Several friends kindly offered detailed comments on this book, so sincere thanks go to Frank Trentmann, Siniša Malešević, Peter Bang, Geoff Crawford, Francesco Duina, Ralph Schroeder, Chuck Lindholm, and Lilli Riga. A different sort of debt—and a huge one—is owed to the Nordea Foundation: the peaceful and beautiful housing it provided during a sabbatical year made it possible to write this book. An early version of chapter 5 appeared in the Journal of Classical Sociology (2011); some parts of chapter 8 first saw the light of day as “A View of Death: On Communism, Ancient and Modern,” in Theory and Society 27(4) (1998), and are used here with kind permission from Springer Science and Business Media. Princeton University Press has been superb, and I thank Cathy Slovensky and Peter Dougherty, the most brilliant of copyeditors and publishers, respectively. I have been wholly dependent on the excellent research assistance of Kalyani Thurairajah.