Challenges the assumption of the rationality of foreign policy makers in international relations, showing how leaders systematically vary in the rationality of their thinking.

Scholars and citizens tend to assume that rationality guides the decision-making of our leaders. Brian C. Rathbun suggests, however, that if we understand rationality to be a cognitive style premised on a commitment to objectivity and active deliberation, rational leaders are in fact the exception not the norm. Using a unique combination of methods including laboratory bargaining experiments, archival-based case studies, quantitative textual analysis and high-level interviews, Rathbun questions some of the basic assumptions about rationality and leadership, with profound implications for the field of international relations. Case studies of Bismarck and Richelieu show that the rationality of realists makes them rare. An examination of Churchill and Reagan, romantics in international politics who sought to overcome obstacles in their path through force of will and personal agency, show what less rationality looks like in foreign policy making.

An original work on the important idea of reason of state and British and imperial history and constitutional theory.

Develops a theory of the modern state based on trust, drawing on Law, History and Social Science.

Examines the emergence of Brazilian psychiatry during a period of national regeneration, demonstrating how sociopolitical negotiations can shape psychiatric professionalization

"Ethics boards have become obligatory passage points in today's medical science, and we forget how novel they really are. The use of humans in experiments is an age-old practice that records show goes back to at least the third century BC and, since the early modern period, as a practice it has become increasingly popular. Yet, in most countries around the world, hardly any formal checks and balances existed to govern the communal oversight of experiments involving human subjects until at least the 1960s. Ethics by Committee traces the rise of ethics boards for human experimentation in the second half of the twentieth century. Using the Netherlands as a case-study, Noortje Jacobs shows how the authority of physicians to make decisions about clinical research gave way in most developed nations to formal mechanisms of communal decision-making that served to regiment the behavior of individual researchers. This historically unprecedented change in scientific governance came out of a growing international wariness of medical research in the decades after World War II. Research ethics committees were originally intended not only to make human experimentation more ethical but also to raise its epistemic quality. By examining complex negotiations over the appropriate governance of human subjects research, Ethics by Committee advances our understanding not only of the history of research ethics and the randomized controlled trial but also, more broadly, of how liberal democracies in the late twentieth century have sought to resolve public concerns over charged issues in medicine and science"--