In anthropology as much as in popular imagination, kings are figures of fascination and intrigue, heroes or tyrants in ways presidents and prime ministers can never be. This collection of essays by two of the world?s most distinguished anthropologists?David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins?explores what kingship actually is, historically and anthropologically. As they show, kings are symbols for more than just sovereignty: indeed, the study of kingship offers a unique window into fundamental dilemmas concerning the very nature of power, meaning, and the human condition. Reflecting on issues such as temporality, alterity, piracy, and utopia?not to mention the divine, the strange, the numinous, and the bestial?Graeber and Sahlins explore the role of kings as they have existed around the world, from the BaKongo to the Aztec to the Shilluk and beyond. Richly delivered with the wit and sharp analysis characteristic of Graeber and Sahlins, this book opens up new avenues for the anthropological study of this fascinating and ubiquitous political figure.

A moving meditation on recent geopolitical crises, viewed through the lens of ancient and modern tragedy "Spare, elegant and poignant. . . . If there is a single contemporary book that should be pressed into the hands of those who decide issues of war and peace, this is it."--John Gray, New Statesman "It is tragic that Robert D. Kaplan's luminous The Tragic Mind is so urgently needed."--George F. Will Some books emerge from a lifetime of hard-won knowledge. Robert D. Kaplan has learned, from a career spent reporting on wars, revolutions, and international politics in Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia, that the essence of geopolitics is tragedy. In The Tragic Mind , he employs the works of ancient Greek dramatists, Shakespeare, German philosophers, and the modern classics to explore the central subjects of international politics: order, disorder, rebellion, ambition, loyalty to family and state, violence, and the mistakes of power. The great dilemmas of international politics, he argues, are not posed by good versus evil--a clear and easy choice--but by contests of good versus good, where the choices are often searing, incompatible, and fraught with consequences. A deeply learned and deeply felt meditation on the importance of lived experience in conducting international relations, this is a book for everyone who wants a profound understanding of the tragic politics of our time.

This book was first published in 1980. Walter Ullmann made substantial contributions to many areas of medieval studies, and to those of papal history and cannon law particularly, which have been distinguished by quality and quantity alike. The bibliography of his published work included in this volume contains almost four hundred items. No less influential for generations of students have been his teaching and lecturing, especially at Leeds and from 1949 to 1978 at Cambridge. In Authority and Power friends and former pupils combined to mark his retirement from the Cambridge Chair of Medieval History, with each contributor writing on or near the subject originally studied under Professor Ullmann's supervision. The essays serve both to acknowledge a sense of shared indebtedness to Professor Ullmann and to indicate new approaches and developments, as they were at the time, in legal-historical scholarship. --