Em busca da relação profícua entre Psicanálise e História, procura-se, neste artigo avaliar como Carlo Ginzburg, em sua trajetória intelectual e acadêmica, discutiu Freud e a Psicanálise à luz da Micro-História. Para tanto, a obra de Ginzburg Mitos, emblemas, sinais: morfologia e história tornou-se um manancial para esta busca. Nos capítulos Sinais: raízes de um paradigma indiciário e, principalmente, Freud, o homem dos lobos e os lobisomens, Ginzburg discute criticamente as interpretações de Freud sobre o seu caso clínico mais (...) importante, um paciente russo de nome Serguei Constantinovitch Pankejeff, conhecido como O Homem dos Lobos. Ginzburg não deixa de reconhecer a magnitude da obra de Freud, mas aponta suas limitações como não considerar suficientemente a formação cultural de seu paciente e dar um enfoque maior a individuação. Ginzburg permitiu, ainda, demonstrar em sua obra a importância da Psicanálise na elaboração do conceito fundamental à MicroHistória, o paradigma indiciário. (shrink)

In this study, we build on a recent social data scientific mapping of Danish environmentalist organizations and activists during the COVID-19 lockdown in order to sketch a distinct genre of digital social research that we dub a quali-quantitative micro-history of ideas in real-time. We define and exemplify this genre by tracing and tracking the single political idea and activist slogan of grøn genstart across Twitter and other public–political domains. Specifically, we achieve our micro-history through an iterative (...) and mutual attuning between computational and netnographic registers and techniques, in ways that contribute to the nascent field of computational anthropology. By documenting the serial ways in and different steps through which our inquiry was continually fed and enhanced by crossing over from ethnographic observation to computational exploration, and vice versa, we offer up our grøn genstart case account as exemplary of wider possibilities in this line of inquiry. In particular, we position the genre of micro-history of ideas in real-time within the increasingly wide and heterogeneous space of digital social research writ large, including its established concerns with ‘big and broad’ social data, the repurposing of computational ‘interface’ techniques for socio-cultural research, as well as diverse aspirations for deploying digital data within novel combinations of qualitative and quantitative methods. (shrink)

In workplace settings, skilled participants cooperate on the basis of shared routines in smooth and often implicit ways. Our study shows how interactional histories provide the basis for routine coordination. We draw on theater rehearsals as a perspicuous setting for tracking interactional histories. In theater rehearsals, the process of building performing routines is in focus. Our study builds on collections of consecutive performances of the same instructional task coming from a corpus of video-recordings of 30 h of theater rehearsals of (...) professional actors in German. Over time, instructions and their implementations are routinely coordinated by virtue of accumulated shared interactional experience: Instructions become shorter, the timing of responses becomes increasingly compacted and long negotiations are reduced to a two-part sequence of instruction and implementation. Overall, a routine of how to perform the scene emerges. Over interactional histories, patterns of projection of next actions emanating from instructions become reliable and can be used by respondents as sources for anticipating and performing relevant next actions. The study contributes to our understanding of how shared knowledge and routines accumulate over shared interactional experiences in publicly performed and reciprocally perceived ways and how this impinges on the efficiency of joint action. (shrink)

The article develops three complementary lines of argument. It first points to the great theoretical gap that characterizes Koselleck's work: quasi-transcendental anthropology on the one hand, and historical semantics on the other. The hybrid status of historical semantics, both macro- and micro- sociological, is also specified. Secondly, the article critiques the neo-Hobbesianism implicit in Koselleck's historical ontology. Departing from Jean Baechler's anthropology, it reformulates the conceptual framework within which the initial foundational ambition could be maintained without however renewing the (...) aporiai of the Koselleckian systematics. Finally, it asks how to connect the three M's (the meta-historical, the macro- and the micro-sociological levels). The solution focuses on the core aspects of the intermediate, macro-sociological level to make the case for a heuristic reciprocal hybridization of meta-historical anthropology, of comparative historical sociology and of the pragmatic history of historical semantics. (shrink)

Baumard proposes that life history slowing in populations over time is the principal driver of innovation rates. We show that this is only true of micro-innovation rates, which reflect cognitive and economic specialization as an adaptation to high population density, and not macro-innovation rates, which relate more to a population's level of general intelligence.

Around the turn of the century, political philosophy became one of the most lively areas of philosophical study in China. An important trend of development is represented by the shift from macro-political philosophy to micro-political philosophy. A careful analysis of this trend is the object of this paper. It shows how, in the Chinese context, micro-political philosophy, micro-history, critique of everyday life, and other theories much debated in the West, are relatively new. As such, a solid (...) foundation for micro-political philosophy must be found within the theoretical resources established in the 20th century western culture, then integrated to the Chinese context and absorbed by this latter to get inspiration. (shrink)

What exactly is a second? Why is it called a second? When was the first second used and why? In the bestselling tradition of LONGITUDE, TIME combines the best of popular science and popular history to make an informative and entertaining read.

ABSTRACTHow do micro cases lead us to surprising macro claims? Historians often say that the micro level casts light on the macro level. This metaphor of “casting light” suggests that the micro does not illuminate the macro straightforwardly; such light needs to be interpreted. In this essay, I propose and clarify six interpretive norms to guide micro‐to‐macro inferences.I focus on marginal groups and monsters. These are popular cases in social and cultural histories, and yet seem to (...) be unpromising candidates for generalization. Marginal groups are dismissed by the majority as inferior or ill‐fitting; their lives seem intelligible but negligible. Monsters, on the other hand, are somehow incomprehensible to society and treated as such. First, I show that, by looking at how a society identifies a marginal group and interacts with it, we can draw surprising inferences about that society's self‐image and situation. By making sense of a monster's life, we can draw inferences about its society's mentality and intelligibility. These will contest our conception of a macro claim. Second, I identify four risks in making such inferences — and clarify how norms of coherence, challenge, restraint, connection, provocation, and contextualization can manage those risks.My strategy is to analyze two case studies, by Richard Cobb, about a band of violent bandits and a semi‐literate provincial terrorist in revolutionary France. Published in 1972, these studies show Cobb to be an inventive and idiosyncratic historian, who created new angles for studying the micro level and complicated them with his autobiography. They illustrate how a historian's autobiographical, literary, and historiographical interests can mix into a risky, and often rewarding, style. (shrink)

Cultural historical research has deliberately challenged “historical realism,” the view that history is comprised entirely of observable actions that actually occurred, and instead has emphasized the historical significance of thoughts, emotions, and representations; it has also focused on the invisible, the momentary, and the perishable. These latter elements introduce the notion of the possible in history. This article examines the ways in which cultural history has approached the notion of the possible, as well as the methodological and (...) theoretical implications of this approach. Its chief claim is that the idea of possibility is fundamental for the concept of culture and ineliminable from its historical study.The question of possibility is present in multiple ways in the study of history; it is important to distinguish among different levels of possibility. The possible may mean, for instance, what it is possible for historians to know about the past, or the possibilities open to historical agents themselves, or, indeed, the possibilities they perceived themselves as having even if these seem impossible from the point of view of the historian. The article starts with the first aspect and moves on toward the possibilities that existed in the past world either in fact or in the minds of those in the past.The article argues that the study of past cultures always entails the mapping of past possibilities. The first strand of the essay builds on the metaphor of the black hole and intends to solve one of the central problems faced by cultural historians, namely, how to access the horizon of the people of the past, their experience of their own time, especially when the sources remain silent. The second, more speculative strand builds on the notion of plenitude and is designed to open up avenues for further discussion about the concept of culture in particular. (shrink)

This article broadens understanding of the role that East European intellectuals have played in building foundations for democratic institutions and practices over the past two decades. Drawing on Habermas’ writings on the public sphere, we use interviews conducted with founders of women’s and gender studies centers, professional women’s NGOs and Internet forums to examine the establishment of new micro-contexts for civic engagement and critical debate in Ukraine. Three main types of indigenous feminist micro-public are identified: academic, professional and (...) virtual. Through an analysis of these micro-publics as well as the works of writer Oksana Zabuzhko, we explore the articulation and legitimation of a “national feminist” standpoint that draws upon feminism to criticize populist understandings of national history and civic belonging. We contribute to studies of democratization and transition by suggesting how small groups of critical intellectuals (locally called “tusovky”) acted as microfoundations of civil society. By supporting local engagement with Western critical theory, these small groups helped to create a new infrastructure for engaging intellectuals in the pluralization and diversification of public life. (shrink)

This volume considers the confluence of world history and historical materialism, with the following guiding question in mind: given developments in the field of historical materialism concerned with the intersection of race, gender, labour, and class, why is it that within the field of World History, historical materialism has been marginalized, precisely as World History orients toward transnational socio-cultural phenomenon, micro-studies, or global histories of networks? Answering this question requires thinking, in an inter-related manner, about both (...) the development of World History as a discipline, and the place of economic determinism in historical materialism. This book takes the position that historical materialism (as applied to the field of World History) needs to be more open to the methodological diversity of the materialist tradition and to refuse narrowly deterministic frameworks that have led to marginalization of materialist cultural analysis in studies of global capitalism. At the same time, World History needs to be more self-critical of the methodological diversity it has welcomed through a largely inclusionary framework that allows the material to be considered separately from cultural, social, and intellectual dimensions of global processes. (shrink)

This article discusses the new microhistory of the 1970s and 1980s in terms of the concept of exceptional typical, and contrasts the new microhistory to old microhistory, in which the relationship between micro and macro levels of phenomena was defined by means of the concepts of exceptionality and typicality. The focus of the essay is on Carlo Ginzburg's method of clues, Walter Benjamin's idea of monads, and Michel de Certeau's concept of margins. The new microhistory is also compared with (...) methodological discussions in the social sciences. In the mid-1970s concepts like the micro-macro link or the microfoundations of macrotheory were introduced in sociology and economics. But these largely worked in terms of the concepts of typicality or exceptionality, and this has proved to be problematic. Only historians have developed concepts that escape these and the older definitions of the micro-macro relationship; indeed, the "new microhistory" can best be described in terms of the notion of "exceptional typical." The essay explores the meaning of this notion. (shrink)

The vast visual coverage of the Boxer Uprising in northern China that ended with foreigners traipsing through the Forbidden City in Beijing reflects both the richly innovative image technology at the turn of the century and the international interest in events that involved many of the world’s most powerful nations. Historians and students who seek to understand the incident through the innovative technology of today can, for the first time, access primary source images in large numbers malleably displayed in the (...) digital environment. The sheer volume of images collected in one place offers powerful new insights into a history already broadly covered in analytical texts and first-person accounts. One qualitative difference from previous histories is the emergence of subjective points of view that can be conveyed in multidimensional models that juxtapose experiential recordings of the day. Harnessing the tension of contrasting viewpoints – who knew what when – enables today’s learners to see through the lenses of past participants whose understanding was limited by location, communications and, one must remember, by not knowing the outcome. Those who were besieged in the Foreign Legations did not know if they would survive; soldiers and rebels on the road to Beijing knew only the difficulties of the march; illustrations in newspaper reports overseas were coloured by politics and both national and international rivalries. Digital visual representations have the possibility of recreating the collision of experiences that allow users to move between personal records and public reporting from the time to gain a knowledge that is unmitigated by an author’s text-based presentation and conclusions. The result is as much a revolution in perception of historical events – perception-based learning – as it is in information about these events. (shrink)

The recent wave of rebellions in the Middle East, commonly referred to as the “Arab Spring,” has stirred up a revival of scholarly interest in the phenomenon of political reform in the Arab world and Muslim-majority states in general. Speculation on the causes of revolution, the provenance and function of political authority, and the means for reshaping or refashioning the existing political or social order had a rich legacy in medieval and early modern Arabic political thought. Islamic history itself (...) provides examples of reforms and revolts that can be seen as antecedents to events associated with the Arab Spring as well as with religious conflicts in Northern Nigeria and Sudan. Thus, a study of the past can.. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to assess Arnason’s civilizational theory and methodology and their application to non-Western civilizations from a historical-comparative sociological perspective. Although civilizational analysis and historical sociology as historical-comparative orientations in sociology are closely connected, civilizational analysis concentrates particularly on the macro-history of civilizations, whereas historical-comparative sociology (particularly in its American variety) is orientated rather to a meso- and micro-analytical foundation of societal developments and therefore is more time- and context-sensitive. From such a perspective, the (...) article reconstructs, first, Arnason’s theoretical and methodological approach to civilizational analysis and discusses his contribution to the civilizational origins and dynamics of the West as a measuring rod for non-European societies. Second, it then assesses Arnason’s two major exemplary civilizational studies: the Soviet model in Russia, Eastern Europe and the non-European world as well as the Japanese civilization in the broader East Asian civilizational context. The article concludes with a critical summary of Arnason’s highly innovative approach from the vantage point of a recently developing global orientation in historical and comparative sociology. (shrink)

The article discusses in a broader historical context the well-known thesis of V. I. Lenin that capitalism was formed as a result of a change in the behavior of large merchants, who, after the state achieves political unity and forms a unified market, switch from trade to the organization of production. Researchers of the 17th century Siberia do not find historical confirmation of Lenin’s scheme, however, it is quite applicable to other countries of the early modern period and to the (...) mechanism of the early stage of the colonial expansion of European powers (I. R. Sokolovsky, 2019). At the same time, J. Diamond’ research pointed out the boundary between “normal” human behavior in the new lands and the behavior of the colonizers of the early modern period. This boundary is a rational or quasi-rational accounting of one’s actions. M. Heidegger calls this approach Gestell. Gestell considers the surrounding world as a calculated resource for self-increasing profit. Using the example of a Swiss wine merchant who died in North America in 1736, the Italian micro-historian K. Ginzburg showed how the merchants and “capitalists” actually acted and what the Gestell that determined their actions looked like in everyday life: predatory appropriation of material and labor resources is gradually getting a solid base of rational calculation. (shrink)

This thesis develops a detailed account of the emergence of for all practical purposes continuous, quasi-classical world histories from the discontinuous, stochastic micro dynamics of Minimal Bohmian Mechanics (MBM). MBM is a non-relativistic quantum theory. It results from excising the guiding equation from standard Bohmian Mechanics (BM) and reinterpreting the quantum equilibrium hypothesis as a stochastic guidance law for the random actualization of configurations of Bohmian particles. On MBM, there are no continuous trajectories linking up individual configurations. Instead, individual (...) configurations are actualized independently of each other, carving out the decoherence-induced branching structure of the universal wave function. Yet, by contrast to the Everett interpretation, branches of the universal wave function are not actualized in parallel, i.e. all at the same time. Rather, world branches, on MBM, are actualized sequentially. -/- For an introduction to MBM, the transition from BM to MBM is described, and their empirical equivalence is established. I present the conditions under which MBM can be classified as a primitive ontology (PO) theory, regarded as crucial for the acceptance of a theory as Bohmian by many proponents of BM. While rendering MBM compatible with the PO approach, it must not fall prey to the problem of communication, arising from the two-space reading of BM. -/- The issue of temporal solipsism, identified by Bell as a serious problem for his “Everett (?) theory” – the historic predecessor of MBM – is discussed. I argue that Barbour’s time capsule approach does not provide a satisfactory solution. In particular, his adopting a more than minimal psychophysical parallelism between brain processes and experience of macroscopic change is argued to be reasonable in light of our current best neuroscience, yet problematic for theories relying solely on time capsules, understood as highly structured, individual, internally static configurations. As a solution, I introduce worlds, and world histories, as key concepts in providing a link between MBM’s micro dynamics and macroscopic phenomena. Worlds, other than time capsules, are coarse-grained regions in phase- or configuration space, defined as sets of possible micro states satisfying a relation of sufficient similarity from a macroscopic perspective, with respect to a given micro state. Hence, worlds may overlap. -/- I argue that worlds thus construed are a reasonable option for replacing the disjoint macro regions of phase space, resulting from the usual way of partitioning phase space in the standard framework of Boltzmannian statistical mechanics. This move solves the issue of discontinuous change of macro variables upon the micro state crossing the boundary between different macro regions. -/- I adapt this move for MBM’s discontinuous micro dynamics in configuration space. Issues revolving around the microscopic-macroscopic distinction, particle identity, impenetrability and haecceity in light of the desideratum of particle number conservation, etc., are discussed. I provide a detailed explanation of how overlapping worlds in MBM form world histories, thereby linking up macroscopically distinct worlds. Thus, the problem of temporal solipsism is resolved in a way that is compatible with a more than minimal psychophysical parallelism. (shrink)

The following is a short introduction to this special issue, which builds on and significantly extends and updates the research published recently in the Iwanami Series on Japanese economic history. First, we offer a modern interpretation of four institutional elements that are particularly important for understanding the growth path of the Japanese economy. These are (a) ownership; (b) regulation of factor markets; (c) labor mobility and (d) the judiciary. These four elements properly clarify the incentive structure behind economic institutions. (...) We then briefly explain how the four articles in this special issue—two at the macro level providing updated estimates of long-run rates of growth in gross domestic product (GDP) and total factor productivity (TFP), and two at the micro level examining institutional changes in specific markets—build on this unified framework, and deepen our understanding of Japanese economic history. (shrink)

Idealism is philosophy on a grand scale, combining micro and macroscopic problems into systematic accounts of everything from the nature of the universe to the particulars of human feeling. In consequence, it offers perspectives on everything from the natural to the social sciences, from ecology to critical theory. Heavily criticised by the dominant philosophies of the 20th Century, Idealism is now being reconsidered as a rich and untapped resource for contemporary philosophical arguments and concepts. This volume provides a comprehensive (...) portrait of the major arguments and philosophers in the Idealist tradition. The book demonstrates how Idealist philosophy provides a fruitful way of understanding contemporary issues in metaphysics, the philosophy of science, political philosophy, scientific theory and critical social theory. (shrink)

This essay offers a preliminary account of the ways in which alterations to the landscape of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Sukhothai and Chiang Mai figured within the micro-politics of these city-states. I show how landscape alterations inspired by Lanka and mainland South Asia served the consolidation and projection of royal power within the context of local and regional competition, and how such alterations formed part of strategic royal engagement with Buddhist monastic lineages.

A long history of extractive industries and activities have shaped the societies of northern Mozambique, and the Cabo Delgado province in particular. For centuries, the growing international demand on local resources had a great impact on the northern micro-societies. The demand for cheap labour and natural resources, ranging from ivory and cotton, to timber, rubies, land, gas and more, involved thousands of local actors in its extraction, reproducing systems of local power. The persistence of poverty, inequality and conflicts, (...) as well as simmering and sometimes grand-scale violence, fits into a long-term trend of extractivism. Through a historical approach and field observations, we focus on the political economy of extracting natural resources. We point out the persisting basic patterns of extractivism that accompanied Mozambique's integration into global markets, and continued or even deepened, in the post-independence period. These activities are oriented towards foreign markets. They are instigated by foreign investment, but invariably carried out in collaboration with a chain of national gatekeepers. In a clientelist system, local elites resort to their proximity to the state to reproduce their power, often at the expense of state expropriation. Weak state institutions have the functional effect of reproducing the elites, also serving the interests of extractivist capital. It is, however, a system with many and profound contradictions, producing conflict and violence, which also recurrently put those interests at risk. (shrink)

Fundamentally, Roman economic history is the study of how and why inhabitants of the Roman world produced, distributed and exchanged goods and services. By understanding the economic actions, events, institutions and products of the Roman world, Roman economic historians come to understand better the Romans themselves: their motivations, values, relationships and identities, among other things. With such a broad remit, today's Roman economic and monetary historians not only scour traditional sources for evidence of Roman commerce, prices, labour, capital and (...) contracts, but they now deploy an ever-broadening range of methodologies, theories and approaches – some of which originate well outside the disciplines of both history and economics. Some Roman economic historians, for example, create, investigate and run simulations, using massive digital archives of data gleaned from ancient evidence. Others compare micro-nutrients in ancient wheat varieties with their modern counterparts to gain a better understanding of diet, nutrition and economic prosperity in Roman cities. Increasingly, specialists in some aspect of the Roman economy find themselves members of internationally funded interdisciplinary teams seeking to understand what Arctic ice cores or North-American tree rings say about money production in the Roman principate. Roman economic historians’ scholarly sprawl has never been more challenging to describe, but I believe it is possible to group recent developments in the field into three overlapping areas: digitisation, particularisation and consilience. (shrink)

This paper forms part of a research project investigating conceptions of the relationship between micro-level selfseeking agent behaviour and the desirability or otherwise of the resulting macro-level social outcomes in the history of economics.

Originally published in 1971, this volume examines the relationship between the history and sociology of education. History does not stand in isolation, but has much to draw from and contribute to, other disciplines. The methods and concepts of sociology, in particular, are exerting increasing influence on historical studies, especially the history of education. Since education is considered to be part of the social system, historians and sociologists have come to survey similar fields; yet each discipline appears to (...) have its own aims and methodology. (shrink)

There is a common tradition in European education going back to the Middle Ages which long played a part in providing the curriculum of schools which catered both for the wealthy and for able sons of less well-to-do families. Originally published in 1974, this volume examines the relationship between education and society in the different countries of Europe from which differences in tradition and practice emerge. The countries discussed include: France, Germany, the former Soviet Union, Poland and Sweden.

Books reviewed in this article: The History of Everyday Life. Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life Edited by Alf Lüdtke, translated by William Templer Jeux d'Échelles. La micro‐analyse àl'expérience Edited by Jacques Revel.

The negative co‐variation of life‐history traits such as fecundity and lifespan across species suggests the existence of ubiquitous trade‐offs. Mechanistically, trade‐offs result from the need to differentially allocate limited resources to traits like reproduction versus self‐maintenance, with selection favoring the evolution of optimal allocation mechanism. Here I discuss the physiological (endocrine) mechanisms that underlie optimal allocation rules and how such rules evolve. The hormone testosterone may mediate life‐history trade‐offs due to its pleiotropic actions in male vertebrates. Conservation in (...) the actions of testosterone in vertebrates has prompted the ‘evolutionary constraint hypothesis,’ which assumes that testosterone signaling mechanisms and male traits evolve as a unit. This hypothesis implies that the actions of testosterone are similar across sexes and species, and only the levels of circulating testosterone concentrations change during evolution. In contrast, the ‘evolutionary potential hypothesis’ proposes that testosterone signaling mechanisms and male traits evolve independently. In the latter scenario, the linkage between hormone and traits itself can be shaped by selection, leading to variation in trade‐off functions. I will review recent case studies supporting the evolutionary potential hypothesis and suggest micro‐evolutionary experiments to unravel the mechanistic basis of life‐history evolution. BioEssays 29: 133–144, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

In recent years there has been a revival of the debate about the relation between history and philosophy of science. This article seeks to contribute to the discussion by approaching the issue from a new angle. To rethink the relation between the two domains of study, I apply an important insight about scientific practice to the practice of integrating the history and philosophy of science: the insight that the scientific paper does not give a faithful account of the (...) actual research pursued in the laboratory or in the field. Arguably, the scholarly article about science is also not a transparent window to the activity of producing such an article. But if it is not, we need to redirect our attention. If we want to understand the nature and merits of integrating the history and philosophy of science, we need to examine both the actual activity of integrating and the scholarly paper produced by it. To consider what one can learn from such an inquiry, I reflect on my own activity of studying scientific justification through the combination of historical and philosophical analysis. Probing a concrete historical episode, micro-anatomical research on the retina in the 19th century, I pursue two related questions, the first-order question, 'What exactly is scientific justification in the given case?' and the meta-question, 'How do I go about analysing justificatory practices?' I then characterise the nature of my analysis and consider what can be learned from the study of the practice of integrating the history and philosophy of science. (shrink)

Originally published in 1972, this book is concerned with education as part of a larger social history. Chapters include: The roots of Anglican supremacy in English education The Board schools of London The use of ecclesiastical records for the history of education Topographical resources: private and secondary education from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.

The History of Everyday Life. Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life by Alf Lüdtke; William Templer Jeux D'Échelles. La Micro-Analyse à L'Expérience. by Jacques Revel.

This thesis argues for the fundamental importance of the opposition between holistic and reductionistic world-views in economics. Both reductionism and holism may nevertheless underpin laissez-faire policy prescriptions. Scrutiny of the nature of the articulation between micro and macro levels in the writings of economists suggests that invisible hand theories play a key role in reconciling reductionist policy prescriptions with a holistic world. An examination of the prisoners' dilemma in game theory and Arrow's impossibility theorem in social choice theory sets (...) the scene. The prisoners' dilemma epitomises the collective irrationality coordination problems lead to. The source of the dilemma is identified as the combination of interdependence in content and independence in form of the decision making process. Arrovian impossibility has been perceived as challenging traditional views of the relationship between micro and macro levels in economics. Conservative arguments against the possibility in principle of a social welfare function are criticised here as depending on an illicit dualism. The thesis then reviews the standpoints of Smith, Hayek and Keynes. For Smith, the social desirability of individual self-seeking activity is ensured by the 'invisible hand' of a god who has moulded us so to behave, that the quantity of happiness in the world is always maximised. Hayek seeks to re-establish the invisible hand in a secular age, replacing the agency of a deity with an evolutionary mechanism. Hayek's evolutionary theory, criticised here as being based on the exploded notion of group selection, cannot underpin the desirability of spontaneous outcomes. I conclude by arguing that Keynes shares the holistic approach of Smith and Hayek, but without their reliance on invisible hand mechanisms. If spontaneous processes cannot be relied upon to generate desirable social outcomes then we have to take responsibility for achieving this ourselves by establishing the appropriate institutional framework to eliminate macroeconomic prisoners' dilemmas. (shrink)

Part of the educational system in England has been geared towards the preparation of particular professions, while the identity and status of members of some professions have depended significantly on the general education they have received. Originally published in 1973, this volume explores the interaction between education and the professions. It also looks at the education of the main professions in sixteenth century England and at how twentieth century university teaching is a key profession for the training of new recruits (...) to other professions. (shrink)

Politics and Modernity provides a critical review of the key interface of contemporary political theory and social theory about the questions of modernity and postmodernity. Review essays offer a broad-ranging assessment of the issues at stake in current debates. Among the works reviewed are those of William Connolly, Anthony Giddens, J[um]urgen Habermas, Alasdair MacIntyre, Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor and Roy Bhaskar. As well as reviewing the contemporary literature, the contributors assess the historical roots of current problems in the works of (...) Nietzsche and Max Weber. (shrink)

The Russian philosopher and cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin has traditionally been seen as the leading figure in the group of intellectuals known as the Bakhtin Circle. The writings of other members of the Circle are considered much less important than his work, while Bakhtin's achievement has been exaggerated in proportion to the downgrading of the thinkers with whom he associated in the 1920s. This volume, which includes new translations and studies of the work of the most important members of the (...) Circle, sets out to correct the distortions in the established representations of its activity. The original contributions to literary and linguistic theory made by Valentin Voloshinov and Pavel Medvedev (but frequently credited to Bakhtin) are assessed, and the distinctiveness of their approaches is highlighted. (shrink)

The Pythagorean Life is the most extensive surviving source on Pythagoreanism, and has wider interest as an account of the religious aspirations of late antiquity. "...admirably clear translation and sensible introduction"--The Classical...

In Culture, Genre, and Literary Vocation, Michael Davitt Bell charts the important and often overlooked connection between literary culture and authors' careers. Bell's influential essays on nineteenth-century American writers—originally written for such landmark projects as The Columbia Literary History of the United States and The Cambridge History of American Literature—are gathered here with a major new essay on Richard Wright. Throughout, Bell revisits issues of genre with an eye toward the unexpected details of authors' lives, and invites us (...) to reconsider the hidden functions that terms such as "romanticism" and "realism" served for authors and their critics. Whether tracing the demands of the market or the expectations of readers, Bell examines the intimate relationship between literary production and culture; each essay closely links the milieu in which American writers worked with the trajectory of their storied careers. (shrink)

This book is an interdisciplinary research work designed to be of interest to a broad range of academics. The book examines the relationship between democracy and the (trans)formations of urban spaces in Iran. It engages with the ideas of ‘modernity’ in architecture and investigates how they might align (or not) with other forms of radical power. The topic of the work is novel and aims to examine the relationship between the affordances of public spaces, their micro-histories, and the emergence (...) of critical social events and movements. The breadth of the topic demanded engagement with a rich body of architectural theory and history and relevant texts in urban sociology, colonial and postcolonial studies, political geography, and cultural studies, a challenge to which the book has responded outstandingly. -/- This book offers an understanding of the public spaces through political change, power struggle, and autocratic modernity manifested. It addresses the subject of politics in architecture and built environment by examining the various academic literature in urban studies, architectural history, urban anthropology, urban sociology, cultural geographies, planning history, philosophy, and the broader social and political sciences. Followingly, it will be focused on the less well-known traditions of architecture and democratic values drawing upon western and (non)western perspectives to decolonize the notion of public space in the global south. In better words, the book investigates the mechanisms of power struggles and the transformative dynamism of totalization and state-led modernization, which motivates or shapes a creative tension in the form of the city. The issue is urgent for policymakers and architects, urban designers, political and cultural geographers, and other practitioners working on the built environment to create more democratic public spaces in the global south. (shrink)

Summary During his prolific career, the German Jewish scientist Franz Boas (Minden, 1858 - New York, 1942) recognized as the founding father of American Cultural Anthropology – maintained assiduous contacts with the European scientific community, in a privileged way with that of the German area. The contribution addresses the Boasian correspondence with the two directors of the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv, the philosopher and psychologist Carl Stumpf, and the ethnomusicolo-gist Erich Moritz von Hornbostel. All three were united by a common scientific experimental (...) training and a solid musical education, typical of their Bildungsbu ü rgertum. With them, Boas consistently shared his fieldwork findings regarding music, sound, and language among the Indians of British Columbia: indeed, their epistolary exchanges intertwine epistemological reflections centered on the study of «exotische Musik» in context with technical problems, derived from the use of phonographic recordings and the relative shipments of wax cylinders by Boas to the Phonographic Archive. So far, the critical literature has not paid particular attention to their correspondence, that offer instead a privileged look in observing the birth of Ethnomusicology, at the time still defined as comparative Musicology (vergleichende Musikwissenschaft). Starting from a biographical contextualization and following the micro-history of the scientific and personal relationship of these scientists, the contribution aims to explore the hypothesis that the emerging Ethnomusicology significantly contributed to the definition of Cultural Anthropology as a discipline. In his painstaking research devoted to the Native Indian sounds and languages, Boas observed indeed what happens if a mind is exposed to a new sound, musical or linguistic context; he had therefore to rigorously deal with the phenomena of mishearing, sound-blindness and biasing filter related to the perception of «new sounds». Thanks to his fieldwork, Boas would endorse a relativistic and “in context” approach to perception and mental representations of sounds, fostering his eventual lifelong, hectic concern about a broaden antiracist theory of human mental functions. (shrink)

Introduction Talking about civilization is like talking about God. While the aim is to gain knowledge, often the result is only greater obscurity. What is at issue may not be really a concept, but nothing at all. Yet, concepts have their own history, and the UN's inauguration of 2001 as the year of the “dialogue of civilizations,” not to mention recent ethno-religious conflicts, has generated new interest in “civilizational” questions—despite the fact that this runs counter to the postmodern aversion (...) to traditional historiography, in favor of “micro-histories,”1 and objections to the term “civilization” on the ground that it cannot be defined…. (shrink)