Jerry Z. Muller's Books

The Tyranny of Metrics

By: Jerry Z. Muller

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How the obsession with quantifying human performance threatens business, medicine, education, government—and the quality of our lives Today, organizations of all kinds are ruled by the belief that the path to success is quantifying human performance, publicizing the results, and dividing up the rewards based on the numbers. But in our zeal to instill the evaluation process with scientific rigor, we've gone from measuring performance to fixating on measuring itself—and this tyranny of metrics now threatens the quality of our organizations and lives. In this brief, accessible, and powerful book, Jerry Muller uncovers the damage metrics are causing and shows how we can begin to fix the problem. Filled with examples from business, medicine, education, government, and other fields, the book explains why paying for measured performance doesn't work, why surgical scorecards may increase deaths, and much more. But Muller also shows that, when used as a complement to judgment based on personal experience, metrics can be beneficial, and he includes an invaluable checklist of when and how to use them. The result is an essential corrective to a harmful trend that increasingly affects us all.

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245

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Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0691191263

ISBN 13

9780691191263

Professor of Apocalypse

The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes

By: Jerry Z. Muller

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Professor of Apocalypse

The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes

By: Jerry Z. Muller

The controversial Jewish thinker whose tortured path led him into the heart of twentieth-century intellectual life Scion of a distinguished line of Talmudic scholars, Jacob Taubes (1923–1987) was an intellectual impresario whose inner restlessness led him from prewar Vienna to Zurich, Israel, and Cold War Berlin. Regarded by some as a genius, by others as a charlatan, Taubes moved among yeshivas, monasteries, and leading academic institutions on three continents. He wandered between Judaism and Christianity, left and right, piety and transgression. Along the way, he interacted with many of the leading minds of the age, from Leo Strauss and Gershom Scholem to Herbert Marcuse, Susan Sontag, and Carl Schmitt. Professor of Apocalypse is the definitive biography of this enigmatic figure and a vibrant mosaic of twentieth-century intellectual life. Jerry Muller shows how Taubes’s personal tensions mirrored broader conflicts between religious belief and scholarship, allegiance to Jewish origins and the urge to escape them, tradition and radicalism, and religion and politics. He traces Taubes’s emergence as a prominent interpreter of the Apostle Paul, influencing generations of scholars, and how his journey led him from crisis theology to the Frankfurt School, and from a radical Hasidic sect in Jerusalem to the center of academic debates over Gnosticism, secularization, and the revolutionary potential of apocalypticism. Professor of Apocalypse offers an unforgettable account of an electrifying world of ideas, focused on a charismatic personality who thrived on controversy and conflict.

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656

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Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0691259305

ISBN 13

9780691259307

The Mind and the Market

Capitalism in Western Thought

By: Jerry Z. Muller

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The Mind and the Market

Capitalism in Western Thought

By: Jerry Z. Muller

Capitalism has never been a subject for economists alone. Philosophers, politicians, poets and social scientists have debated the cultural, moral, and political effects of capitalism for centuries, and their claims have been many and diverse. The Mind and the Market is a remarkable history of how the idea of capitalism has developed in Western thought. Ranging across an ideological spectrum that includes Hobbes, Voltaire, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Hegel, Marx, and Matthew Arnold, as well as twentieth-century communist, fascist, and neoliberal intellectuals, historian Jerry Muller examines a fascinating thread of ideas about the ramifications of capitalism and its future implications. This is an engaging and accessible history of ideas that reverberate throughout everyday life.

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511

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Anchor

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ISBN 10

0385721668

ISBN 13

9780385721660

The Tyranny of Metrics

By: Jerry Z. Muller

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The Tyranny of Metrics

By: Jerry Z. Muller

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Princeton University Press

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0691191263

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9780691191263

Conservatism

An Anthology of Social and Political Thought from David Hume to the Present

By: Jerry Z. Muller

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Conservatism

An Anthology of Social and Political Thought from David Hume to the Present

By: Jerry Z. Muller

At a time when the label "conservative" is indiscriminately applied to fundamentalists, populists, libertarians, fascists, and the advocates of one or another orthodoxy, this volume offers a nuanced and historically informed presentation of what is distinctive about conservative social and political thought. It is an anthology with an argument, locating the origins of modern conservatism within the Enlightenment and distinguishing between conservatism and orthodoxy. Bringing together important specimens of European and American conservative social and political analysis from the mid-eighteenth century through our own day, Conservatism demonstrates that while the particular institutions that conservatives have sought to conserve have varied, there are characteristic features of conservative argument that recur over time and across national borders. The book proceeds chronologically through the following sections: Enlightenment Conservatism (David Hume, Edmund Burke, and Justus Möser), The Critique of Revolution (Burke, Louis de Bonald, Joseph de Maistre, James Madison, and Rufus Choate), Authority (Matthew Arnold, James Fitzjames Stephen), Inequality (W. H. Mallock, Joseph A. Schumpeter), The Critique of Good Intentions (William Graham Sumner), War (T. E. Hulme), Democracy (Carl Schmitt, Schumpeter), The Limits of Rationalism (Winston Churchill, Michael Oakeshott, Friedrich Hayek, Edward Banfield), The Critique of Social and Cultural Emancipation (Irving Kristol, Peter Berger and Richard John Neuhaus, Hermann Lübbe), and Between Social Science and Cultural Criticism (Arnold Gehlen, Philip Rieff). The book contains an afterword on recurrent tensions and dilemmas of conservative thought.

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471

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Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0691213119

ISBN 13

9780691213118

The Other God that Failed

Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism

By: Jerry Z. Muller

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The Other God that Failed

Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism

By: Jerry Z. Muller

Why did some of the "best and brightest" of Weimar intellectuals advocate totalitarian solutions to the problems of liberal democratic, capitalist society? How did their "radical conservatism" contribute to the rise of National Socialism? What roles did they play in the Third Reich? How did their experience of totalitarianism lead them to recast their social and political thought? This biography of Hans Freyer, a prominent German sociologist and political ideologist, is a case study of intellectuals and a "god that failed"--not on the political left, but on the right, where its significance has been overlooked. The author explores the interaction of political ideology and academic social science in democratic and totalitarian regimes, the transformation of German conservatism by the experience of National Socialism, and the ways in which tension between former collaborators and former opponents of National Socialism continued to mold West German intellectual life in the postwar decades.

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467

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Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0691228256

ISBN 13

9780691228259

Adam Smith in His Time and Ours

Designing the Decent Society

By: Jerry Z. Muller

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Adam Smith in His Time and Ours

Designing the Decent Society

By: Jerry Z. Muller

Counter to the popular impression that Adam Smith was a champion of selfishness and greed, Jerry Muller shows that the Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations maintained that markets served to promote the well-being of the populace and that government must intervene to counteract the negative effects of the pursuit of self-interest. Smith's analysis went beyond economics to embrace a larger "civilizing project" designed to create a more decent society.

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292

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Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0691001618

ISBN 13

9780691001616

The Mind and the Market

Capitalism in Western Thought

By: Jerry Z. Muller

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The Mind and the Market

Capitalism in Western Thought

By: Jerry Z. Muller

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511

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ISBN 10

0307428990

ISBN 13

9780307428998

Capitalism and the Jews

By: Jerry Z. Muller

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Capitalism and the Jews

By: Jerry Z. Muller

How the fate of the Jews has been shaped by the development of capitalism The unique historical relationship between capitalism and the Jews is crucial to understanding modern European and Jewish history. But the subject has been addressed less often by mainstream historians than by anti-Semites or apologists. In this book Jerry Muller, a leading historian of capitalism, separates myth from reality to explain why the Jewish experience with capitalism has been so important and complex—and so ambivalent. Drawing on economic, social, political, and intellectual history from medieval Europe through contemporary America and Israel, Capitalism and the Jews examines the ways in which thinking about capitalism and thinking about the Jews have gone hand in hand in European thought, and why anticapitalism and anti-Semitism have frequently been linked. The book explains why Jews have tended to be disproportionately successful in capitalist societies, but also why Jews have numbered among the fiercest anticapitalists and Communists. The book shows how the ancient idea that money was unproductive led from the stigmatization of usury and the Jews to the stigmatization of finance and, ultimately, in Marxism, the stigmatization of capitalism itself. Finally, the book traces how the traditional status of the Jews as a diasporic merchant minority both encouraged their economic success and made them particularly vulnerable to the ethnic nationalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Providing a fresh look at an important but frequently misunderstood subject, Capitalism and the Jews will interest anyone who wants to understand the Jewish role in the development of capitalism, the role of capitalism in the modern fate of the Jews, or the ways in which the story of capitalism and the Jews has affected the history of Europe and beyond, from the medieval period to our own.

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279

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Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1400834368

ISBN 13

9781400834365

Professor of Apocalypse

The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes

By: Jerry Z. Muller

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Professor of Apocalypse

The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes

By: Jerry Z. Muller

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656

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0691259305

ISBN 13

9780691259307

Conservatism

An Anthology of Social and Political Thought from David Hume to the Present

By: Jerry Z. Muller

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Conservatism

An Anthology of Social and Political Thought from David Hume to the Present

By: Jerry Z. Muller

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471

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0691213119

ISBN 13

9780691213118

Adam Smith in His Time and Ours

Designing the Decent Society

By: Jerry Z. Muller

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Adam Smith in His Time and Ours

Designing the Decent Society

By: Jerry Z. Muller

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Page Count

288

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0691001618

ISBN 13

9780691001616

Book's by Jerry Z. Muller

The Tyranny of Metrics

The Tyranny of Metrics

Professor of Apocalypse

Professor of Apocalypse

The Mind and the Market

The Mind and the Market

The Tyranny of Metrics

The Tyranny of Metrics

Conservatism

Conservatism

The Other God that Failed

The Other God that Failed

Adam Smith in His Time and Ours

Adam Smith in His Time and Ours

The Mind and the Market

The Mind and the Market

Capitalism and the Jews

Capitalism and the Jews

Professor of Apocalypse

Professor of Apocalypse

Conservatism

Conservatism

Adam Smith in His Time and Ours

Adam Smith in His Time and Ours

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