This is the first full length account of the life and ideas of Mary Douglas, the British social anthropologist whose publications span the second half of the twentieth century. Richard Fardon covers Douglas' family background, and the pervasive ...

Do institutions think? If so, how do they do it? Do they have minds of their own? If so, what thoughts occupy these suprapersonal minds? Mary Douglas delves into these questions as she lays the groundwork for a theory of institutions. Usually the ...

Our day-to-day experiences over the past decade have taught us that there must be limits to our tremendous appetite for energy, natural resources, and consumer goods. Even utility and oil companies now promote conservation in the face of demands ...

The rapid developments in technologies — especially computing and the advent of many 'smart' devices, as well as rapid and perpetual communication via the Internet — has led to a frequently voiced view which Nicholas Agar describes as 'radical ...

'The Singularity' is what Silicon Valley calls the idea that, eventually, we will be overrun by machines that are able to take decisions and act for themselves. What no one says is that it happened before. A few hundred years ago, humans started ...

What is the state? And what's it ever done for you? More than you think. The state houses us, educates us, employs us, protects us on the street and in the wider world. It is the country we created together, and a part of our national identity ...

Last of the Lions is two histories woven into one remarkable story. It's a personal history – the evocative life of Clarence B. Jones, from his depression- and segregation-era upbringing at the hands of caring Irish Catholic nuns through our ...

The Internet is the most remarkable thing human beings have built since the Pyramids. John Naughton's book intersperses wonderful personal stories with an authoritative account of where the Net actually came from, who invented it and why and ...

Charles Maier offers a new narrative of the long twentieth century, focused on institutions that shaped politics and societies: project-states, driven by democratic or authoritarian ideologies; capital; and advocates of apolitical values, such as ...

"A sweeping intellectual history of the welfare state's policy-in-waiting From Thomas More to Thomas Paine, Milton Friedman to Mark Zuckerberg, centuries of public figures have hailed the power of government payments as a tool for advancing ...