Publishing with Library of Social Science
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Library of Social Science publishes significant research by some of the most accomplished and prominent scholars in the world. Recent authors include (see our Essays/Papers website as well as our Review Essay website):
• Geoffrey Cocks
• Kelly Denton-Borhaug
• George Dunn
• Liah Greenfeld
• Roger Griffin
• Gerald V. O'Brien
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• Murray Schwartz
• Ivan Strenski
• Mikkel Thorup
• Michael Vlahos
• David Weddle |
Summaries of several of our most popular papers appear below. Please read these—then click through to read the paper, as well as the issue of the LSS Newsletter issue in which the paper was promoted.
Library of Social Science provides a space of freedom, allowing scholars to present new insights and develop new theories. Dr. Alexander Chirila writes about Library of Social Science’s mission:
| “Not only must we produce knowledge using the tools of our disciplines — anthropology, sociology, psychology — we must be able to communicate this knowledge to those who stand to benefit from it. The Library of Social Science is positioned at the vanguard of this fusion between content and medium. What was once radical can now be considered; what was silent can now be heard.” |
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We are highly selective in what we publish. Papers and essays appear on our Essays/Papers website and are promoted through the LSS Newsletter, which reaches a world-wide audience of over 55,000 educators, professionals, students and publishing executives.
Along with publishing and promoting an author's paper, we publicize his or her upcoming presentations, provide links to videos, and promote and sell a book title with each paper we publish.
| For examples of papers that we’ve recently published, please see the websites for
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Steven Gardiner commented on his recent contribution: “My article had a bigger impact than anything I’ve ever published in an academic journal. It was quoted and re-quoted dozens of times.” |
| Papers Recently Published by Library of Social Science |
Gullace draws our attention to the significance of a recruitment campaign that called on women to motivate “slackers” and un-enlisted men by giving them a white feather, a symbol of cowardice and civic disloyalty taken from a “popular imperial adventure” written by A. E. W. Mason in 1902. Men given the white feather were publically shamed and humiliated, their courage and manhood called into question. What better incentive to join the war effort and atone for their cowardice by undergoing a collective maturation rite on the battlefield?
Sexuality and sacrifice were thus joined by a brand of patriotism where “something as private as female sexuality took on a military significance at the expense of all those unenlisted men who appeared reluctant to defend its sanctity.” Gullace goes on to write that in “the suggestion that both women and war demanded the same qualities out of a man, female sexuality became central to the contemporary understanding of the forging of martial identity.” Gullace cites an impressive body of examples and demonstrates a thorough knowledge of a form of moral and psychological manipulation that saw the state assume “the guise of a woman for the purpose of recruiting.” |
Bryson writes that “communities are formed…and communal identities are reinforced through sacrificial violence and the violence (often war) that follows…the pattern of violence, rather than being quelled by sacrifice, actually emerges from the sacrificial pattern.” The dismemberment of a physical body in sacrifice serves to unite a communal body in ways that an external threat may fail to do. It is through the sacrifice of the self that a greater Self may emerge, a pattern that Bryson finds recurrent in the Old Testament.
Bryson goes on to say that the “body is perhaps our most basic metaphor: our experience of the world is as a body, and our sense of unity, arising from a fragmentation by which it is ever threatened with re-engulfment, is a body’s sense.” This concept is a familiar one in the West, an organic metaphor that can be traced through Plato, Aristotle, Hegel and Hobbes. Bryson suggests that by anthropomorphizing the Communal Body, we devalue the individual and imply that some members of that body may be sacrificed for the good of the whole. This pattern of thinking, evident in the Bible and earliest conceptions of centralized authority, has influenced and informed our willingness to sacrifice, dismember, and mutilate one body (or many) for the sake of the collective Body. |
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Although each war has its own history, wars are built on similar ideological mappings. The series of events that compose a war appear to be highly elusive; but the core ideological models that structures war tend to be stable. Both sides present their violent practices as well-considered, unavoidable, and necessary. The construction of the Enemy is accompanied by the construction of the Self as antagonistic to the Enemy's identity. Ironically, the identity of the Enemy as a constitutive outside is indispensable to the construction of the identity of the Self, as the evilness of the Enemy is a necessary condition for the articulation of the goodness of the Self. |
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The 20th century’s wars—from 1914-1951, and their aftermath—killed perhaps 150 million individual human beings. We casually ascribe this calamity to madness, evil, or the inevitable efficiencies of an industrial economy. Yet I argue that this killing was embedded in the desire of peoples to fulfill—through war—the vision that drove them. This was the paradoxical, unconfessed vision of Modernity—which replaced universal institutions of collective identity (for centuries vested in social order and Church) with a dynamic new alternative |
O’Brien identifies several antagonistic metaphors employed to describe immigrants to the United States at the turn of the 20th Century. He begins with the organism metaphor, writing that “Infection and disease-related metaphors were very much in keeping with the thinking of immigration restrictionists, and provided a rhetorically picturesque means of sharing these fears publically.” Incoming immigrants were seen as polluting, impure, infectious and indigestible to the national body. They gathered in insular communities within cities, apparently refusing to be assimilated or incorporated, bringing with them alien ideologies and practices that posed a threat to the health and identity of the collective.
O’Brien moves on to the flood metaphor, equally popular as a rhetorical device, and the invading army metaphor. He cites several direct sources that compared the numbers of immigrants to the number of American troops deployed during the Great War, or insisted that these “groups of undesirable foreigners were bent on engaging in, even without their knowledge, a bloodless takeover of the nation.” O’Brien concludes by pointing out the recurrence of these metaphors throughout history, used against a variety of target groups. |
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