In Pride and Solace, Norman Jacobson presents a novel perspective on the history of politcal theory. He sees an implicit conspiracy between political thinkers and their audience, in which theory feeds the common longing for solace, while the conversion of the audience to the thinker’s truth gratifies a craving for immortality, the thinker’s pride. In each age since the birth of the modern state, political theorists have found new forms of solace to meet the needs and character of their times. Machiavelli offers his Prince, the political warrior and national savior. Hobbes combats people’s fears of their innate disorderly passions with great artificial systems of law and science. And to give people all the the advantages of both the state of nature and civilized life, Rousseau fashions the social contract as the new basis of human political community. Despite attempts to develop a political theory without solace by such writers as Orwell, Arendt, and Camus, theorists still flourish who profess a dogmatic faith in history or in revolution, in Western technological superiority or Third World righteousness, and who condone torture and casual murder to attain ends seen as just, honorable, or foreordained. Jacobson’s book wages an intellectual struggle on two fronts: against the prideful offer of salvation by political means, and against the stoical rejection of solace in any form whatever. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1978.

In Pride and Solace, Norman Jacobson presents a novel perspective on the history of politcal theory. He sees an implicit conspiracy between political thinkers and their audience, in which theory feeds the common longing for solace, while the conversion of the audience to the thinker’s truth gratifies a craving for immortality, the thinker’s pride. In each age since the birth of the modern state, political theorists have found new forms of solace to meet the needs and character of their times. Machiavelli offers his Prince, the political warrior and national savior. Hobbes combats people’s fears of their innate disorderly passions with great artificial systems of law and science. And to give people all the the advantages of both the state of nature and civilized life, Rousseau fashions the social contract as the new basis of human political community. Despite attempts to develop a political theory without solace by such writers as Orwell, Arendt, and Camus, theorists still flourish who profess a dogmatic faith in history or in revolution, in Western technological superiority or Third World righteousness, and who condone torture and casual murder to attain ends seen as just, honorable, or foreordained. Jacobson’s book wages an intellectual struggle on two fronts: against the prideful offer of salvation by political means, and against the stoical rejection of solace in any form whatever. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1978.

An illuminating portrait of young LGBTQ people in China, the latest addition to the acclaimed photobook series celebrating LGBTQ communities around the world Same-sex relationships have been an accepted part of Chinese culture for centuries. It was only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, under the influence of the West, that homophobia became more prevalent; and under Mao, homosexuality was criminalized. By the turn of the last millennium, same-sex relationships were once again legal, and by 2001, homosexuality had been declassified as a mental disorder. Polling suggests that the younger generation embraces sexual diversity and LGBTQ rights. But the stigma against queer people still remains. Recent reports from China have noted government attempts to clamp down on LGBTQ media and events, and numerous citizens are still being sent by family members to conversion therapy. Photographer Sarah Mei Herman first started photographing young queer people and their personal relationships during an artist residency in Xiamen in Fujian Province on China’s southeastern coast. As she explored what drew these people together, she herself built up close friendships with her subjects and, even after her residency had ended, returned to Xiamen to photograph them, capturing the way they have changed over the course of a number of years. The sixteenth entry in The New Press’s worldwide LGBTQ photobook series, Solace is a stunning collection of full-color photos in a beautiful, affordable volume. It provides a portrait of young people navigating the ambiguities of friendship and sexuality as they enter adulthood and grapple with what it means to be queer in modern-day China. Solace was designed by Emerson, Wajdowicz Studios (EWS).

Consolation has always played an uncomfortable part in the literary history of loss. But in recent decades its affective meanings and ethical implications have been recast by narratives that appear at first sight to foil solace altogether. Illuminating this striking archive, Discrepant Solace considers writers who engage with consolation not as an aesthetic salve but as an enduring problematic, one that unravels at the centre of emotionally challenging works of late twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction and life-writing. The book understands solace as a generative yet conflicted aspect of style, where microelements of diction, rhythm, and syntax capture consolation's alternating desirability and contestation. With a wide-angle lens on the contemporary scene, David James examines writers who are rarely considered in conversation, including Sonali Deraniyagala, Colson Whitehead, Cormac McCarthy, W.G. Sebald, Doris Lessing, Joan Didion, J. M. Coetzee, Marilynne Robinson, Julian Barnes, Helen Macdonald, Ian McEwan, Colm Toibin, Kazuo Ishiguro, Denise Riley, and David Grossman. These figures overturn critical suppositions about consolation's kinship with ideological complaisance, superficial mitigation, or dubious distraction, producing unsettling perceptions of solace that shape the formal and political contours of their writing. Through intimate readings of novels and memoirs that explore seemingly indescribable experiences of grief, trauma, remorse, and dread, James demonstrates how they turn consolation into a condition of expressional possibility without ever promising us relief. He also supplies vital traction to current conversations about the stakes of thinking with contemporary writing to scrutinize affirmative structures of feeling, revealing unexpected common ground between the operations of literary consolation and the urgencies of cultural critique. Discrepant Solace makes the close reading of emotion crucial to understanding the work literature does in our precarious present.

Since World War II, Protestant sermons have been an influential tool for defining American citizenship in the wake of national crises. In the aftermath of national tragedies, Americans often turn to churches for solace. Because even secular citizens attend these services, they are also significant opportunities for the Protestant religious majority to define and redefine national identity and, in the process, to invest the nation-state with divinity. The sermons delivered in the wake of crises become integral to historical and communal memory—it matters greatly who is mourned and who is overlooked. Melissa M. Matthes conceives of these sermons as theo-political texts. In When Sorrow Comes, she explores the continuities and discontinuities they reveal in the balance of state power and divine authority following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the assassinations of JFK and MLK, the Rodney King verdict, the Oklahoma City bombing, the September 11 attacks, the Newtown shootings, and the Black Lives Matter movement. She argues that Protestant preachers use these moments to address questions about Christianity and citizenship and about the responsibilities of the Church and the State to respond to a national crisis. She also shows how post-crisis sermons have codified whiteness in ritual narratives of American history, excluding others from the collective account. These civic liturgies therefore illustrate the evolution of modern American politics and society. Despite perceptions of the decline of religious authority in the twentieth century, the pulpit retains power after national tragedies. Sermons preached in such intense times of mourning and reckoning serve as a form of civic education with consequences for how Americans understand who belongs to the nation and how to imagine its future.