60x90/16, hard cover, 512 pp., 2008-04-21
ISBN 978-5-86793- 567-2

The book of Marina Mogilner “Homo imperii: the history of physical anthropology in Russia” contemplates on unique material of development of the “non-classic” science on man (his types, races, body structure and collective distinctions) in the second half of the 19th and the first third of the 20th centuries. The author analyzes the activity of the Russian anthropology society, the history of founding the corresponding departments in universities, adoption of ideas from the “colonial” anthropology and geography, heated discussions of ethnicity and the “Russian” nature of Pushkin, and so on. The analysis is performed amid the arguments on the ethnographical diversity and integrity of the empire, as well as in the process of adapting the anthropology to the Soviet conditions.

The Decline of the German Mandarins by American historian Fritz Ringer (1934 – 2006) was widely acclaimed as soon as it appeared in 1969. In spite, or perhaps because of the heated debate it provoked, it quickly became known as a classic, and was translated in many countries from Portugal to Japan. Today, its importance has not diminished. It is at once a meticulous, uncompromisingly complex social history of the academic community, an institutional history of science, a study of the evolution of teaching practices and an examination of their end product – late 19th and early 20th century German philosophy and spiritual thought. Ringer showed the historically determined, ever evolving connections between these areas with such convincing clarity, that nowadays research in this field would seem impossible without his ideas. The study of the ‘mandarins’ ideology played an important role in the development of the well-known sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s research into the field of science, and into Heidegger. Bourdieu and Ringer worked together for many years. The vital role of this book in shaping the nature and style of modern research in the history of science, intellectual history, the sociology of knowledge, and Germanics, is hard to overestimate.