The Structure of World History

Author: Kojin Karatani
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822376687
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325

Book Description
In this major, paradigm-shifting work, Kojin Karatani systematically re-reads Marx's version of world history, shifting the focus of critique from modes of production to modes of exchange. Karatani seeks to understand both Capital-Nation-State, the interlocking system that is the dominant form of modern global society, and the possibilities for superseding it. In The Structure of World History, he traces different modes of exchange, including the pooling of resources that characterizes nomadic tribes, the gift exchange systems developed after the adoption of fixed-settlement agriculture, the exchange of obedience for protection that arises with the emergence of the state, the commodity exchanges that characterize capitalism, and, finally, a future mode of exchange based on the return of gift exchange, albeit modified for the contemporary moment. He argues that this final stage—marking the overcoming of capital, nation, and state—is best understood in light of Kant's writings on eternal peace. The Structure of World History is in many ways the capstone of Karatani's brilliant career, yet it also signals new directions in his thought.

History and Repetition

Author: Kōjin Karatani
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231157290
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
Kojin Karatani wrote the essays in History and Repetition during a time of radical historical change, triggered by the collapse of the Cold War and the death of the Showa emperor in 1989. Reading Karl Marx in an original way, Karatani developed a theory of history based on the repetitive cycle of crises attending the expansion and transformation of capital. His work led to a rigorous analysis of political, economic, and literary forms of representation that recast historical events as a series of repeated forms forged in the transitional moments of global capitalism. History and Repetition cemented Karatani's reputation as one of Japan's premier thinkers, capable of traversing the fields of philosophy, political economy, history, and literature in his work. The first complete translation of History and Repetition into English, undertaken with the cooperation of Karatani himself, this volume opens with his innovative reading of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, tracing Marx's early theoretical formulation of the state. Karatani follows with a study of violent crises as they recur after major transitions of power, developing his theory of historical repetition and introducing a groundbreaking interpretation of fascism (in both Europe and Japan) as the spectral return of the absolutist monarch in the midst of a crisis of representative democracy. For Karatani, fascism represents the most violent materialization of the repetitive mechanism of history. Yet he also seeks out singularities that operate outside the brutal inevitability of historical repetition, whether represented in literature or, more precisely, in the process of literature's demise. Closely reading the works of Oe Kenzaburo, Mishima Yukio, Nakagami Kenji, and Murakami Haruki, Karatani compares the recurrent and universal with the singular and unrepeatable, while advancing a compelling theory of the decline of modern literature. Merging theoretical arguments with a concrete analysis of cultural and intellectual history, Karatani's essays encapsulate a brilliant, multidisciplinary perspective on world history.

Plough, Sword, and Book

Author: Ernest Gellner
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226287025
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
Elucidates and argues for the author's concept of human history from the past to the present.

Structure, Culture, and History

Author: Sing C. Chew
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780847698370
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Book Description
Preface p. vii Part I. Structural Analysis: Past, Present, and Future 1. History of Social Structural Analysis Charles Crothers p. 3 2. Social Structure: The Future of a Concept Douglas V. Porpora p. 43 Part II. Culture and Social Structure 3. How Are Structures Meaningful? Cultural Sociology and Theories of Structure Lyn Spillman p. 63 4. Agency, Structure, and Deritualization: A Comparative Investigation of Extreme Disruptions of Social Order J. David Knottnerus p. 85 5. Global Power, Hegemonic Decline, and Culture Narratives Albert J. Bergesen p. 107 6. Situating Hybridity: The Positional Logics of a Discourse Jonathan Friedman p. 125 Part III. History and Social Structure 7. A Structural Theory of the Five Thousand Year World System Barry K. Gills and Andre Gunder Frank p. 151 8. Evolutionary Pulsations in the World System George Modelski and William R. Thompson p. 177 9. Paradigms Bridged: Institutional Materialism and World-Systemic Evolution Christopher Chase-Dunn and Thomas D. Hall p. 197 10. Ecology in Command Sing C. Chew p. 217 11. Applications of Elementary Theory to Social Structures of Antiquity Brent Simpson and David Willer p. 231 Part IV. Micro and Macro Structures: Interactions and Organizations 12. Gender, Institutions, and Difference: The Continuing Importance of Social Structure in Understanding Gender Inequality in Organizations Amy S. Wharton p. 257 13. Social Structure and Social Exchange Joseph Whitmeyer and Karen S. Cook p. 271 14. Social Organizations across Space and Time: The Policy Process, Mesodomain Analysis, and Breadth of Perspective Peter M. Hall and Patrick J.W. McGinty p. 303 15. Acts, Persons, Positions, and Institutions: Legitimating Multiple Objects and Compliance with Authority Henry A. Walker and Larry Rogers and Morris Zelditch p. 323 Index p. 341 Contributor Affiliations p. 343.

World History

Author: Eugene Berger
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic book
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description
Annotation World History: Cultures, States, and Societies to 1500 offers a comprehensive introduction to the history of humankind from prehistory to 1500. Authored by six USG faculty members with advance degrees in History, this textbook offers up-to-date original scholarship. It covers such cultures, states, and societies as Ancient Mesopotamia, Ancient Israel, Dynastic Egypt, India's Classical Age, the Dynasties of China, Archaic Greece, the Roman Empire, Islam, Medieval Africa, the Americas, and the Khanates of Central Asia. It includes 350 high-quality images and maps, chronologies, and learning questions to help guide student learning. Its digital nature allows students to follow links to applicable sources and videos, expanding their educational experience beyond the textbook. It provides a new and free alternative to traditional textbooks, making World History an invaluable resource in our modern age of technology and advancement.

The Structure of the World

Author: Steven French
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191507725
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 413

Book Description
In The Structure of the World, Steven French articulates and defends the bold claim that there are no objects. At the most fundamental level, modern physics presents us with a world of structures and making sense of that view is the central aim of the increasingly widespread position known as structural realism. Drawing on contemporary work in metaphysics and philosophy of science, as well as the 'forgotten' history of structural realism itself, French attempts to further ground and develop this position. He argues that structural realism offers the best way of balancing our need to accommodate the results of modern science with our desire to arrive at an appropriately informed understanding of the world that science presents to us. Covering not only the realism-antirealism debate, the nature of representation, and the relationship between metaphysics and science, The Structure of the World defends a form of eliminativism about objects that sets laws and symmetry principles at the heart of ontology. In place of a world of microscopic objects banging into one another and governed by the laws of physics, it offers a world of laws and symmetries, on which determinate physical properties are dependent. In presenting this account, French also tackles the distinction between mathematical and physical structures, the nature of laws, and causality in the context of modern physics, and he concludes by exploring the extent to which structural realism can be extended into chemistry and biology.

Transcritique

Author: Kojin Karatani
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262263368
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 382

Book Description
Kojin Karatani's Transcritique introduces a startlingly new dimension to Immanuel Kant's transcendental critique by using Kant to read Karl Marx and Marx to read Kant. In a direct challenge to standard academic approaches to both thinkers, Karatani's transcritical readings discover the ethical roots of socialism in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and a Kantian critique of money in Marx's Capital. Karatani reads Kant as a philosopher who sought to wrest metaphysics from the discredited realm of theoretical dogma in order to restore it to its proper place in the sphere of ethics and praxis. With this as his own critical model, he then presents a reading of Marx that attempts to liberate Marxism from longstanding Marxist and socialist presuppositions in order to locate a solid theoretical basis for a positive activism capable of gradually superseding the trinity of Capital-Nation-State.

The Family

Author: Mary Jo Maynes
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199713707
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 164

Book Description
People have always lived in families, but what that means has varied dramatically across time and cultures. The family is not a "natural" phenomenon but an institution with a dynamic history stretching 10,000 years into the past. Mary Jo Maynes and Ann Waltner tell the story of this fundamental unit from the beginnings of domestication and human settlement. They consider the codification of rules governing marriage in societies around the ancient world, the changing conceptions of family wrought by the heightened pace of colonialism and globalization in the modern world, and how state policies shape families today. The authors illustrate ways in which differences in gender and generation have affected family relations over the millennia. Cooperation between family members--by birth or marriage--has driven expansions of power and fusions of culture in times and places as different as ancient Mesopotamia, where kings' daughters became priestesses who mediated among the various cultures and religions of their fathers' kingdom, and sixteenth-century Mexico, in which alliances between Spanish men and indigenous women variously allowed for consolidation of colonial power or empowered resistance to colonial rule. But family discord has also driven - and been driven by - historical events such as China's 1919 May Fourth Movement, in which young people seeking an end to patriarchal authority were key participants. Maynes's and Waltner's view of the family as a force of history brings to light processes of human development and patterns of social life and allows for new insights into the human past and present.

The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation

Author: Paul A. Roth
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810140896
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
In The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation, Paul A. Roth resolves disputes persisting since the nineteenth century about the scientific status of history. He does this by showing why historical explanations must take the form of a narrative, making their logic explicit, and revealing how the rational evaluation of narrative explanation becomes possible. Roth situates narrative explanations within a naturalistic framework and develops a nonrealist (irrealist) metaphysics and epistemology of history—arguing that there exists no one fixed past, but many pasts. The book includes a novel reading of Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, showing how it offers a narrative explanation of theory change in science. This book will be of interest to researchers in historiography, philosophy of history, philosophy of science, philosophy of social science, and epistemology.

Navigating World History

Author: P. Manning
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403973857
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 427

Book Description
World history has expanded dramatically in recent years, primarily as a teaching field, and increasingly as a research field. Growing numbers of teachers and Ph.Ds in history are required to teach the subject. They must be current on topics from human evolution to industrial development in Song-dynasty China to today's disease patterns - and then link these disparate topics into a coherent course. Numerous textbooks in print and in preparation summarize the field of world history at an introductory level. But good teaching also requires advanced training for teachers, and access to a stream of new research from scholars trained as world historians. In this book, Patrick Manning provides the first comprehensive overview of the academic field of world history. He reviews patterns of research and debate, and proposes guidelines for study by teachers and by researchers in world history.