write about transgender identity, I needed to name it as such. Not a simple feat, of course, because the term did not yet exist in the nineteenth century. But clearly, as my research proved, there were people in this time– and as we know now, in every century– who felt misaligned with the gender assigned to them at birth. This deeply ingrained sense of self was the reason that Dieulafoy, an otherwise deeply conservative figure, would subvert gender norms. Soon I would come to understand that the writer Rachilde was similarly misunderstood. Rachilde was often described as someone who “resisted interpretation”– so full of contradictions were their writings and persona. But once you recognized nonbinary identity as the motivating impulse of Rachilde's challenges to gender norms, everything about them seemed less contradictory. They wore pants and also did not see themself as a feminist. It suddenly made sense.

Anthony Comstock Rides Again

The resurgence of American censorship and book bans

KATHERINE GIUFFRE

2016— Then Vice President Joe Biden examines James Joyce manuscripts at Trinity college, Dublin.  Official White House Photo by David Lienemann. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons 

 

This is a repost of an entry that originally ran in July 2023.

Anthony Comstock is back in the news. More than a century after his death, the founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV) and the law he inspired – the 1873 “Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use,” more commonly known as the “Comstock Act” – have emerged once again as players in America’s cultural wars, cited by right-wing judges in 2023 to support banning books, drag shows, and the medical abortion drug mifepristone.

Comstock was active throughout the end of the 19^th century and into the 20^th. He opposed women’s suffrage, the dissemination of any information regarding birth control or abortion, and pornography or other “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” material. Thousands were arrested under the Act and Comstock himself boasted that 15 people were driven to suicide by his actions. After his death in 1915, Comstock’s work was carried on by his successor at the NYSSV, John Sumner.

As I discuss in my book, Outrage: The Arts and the Creation of Modernity », it was Sumner who had Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap arrested in 1920 in New York for publishing an excerpt of James Joyce’s Ulysses in their literary magazine, The Little Review. In January of that same year, Prohibition became law in the US after the Volstead Act passed. In April, Italian immigrants Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were arrested for the murder of a Boston-area paymaster in what many believed was a politically motivated action based on their anarchist political beliefs. And perhaps most importantly, in 1920 the 19^th Amendment became law, guaranteeing women the right to vote, sending Sumner into a frenzy over the fear that “radical feminists” would upend American society. In the midst of these social and cultural changes, Anderson and Heap were convicted, narrowly escaped a prison sentence, and were fined fifty dollars each (about $750 today). Joyce’s Ulysses was effectively banned from the United States. Copies of The Little Review that contained excerpts of it were taken to the official government incinerator and burned. Fortunately, copies already in the hands of purchasers survived to be digitized for us today.

 

Letting AI Read for Us Can Undermine Our Thinking

The complexities of outsourcing literacy

NAOMI S. BARON

Free for commercial use. Via Pixabay.

 

It is said that in the tenth century, the Grand Vizier of Persia traveled with his books –117,000 of them. A caravan of 400 camels bore the load, walking in alphabetical order. Fast forward eight centuries to Napoleon Bonaparte, who, on military campaigns, brought along both a portable library and personal librarian. More recently, at the October 2023 Frankfurt Book Fair (whose origins trace back to the middle ages), 215,000 people came to enjoy the offerings of 4,000 exhibiters.

Reading has long been valued as a source of information and ideas, not to mention as an enjoyable pastime. Media options have evolved, from handwritten manuscripts to print to digital books to audiobooks. But the task for readers remains the same. Besides decoding the words, we strive to make sense of them. Our interpretations often draw upon personal experience and other works we have read. Especially for material that engages or challenges us, the process of reading becomes an act of thinking.

A crucial question in the age of artificial intelligence is whether AI threatens to undermine human reading. As a linguist who has studied the impact of AI on human writing, I am equally concerned about people relying on the technology to do their reading and sense-making for them.

Who does the laundry in your house?

Bias, entrenched ideas, and federal court confirmation hearings

CHRISTINA L. BOYD, PAUL M. COLLINS, JR., AND LORI A. RINGHAND

April 2022, Oval Office— President Joe Biden, with  First Lady Jill Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff, signs the commission for Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. By The White House - P20220408AS-0716, Public Domain, Via Wikimedia Commons

 

Who does the laundry in your house?

That may not be a question most of us would expect to be asked in a professional interview, especially one in which we are under consideration for one of the most prestigious and highly sought-after jobs in our field. Yet when Amy Coney Barrett sat before the Senate Judiciary Committee to field questions about her qualifications and ability to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, that is one of the many gender-biased inquiries she was faced with.

The question, undoubtedly, was intended to be light-hearted not discriminatory. The Senator who asked it seemed to think he was complimenting Barrett’s ability to juggle so many competing demands on her time. And yet, in the decades of public confirmation hearings, it had never seemed to occur to the Senators to ask any of Barrett’s male predecessors who handled their household chores. Male nominees simply don’t elicit images of busy homes and laundry. But Barrett did.

This is how bias often works, and why it can be so challenging to grapple with.

In high profile settings like the Senate Judiciary Committee, bias today rarely (we hope) manifests as intentional discrimination on the basis of race or gender. Rather, it appears when the nominee doesn’t quite “fit” entrenched ideas of what a Supreme Court justice is expected to look like, or how they are supposed to act. That disconnect can generate suspicion, surprise, or discomfort; reactions that women and nominees of color have to then deal with. So, Barrett did what so many women and people of color have done in similar situations. She laughed it off, and answered the question.

Modern Language Association Conference 2024

 

In addition to our booth in the MLA exhibit hall, we offer this virtual space to showcase our new authors, award-winning books, and highlights from the last year of Literary Studies at SUP.

 

Virtual Exhibit

Recent Award Winners

MLA Resources

 

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Virtual Exhibit

Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off these and other recent SUP Literary Studies titles with discount code S24XMLA through our virtual exhibit ».

American Historical Association Conference 2024

 

In addition to our booth in the AHA exhibit hall, we offer this virtual space to showcase our new authors, award-winning books, and highlights from the last year of History at SUP.

 

Announcements

Recent Award Winners

AHA Resources

 

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Announcements

Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off these and other recent SUP History titles with discount code S24XAHA through our virtual exhibit ».

 

The Oppenheimer Enigma

Illuminating legend and doubt

JEAN-PIERRE DUPUY

1945— J. Robert Oppenheimer, General Leslie Groves and others at the Trinity test site. By United States Army Signal Corps - Image taken from Project Gutenberg and cropped and saved to a more appropriate file format. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons

 

Robert Oppenheimer's tortured personality has given rise to several misunderstandings that have led to him becoming a legendary figure, as evidenced by Christopher Nolan's recent film. I try to demystify three of them, based on the analyses of my recent book, The War That Must Not Occur », Stanford University Press, 2023.

  

1. The work on the U.S. bomb justified by the hypothetical future Nazi bomb

It is undeniable that, as early as 1939 at least, the need to outpace Hitler played an important role in the decision to set up the Manhattan Project. After all, it was a German, Otto Hahn, who, in January 1939, succeeded for the first time in achieving the fission of the uranium atom by bombarding it with neutrons.

However, by the end of 1942, there was no Nazi bomb on the horizon anymore. Led by Werner Heisenberg, the German project had been on the wrong track from the start, and it was better suited to building a uranium pile capable of releasing energy than a bomb intended to explode and destroy nations. This failure can be explained in part by the fact that many of Central Europe's most prominent scientists, being Jews, had fled to America, and some of the greatest had joined the Manhattan Project! Heisenberg’s late admission that he didn’t really want to make a bomb remains a moot point.

ASSOCIATION FOR JEWISH STUDIES CONFERENCE 2023

 

In addition to our booth in the AJS exhibit hall, we offer this virtual space to showcase our new authors, award-winning books, and highlights from the last year of Jewish Studies at SUP.

 

Virtual Exhibit

Recent Award Winners

AJS Resources

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Virtual Exhibit

Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off on listed SUP Jewish Studies titles with discount code S23XAJS through our virtual exhibit ».

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Recent Award Winners

 

 

Undesirables: A Holocaust Journey to North Africa »

AOMAR BOUM, ILLUSTRATED BY NADJIB BERBER

• Gold Medal in the Graphic Novel/Drawn Book Category for the 2023 Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPYs).