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Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Interdisciplinary studies > Cultural studies > History of ideas, intellectual history
This work on microeconomics offers interpretations of both its strengths and its weaknesses. It shows how the general equilibrium ideas of Walras and Marshall were gradually transformed after 1930 into formalized accounts of imaginary economies where trading never occurs.
This book examines how China has been portrayed in European and North American social and political thought. Such a question immediately evokes the spectre of orientalism and subsequent chapters explore whether the identification of an orientalist project invalidates the knowledge claims of European and North American social and political thought as it evolved from the 18th to the 20th century.
Confronting the issue of the unacceptable as a social category, this collection of international essays provides distinctive perspectives on the theme of what is deemed socially acceptable. The book reveals the ways category of the unacceptable reflects sexual, racial and political fault-lines of a society.
Southgate draws on ideas within history, philosophy, literature, psychology, and theology to explore two traditions: contentment with our situation as it is, and the aspiration to transcend it. He discusses the possibility of escape from intellectual constraints, and advocates a positive 'duty of discontent', and its implications.
This unique book deals with the most serious macroeconomic failure experienced in the US in the post-war period and the great inflation of the late 1960s and 1970s. It is the first detailed analysis, using Federal Reserve documents, of the thinking behind the inflationary monetary policy during this period. The book examines documentary evidence, including minutes, memos and reports and interviews with people who were closely involved in making policy decisions, to explain the monetary policy that led to this inflation. Thomas Mayer considers forecasting errors and wage and price controls in his attempt to explain why the inflation occurred and places some of the blame on ineffective operating procedures, institutional inefficiencies, and political pressures on the Federal Reserve. The author concludes that much of the responsibility for the mistaken policies lies with academic economists who underestimated the dangers of inflation and encouraged the Federal Reserve to focus on an unattainable employment goal. Monetary Policy and the Great Inflation in the United States will be welcomed by economists, political scientists and economic historians interested in monetary policy.
Dissenters have a common dissatisfaction with economics as it is currently practised, and they recognise that twentieth century economics has failed to explain real world economic phenomena. This major book focuses on the work and lives of seventeen of the most influential dissenting economists who have shaped twentieth century economics and who continue to make economics more relevant.In Economics and its Discontents each chapter explains what it means to be a dissenting economist and examines how and why the work of the featured economist constitutes dissent. It demonstrates that dissent in the profession extends beyond ideology and that dissenters can come from radical, liberal or conservative backgrounds. Dissent is considered in many respects, including how economics is taught, the methodology of economic analysis, the lack of attention economists pay to the real world behaviour of individuals, the narrow and limited assumptions made by economists, the inappropriate attempt of economics to dominate all social sciences, and the policy conclusions reached by standard economic analysis. The dissenters featured in this book suggest that there is a better way to do economics, and a better way to be an economist, and each has helped keep economics honest by constantly questioning traditional thinking. This book salutes and celebrates these dissenters who exemplify the very best of the discipline. If economics is again to be a respected field and a highly regarded profession, we must look to these dissenters to point the way forward. This book will be welcomed by professional economists, researchers and postgraduate students, especially those interested in the history of economic thought, and economic methodology and philosophy.
Medical texts provide a powerful means of accessing contemporary perceptions of illness and through them assumptions about the nature of the body and identity. By mapping these perceptions, from their 19th century focus on illness located in a biological body through to their 'discovery' of the psycho-social patient of the late 20th century, a history of identity, both physical and psychological, is revealed.
"A Brief History of Economics" illustrates how the ideas of the great economists not only influenced societies but were themselves shaped by their cultural milieu. Understanding the economists' visions - lucidly and vividly unveiled by Canterbery -allows readers to place economics within a broader community of ideas. Magically, the author links Adam Smith to Isaac Newton's idea of an orderly universe, F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" to Thornstein Veblen, John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath" to the Great Depression, and Tom Wolfe's "The Bonfire of the Vanities" to Reaganomics. Often humorous, Canterbery's easy style should make the student's first foray into economics lively and relevant. Readers will no longer dare call it the "dismal science".
This book is the first English language edition of Le Commerce et le Gouvernement by the distinguished eighteenth century economist and philosopher Condillac. It was one of the most original contributions to French economics in the eighteenth century. In this edition the editors provide an English translation of the original and a comprehensive account of Condillac's life and contribution to economics. In the late eighteenth century Condillac used the clarity and precision of thought of a leading philosopher to derive a fundamental set of economic principles and their implications for policy. He arrived at the same free trade conclusions as Adam Smith, and Le Commerce et le Gouvernement was published in the same year as The Wealth of Nations. Condillac's economics was initially condemned by the physiocrats because in his utility-based analysis, industry and commerce and not just agriculture contributed to the wealth of France. The original French edition was quickly dismissed by those in positions of power in France who preferred dirigism to competition, while across the Channel the British were unaware of its existence. The importance of Condillac's contribution to economics was recognised after the marginal revolution of the 1870's. In the eighteenth century Condillac won the respect of Voltaire and Rousseau, and the high regard of the King and the Church. His work has since been admired by Allais, Hayek, Menger and Weulersse, while Jevons believed that it provided the first distinct statement of the true connection between value and utility. Commerce and Government will be of special interest to historians of economic thought and those interested in the economic history of the eighteenth century.
Pregnant Fictions explores the complex role of pregnancy in early modern tale-telling and considers how stories of childbirth were used to rethink gendered "truths" at a key moment in the history of ideas. How male medical authorities and female literary authors struggled to describe the inner workings of the unseen--and competed to shape public understanding of it--is the focus of this engaging work by Holly Tucker. In illuminating the gender politics underlying dramatic changes in reproductive theory and practice, Tucker shows just how tenuous the boundaries of scientific "fact" and marvelous fictions were in early modern France. On the literary front, Tucker argues, women used the fairy tale to rethink the biology of childbirth and the sociopolitical uses to which it had been put. She shows that in references to midwives, infertility, sex selection, and embryological theories, fairy-tale writers experimented with alternative ways of understanding pregnancy. In so doing they suggested new ways in which to envision women, knowledge, and power in both the public and the private spheres.
Blending past and present, this brief history of economics is the perfect book for introducing students to the field.A Brief History of Economics illustrates how the ideas of the great economists not only influenced societies but were themselves shaped by their cultural milieu. Understanding the economists' visions - lucidly and vividly unveiled by Canterbery - allows readers to place economics within a broader community of ideas. Magically, the author links Adam Smith to Isaac Newton's idea of an orderly universe, F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby to Thorstein Veblen, John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath to the Great Depression, and Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities to Reaganomics.Often humorous, Canterbery's easy style will make the student's first foray into economics lively and relevant. Readers will dismiss "dismal" from the science.
Mary Wollstonecraft's Social and Aesthetic Philosophy examines Wollstonecraft's attempts to revise representations of women to give them a more active role in public life. Combining history of ideas with close textual reading, Bahar insists that Wollstonecraft's political claims cannot be separated from her desire to develop more convincing aesthetic representations of women.
Despite the importance of Leibniz's mature philosophy, his early work has been relatively neglected. This collection begins with an overview of his formative years and includes 12 original papers by internationally-known scholars. The contributions reflect the wide range of the young Leibniz's philosophical interests and his interests in related subjects, including law, physics and theology. Some chapters explore his relationship to other philosophers, including his teachers in Leipzig and Jena and his Paris friend Tschirnhaus, as well as Hobbes and Spinoza. Others focus on particular periods or texts and deal with themes ranging from ethics and free-will to his philosophically-significant account of transubstantiation and his early monadology. Some of the topics are familiar to Leibniz students - harmony, sufficient reason and possible worlds, for instance - but others are less familiar - for instance, his attitude to historical truth, millenarianism and the relation of mathematics to the natural world. The book provides an introduction to Leibniz's early philosophy and throws light on the development of some of the doctrines with which he is particularly associated.
Bede the Scholar distils a decade of research by leading scholars on the Northumbrian monk, the Venerable Bede (c. 673-735). Considering Bede's place within the wider intellectual developments of the early medieval world, the book demonstrates the centrality of the Bible to his scholarship. The book breaks new ground for our understanding of its subject's self-image through investigation of the famous Ecclesiastical history of the English people, alongside lesser-known works such as the Martyrology, the commentary On Genesis, and the scriptural chapter headings he contributed anonymously to the Vulgate Bible.This volume is an essential contribution which deepens our understanding of the scholarly programme undertaken by one of the most important intellectual figures of the early middle ages. The chapters celebrate the depth and complexity of Bede's writings, whilst demonstrating their overall coherence and clarity. -- .
An innovative departure from traditional approaches to political thought, this groundbreaking anthology includes minority ideologies where they occurred historically. By interweaving minority voices with majority documents rather than grouping them together, Political Thought in the United States presents us with a uniquely organic portrait of American political life. Beginning with the time of the explorers and early settlers, Lyman Tower Sargent presents the political beliefs and ideologies of religious minorities, women, North American Indians, and African Americans as fundamental components of American thought. Political Thought in the United States centers on two themes: the relationship between majority rule and minority rights, and the focus of power in the American system. Together with classic documents long heralded as cornerstones of American democracy, the book features writings of those opposed to the Constitution, slave petitions, Indian treaties, Emerson's Politics, works of conservatives like John Taylor and Herbert Hoover, documents from the feminist movements, labor manifestos, critiques of industrialization, and W. E. B. Du Bois's still-debated The Talented Tenth, and much more.
Entries in this dictionary focus on the people, organizations, events, and ideas that have been significant in the slightly more than two centuries of political communication in this country. The intent is to highlight those events and ideas that still have significance today--thus from the signing of the Declaration of Independence to the threshold of the 21st century. The history of political communication and how that history has repeated itself is examined in this volume. Entries arranged from A to Z, deal with freedom of the press and the major threats to freedom of the press; successful and unsuccessful political campaigns, and the changes that have occurred in political communication as well as the tradition that has emerged in the slightly more than two centuries we have been engaged in it. By offering the reader insight into the evolution of political communication as an academic field, this reference will be useful to students and scholars in the disciplines of political science, political communication, mass communication, U.S. history, and related fields, as well as academic and selected public libraries.
Industry, Space and Competition rediscovers the contributions of the past on industrial organization and spatial economics and analyses these within the context of current movements towards globalization, regionalization and localization.It re-examines the work of von Thunen, Marshall, Weber and Perroux as well as re-assessing less well-known authors including Quesnay, George and Hearn whose contributions have previously been largely disregarded. The book analyses their contributions to spatial economics, industrial organization and economic geography within an historical context. The authors then go on to discuss related issues which are not strictly from the discipline of economics. Finally the authors propose that there should be more interaction with other disciplines including history and geography in order to gain a greater understanding of the subject. This book will be welcomed by historians of economic thought, regional economists, industrial economists, especially those interested in industrial organisation and competition, and scholars of international economics and economic geography.
The standard interpretation keeps repeating that Camus is the prototypical "absurdist" thinker. Such a reading freezes Camus at the stage at which he wrote The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus. By taking seriously how (1) Camus was always searching and (2) the rest of his corpus, Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Ordinary corrects the one-sided, and thus faulty, depiction of Camus as committed to a philosophy of absurdism. His guiding project, which he explicitly acknowledged, was an attempt to get beyond nihilism, the general dismissal of value and meaning in ordinary life. Tracing this project via Camus's works, Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Ordinary, offers a new lens for thinking about the well-known author.
This study examines the development of Marxist-Leninist ideology in the U.S.S.R. from its origins to the collapse of the Soviet regime. Alfred Evans argues that Soviet Marxism-Leninism was subject to significant adaptation under various leaders, contrary to the widespread impression that official Soviet ideology remained static after Stalin. While taking account of scholarly literature on each of the periods covered, the work is significant for being based principally on an analysis of primary (Soviet) sources. Evans' integrated analysis of changes in ideology during the post-Stalin decades is an important contribution to the literature in political science, political economy, and Soviet studies.
The following Treatise presents the sum of a course of Lectures, which, for six or eight years past, I have been in the habit of delivering to successive classes, on the subject of Intellectual Philosophy. One thing I may say in relation to this subject, without boasting. No class have yet passed through this course, without becoming deeply interested in the science of Mental Philosophy; and, in their judgment, receiving great benefit from the truths developed, as well as from the method of development which was adopted. Hence the desire has been very generally expressed by those who have attended the course of instruction, as well as by others who have become acquainted with the general features of the system taught, to have it presented to the public in a form adapted to popular reading. In conformity to such suggestions, as well as to the permanent convictions of my own mind, the following Treatise has been prepared. In preparing it, it has been my aim to reject light from no source whatever from which it could be obtained, and at the same time to maintain the real prerogative of manly independence of thought. Since the publication of the first edition of this work, the author has had the benefit resulting from successive years in teaching the same, and of a careful reading of other works upon the same subject. In this manner, he has been enabled to perceive defects that needed correction in the work, as first presented. The work is now given to the public, as the result of his mature reflections upon this fundamental science. ASA MAHAN (1799-1889) was America's foremost Christian educator, reformer, philosopher, and pastor. He was founding president of two colleges and oneuniversity, where he was able to inspire numerous reforms, publish authoritative philosophical texts, and promote powerful revivals like his close associate Charles Finney. He led the way on all important fronts while being severely persecuted. He introduced the new curriculum later adopted by Harvard, was the first to instruct and grant liberal college degrees to white and colored women, advised Lincoln during the Civil War, and among many other remarkable achievements, was a father to the early evangelical and holiness movements.
In 1794, Friedrich Schiller declared that "beauty is the only possible expression of freedom in phenomena." German Freedom and the Greek Ideal traces this German idea of freedom from the late Enlightenment through the early twentieth century. It focuses on the stars of German intellectual and artistic life in the nineteenth century, with illuminating accounts of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Gottfried Semper, Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Thomas Mann. Delving deeply into their works, McGrath shows how they invoked the ancient Greeks to in order to inspire Germans to cultural renewal and to enrich their understanding of freedom as something deeper and more urgent than political life could offer.
This biography charts the life and fascinating long militant career of the French anarchist journalist, editor, theorist, writer, campaigner and educator Jean Grave (1854-1939), from the run up to the 1871 Paris Commune to the eve of the Second World War. Through Grave, it explores the history of the French and international anarchist communist movement over seven decades: its "heroic period" (1880-1890s), shaken by terrorist violence and intense repression, the emergence of syndicalism, national and international solidarity campaigns, the divisions over the First World War, and post-war division and relegation. Through Grave, a "sedentary transnationalist," the study investigates the networked and transnational organisation of the anarchist movement, addressing the paradox of Grave's international influence alongside his deep rootedness in Paris by emphasizing the movement's global print culture and staggering circulations. |
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