"Duck and cover" are unforgettable words for a generation of Americans, who listened throughout the Cold War to the unescapable propaganda of civil defense. Yet it would have been impossible to protect Americans from a real nuclear attack, and, as Guy Oakes shows in The Imaginary War, national security officials knew it. The real purpose of 1950's civil defense programs, Oakes contends, was not to protect Americans from the bomb, but to ingrain in them the moral resolve needed to face the hazards of the Cold War. Uncovering the links between national security, civil defense, and civic ethics, Oakes reveals three sides to the civil defense program: a system of emotional management designed to control fear; the fictional construction of a manageable world of nuclear attack; and the production of a Cold War ethic rooted in the mythology of the home, the ultimate sanctuary of American values. This fascinating analysis of the culture of civil defense and the official mythmaking of the Cold War will be essential reading for all those interested in American history, politics, and culture.

The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American Cold War Culture

History

Oakes, Guy

Americas

Oxford University Press

The British economist Arthur Cecil Pigou (1877-59) reconceptualized economics as a theory of economic welfare and a logic of policy analysis. Misconceptions of his work abound. This book, an essay in demystification and the first reading of the entire Pigouvian oeuvre, stresses his pragmatic and historicist premises.

Arthur Cecil Pigou (Great Thinkers in Economics)

Aslanbeigui, Nahid

Science & Math

PALGRAVE~MACMILLAN

Collaboration, Reputation, and Ethics in American Academic Life: HANS H. GERTH AND C. WRIGHT MILLS

The meteoric rise of the sociologist C. Wright Mills from a brash and ambitious graduate student to a leading figure in the American intellectual establishment was launched by his collaboration with Hans Gerth on two seminal works on Max Weber. The story of their thirteen-year partnership reveals a relationship of Shakespearean complexity in which respect, trust, generosity, and perhaps even love did not exclude envy, resentment, deceit, and betrayal. Gerth, a German emigre, was several years Mills' senior and his mentor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. What began as a graduate student editing and polishing a professor's rough translations evolved into a publishing partnership pairing Gerth's scholarly expertise with Mills' savvy and skill at organizing and negotiating. Their publication of "From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology in 1946" marked a sea-change in American sociology by making key Weberian texts available to social scientists working in the English language. Their second project, "Character and Social Structure", demonstrated how Weber's theories could be put into practice. In the course of exploring the history of the Gerth-Mills association, Guy Oakes and Arthur J. Vidich consider themes central to questions of academic ethics, including how the distribution of knowledge and power in collaboration shapes the social production of authorship, academic reputation, and intellectual authority; how the dynamics of collaboration play into the competition over credit for scientific and scholarly work; and how concealment, secrecy, and deception contribute to the building of academic reputation. Thus, the historic partnership of Gerth and Mills serves as a point of departure for a sustained discussion of essential issues in the ethics and politics of academic life.

Collaboration, Reputation, and Ethics in American Academic Life: Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills

Politics & Social Sciences

Vidich, Arthur J.

Social Sciences

University of Illinois Press

The meteoric rise of the sociologist C. Wright Mills from a brash and ambitious graduate student to a leading figure in the American intellectual establishment was launched by his collaboration with Hans Gerth on two seminal works on Max Weber. The story of their thirteen-year partnership reveals a relationship of Shakespearean complexity in which respect, trust, generosity, and perhaps even love did not exclude envy, resentment, deceit, and betrayal. Gerth, a German emigre, was several years Mills' senior and his mentor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. What began as a graduate student editing and polishing a professor's rough translations evolved into a publishing partnership pairing Gerth's scholarly expertise with Mills' savvy and skill at organizing and negotiating.Their publication of "From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology" in 1946 marked a sea change in American sociology by making key Weberian texts available to social scientists working in the English language. Their second project, "Character and Social Structure", demonstrated how Weber's theories could be put into practice.In the course of exploring the history of the Gerth-Mills association, Guy Oakes and Arthur J. Vidich consider themes central to questions of academic ethics, including how the distribution of knowledge and power in collaboration shapes the social production of authorship, academic reputation, and intellectual authority; how the dynamics of collaboration play into the competition over credit for scientific and scholarly work; and how concealment, secrecy, and deception contribute to the building of academic reputation. Thus, the historic partnership of Gerth and Mills serves as a point of departure for a sustained discussion of essential issues in the ethics and politics of academic life.

Max Weber's formulation of basic methodological issues has long attracted the attention of philosophers and social scientists. Both will welcome this highly original analysis, which focuses on the troublesome problem of the objectivity of social science the principal concern of Weber's methodological writing. Guy Oakes traces the vital connection of Weber's work to that of philosopher Heinrich Rickert. He lucidly reconstructs Rickert's notoriously difficult concepts in order to isolate the important, and until now poorly understood roots of problems in Weber's own work."Weber and Rickert "adds a new dimension to the understanding of Max Weber by illuminating his relationship to the Southwest German school of neoKantianism and to Rickert. It also introduces Rickert's philosophy, which is currently enjoying renewed interest in Europe, to English speaking readers.The book offers a remarkably accessible exposition of Rickert's theory of values. Oakes breaks through Rickert's high level of abstraction by imaginatively drawing on Kierkegaard's concrete moral tale "Diary of a Seducer "to provide a clear understanding of the way in which Rickert failed to solve the problem of the objectivity of values. His critique of Rickert challenges the methodological basis of Weber's solution to the problem of objectivity, elevating the discussion surrounding Weber's methodology to a new level and opening the way for provocative discourse.Guy Oakes has translated works by Max Weber, Georg Simmel, and Heinrich Rickert, as well as Carl Schmitt's "Political Romanticism. "He teaches social philosophy at Monmouth College and sociology at the New School for Social Research. "Weber and Rickert: Concept Formationin the Cultural Sciences" is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.

Weber and Rickert: Concept Formation in the Cultural Sciences (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought)

Philosophy

Mit Pr

Philosophers and social scientists will welcome this highly original discussion of Max Weber's analysis of the objectivity of social science. Guy Oakes traces the vital connection between Weber's methodology and the work of philosopher Heinrich Rickert, reconstructing Rickert's notoriously difficult concepts in order to isolate the important, and until now poorly understood, roots of problems in Weber's own work.

Weber and Rickert: Concept Formation in the Social Sciences (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought)

MIT Press]

The Soul of the Salesman: The Moral Ethos of Personal Sales

This study develops a sociological perspective on the logic of personal sales and its moral ethos by examining the training of agents in the life insurance industry. Viewed more broadly, it evaluates the meaning and consequences of certain features of the commercialization of American life. Beyond the American scene, the larger interest of this study lies in the same direction—in the question of the consequences that can be expected from the penetration of modern culture as a whole and the domination of all spheres of contemporary life by the conceptual apparatus and the logic of sales.

Business & Money

Management & Leadership

Prometheus+books

The Provocative Joan Robinson: The Making of a Cambridge Economist (Science and Cultural Theory)

One of the most original and prolific economists of the twentieth century, Joan Robinson (1903–83) is widely regarded as the most important woman in the history of economic thought. Robinson studied economics at Cambridge University, where she made a career that lasted some fifty years. She was an unlikely candidate for success at Cambridge. A young woman in 1930 in a university dominated by men, she succeeded despite not having a remarkable academic record, a college fellowship, significant publications, or a powerful patron. In The Provocative Joan Robinson, Nahid Aslanbeigui and Guy Oakes trace the strategies and tactics Robinson used to create her professional identity as a Cambridge economist in the 1930s, examining how she recruited mentors and advocates, carefully defined her objectives, and deftly pursued and exploited opportunities.Aslanbeigui and Oakes demonstrate that Robinson’s professional identity was thoroughly embedded in a local scientific culture in which the Cambridge economists A. C. Pigou, John Maynard Keynes, Dennis Robertson, Piero Sraffa, Richard Kahn (Robinson’s closest friend on the Cambridge faculty), and her husband Austin Robinson were important figures. Although the economists Joan Robinson most admired—Pigou, Keynes, and their mentor Alfred Marshall—had discovered ideas of singular greatness, she was convinced that each had failed to grasp the essential theoretical significance of his own work. She made it her mission to recast their work both to illuminate their major contributions and to redefine a Cambridge tradition of economic thought. Based on the extensive correspondence of Robinson and her colleagues, The Provocative Joan Robinson is the story of a remarkable woman, the intellectual and social world of a legendary group of economists, and the interplay between ideas, ambitions, and disciplinary communities.

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Duke University Press Books

The Soul of the Salesman

This study develops a sociological perspective on the logic of personal sales and its moral ethos by examining the training of agents in the life insurance industry. Viewed more broadly, it evaluates the meaning and consequences of certain features of the commercialization of American life. Beyond the American scene, the larger interest of this study lies in the same direction—in the question of the consequences that can be expected from the penetration of modern culture as a whole and the domination of all spheres of contemporary life by the conceptual apparatus and the logic of sales.

Humanity Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Oakes, Guy. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Oakes, Guy

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Oakes, Guy. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American Cold War Culture

Arthur Cecil Pigou (Great Thinkers in Economics)

Collaboration, Reputation, and Ethics in American Academic Life: Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills

Collaboration, Reputation, and Ethics in American Academic Life: HANS H. GERTH AND C. WRIGHT MILLS

Weber and Rickert: Concept Formation in the Cultural Sciences (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought)

Weber and Rickert: Concept Formation in the Social Sciences (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought)

The Soul of the Salesman: The Moral Ethos of Personal Sales

The Soul of the Salesman: The Moral Ethos of Personal Sales

The Provocative Joan Robinson: The Making of a Cambridge Economist (Science and Cultural Theory)

The Soul of the Salesman