A powerful and original argument that the practice of scholarship is grounded in the concept of radical freedom, beginning with the freedoms of inquiry, thought, and expression. Why are scholars and scholarship invariably distrusted and attacked by authoritarian regimes? Geoffrey Galt Harpham argues that at its core, scholarship is informed by an emancipatory agenda based on a permanent openness to the new, an unlimited responsiveness to evidence, and a commitment to conversion. At the same time, however, scholarship involves its own forms of authority. As a worldly practice, it is a struggle for dominance without end as scholars try to disprove the claims of others, establish new versions of the truth, and seek disciples. Scholarship and Freedom threads its general arguments through examinations of the careers of three scholars: W. E. B. Du Bois, who serves as an example of scholarly character formation; South African Bernard Lategan, whose New Testament studies became entangled on both sides of his country’s battles over apartheid; and Linda Nochlin, whose essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” virtually created the field of feminist art history.

To celebrate The American Scholar's thirtieth anniversary, Hiram Haydn and Betsy Saunders brought together fifty representative selections published throughout those years. These selections include the best essays that appeared throughout the life of one of the leading publications of the country. The editors give a picture of the changing intellectual climate and emphasis from the early 1930s to the late 1950s. The collection illustrates the unusually wide range and diversity of the regular subject matter of The American Scholar. This work is once again brought to public attention a half century later, and this edition includes a new introduction by Irving Louis Horowitz.Haydn and Saunders chose essays that were of supreme quality; those included were among the best of several hundred published. They focused on a diversity of subject matter as well as a selection representative of the different interests stressed in the magazine's history. These pieces reflect the prevailing intellectual and cultural currents of fifty years earlier. The American Scholar Reader then, as now, focuses on themes of economics, religion, psychology, social and cultural matters, ecology, and the importance of conservation.Some of the major contributors and essays herein included are: 'The Germans: Unhappy Philosophers in Politics,' Reinhold Niebuhr; 'The Challenge of Our Times,' Harold J. Laski; 'The Problem of the Liberal Arts College,' John Dewey; 'The Retort Circumstantial,' Jacques Barzun; 'Freud, Religion, and Science,' David Riesman; 'Three American Philosophers,' George Santayana; 'Christian Gauss as a Teacher of Literature,' Edmund Wilson; 'The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt,' Richard Hofstadter; 'The Present Human Condition,' Erich Fromm; 'Our Documentary Culture,' Margaret Mead; and 'Equality America's Deferred Commitment,' C. Vann Woodward.

Regarded by many as the equal of Shakespeare in poetic imagination and expression, Milton was also a prolific writer of prose, applying his potent genius to major issues of domestic, religious and political liberty. This superbly annotated new publication is the most authoritative single-volume anthology yet of Milton's major prose works. Uses Milton's original language, spelling and punctuation Freshly and extensively annotated Notes provide unrivalled contextual analysis as well as illuminating the wealth of Milton's allusions and references Will appeal to a general readership as well as to scholars across the humanities

"Today choice is often taken to be a synonym for freedom. In much of the world, but especially in the United States, having both more occasions to make choices and more options to choose from are familiar political, personal, and economic goals. We are urged to consider our preferences and then to select from menus of options covering almost every element of our lives, including what to buy, where to live, whom to love, what profession to practice, and even what to believe. We like to think that when we determine our preferences among them, we are engaged in the business of self-realization. And yet, everybody from marketing gurus to psychologists to philosophers has also been warning us about the many negative consequences stemming from our obsession with individualized choice-making. Not only are we not very good at realizing our personal desires, but we are also overwhelmed with too many possibilities, anxious about what best to pick and seemingly unable to muster the same enthusiasm for collective decision making as we do for choices about ourselves. Further, our relentless focus on the responsibility for making good ones has stigmatized those without many options, mainly the poor. How did this happen? Drawing on sources as varied as novels, questionnaires, and restaurant menus, The Choice is Yours tells the long history of the invention of choice as the modern form of freedom. Sophia Rosenfeld pays particular attention to women and the halting emergence of feminism in order to demonstrate how choice was, from the start, stigmatized and turned into a horizon for liberty. Thus, this is also a story about constraints, from formal laws to social customs, that have always worked to limit choice-who gets to do it, when and how they do so, what the choices are-in ways that are often invisible and yet central to the role that choice plays in the modern world. Rosenfeld begins in the early modern Western world, with the contemporaneous invention of shopping as an activity focused on the selection of goods and of religious freedom, in addition to freedom of expression as a matter of being able to pick one's convictions. Moving into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, she explores choice in romantic life, choice in politics, and sciences of choice. She takes up the work of contemporary psychologists, economists, and other theorists and offers a new perspective on how to think about choice now-based on a new reading of the past. An epilogue centers on the rise of reproductive choice and its consequences since the 1970s. Ultimately, The Choice is Yours is an argument for the necessity of rethinking the meaning of choice today, including its promise and its limitations, within the contours of modern liberalism"--