新書短訊
（
|
經濟與法律 |
經濟與文化 |
歷史理論 |
|
Max
Weber and the Idea of Economic Sociology (Richard Swedberg, 1998) |
A History
of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and
Society(Mary Poovey, 1998) |
On
History (Eric Hobsbawm, 1998) |
|
Colonizing
Hawaii: The Cultural Power of Law (Sally Engle Merry, 2000) |
The
Enigma of the Gift. (Maurice Godelier, 1999) |
Provincializing Europe (Dipesh Chakrabarty, 2000) |
|
Social
Power and Legal Culture: Litigation Masters in Late Imperial China.
(Melissa Macauley, 1998) |
Food
and Love (Jack Goody, 1999) |
Logics
of History (William H. Sewell Jr., 2005) |
|
|
The
Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (David S. Landes, 1998) |
|
Max
Weber and the Idea of Economic Sociology
(Princeton
University Press, 1998)
By Richard Swedberg
"This book is unequivocally
first-rate. Swedberg writes clearly, comprehensively, in a nuanced style, and
with tremendous erudition. Max Weber and the Idea of Economic Sociology will be
recognized as an invaluable work."--Mark Perlman, University Professor Emeritus
of Economics at the
While most people are familiar with The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, few know that during the last
decade of his life Max Weber (1864-1920) also tried to develop a new way of
analyzing economic phenomena, which he termed "economic sociology."
Indeed, this effort occupies the central place in Weber's thought during the
years just before his death. Richard Swedberg here offers a critical
presentation and the first major study of this fascinating part of Weber's
work.
This book shows how Weber laid a solid
theoretical foundation for economic sociology and developed a series of new and
highly evocative concepts. He not only investigated economic phenomena but also
linked them clearly with political, legal, and religious phenomena. Swedberg
also demonstrates that Weber's approach to economic sociology addresses a major
problem that has haunted economic analysis since the nineteenth century: how to
effectively unite an interest-driven type of analysis (popular with economists)
with a social one (of course preferred by sociologists). Exploring Weber's
views of the economy and how he viewed its relationship to politics, law, and
religion, Swedberg furthermore discusses similarities and differences between
Weber's economic sociology and present-day thinking on the same topic. In
addition, the author shows how economic sociology has recently gained greater
credibility as economists and sociologists have begun to collaborate in
studying problems of organizations, political structures, social problems, and
economic culture more generally. Swedberg's book will
be sure to further this new cooperation.
While most people are familiar with The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, few know that during the last
decade of his life Max Weber (1864-1920) also tried to develop a new way of
analyzing economic phenomena, which he termed "economic sociology."
Indeed, this effort occupies the central place in Weber's thought during the
years just before his death. Richard Swedberg here offers a critical
presentation and the first major study of this fascinating part of Weber's
work. Swedberg furthermore discusses similarities and differences between Weber's
economic sociology and present-day thinking on the same topic. In addition, the
author shows how economic sociology has recently gained greater credibility as
economists and sociologists have begun to collaborate in studying problems of
organizations, political structures, social problems, and economic culture more
generally. Swedberg's book will be sure to further
this new cooperation.
This book is an introduction to Weber's economic sociology. Despite the attention that "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" has received, little attention has been paid to Weber's economic sociology in general; and this book is an effort to remedy this. Chapters are devoted to the sphere of the economy (in Weber's economic sociology); to the interaction between the economy and politics; to the interaction between the economy and law; and to the interaction between economy and religion. My main goal with this book has been to make Weber's ideas more accessible and easier to understand. (From: http://www.amazon.com)
關於作者：
Richard
Swedberg is Professor of Sociology at the
Food
and Love
(Verso
Books, 1999)
By Jack Goody
Jack Goody is a
thinker who enjoys subverting neat simplifications and rigid preconceptions. A
leading anthropologist and comparative sociologist, he is perhaps best known
for his acclaimed critique of crude historical distinctions between 'West' and
'East'--and overblown claims for the uniqueness of the West. In Food and Love,
Goody pursues his argument into the sphere of culture. Starting with a
sustained discussion of the context of such debates in the thought of classic
theorists such as Marx, as well as contemporary historical and sociological
notions of modernisation, Goody goes on to survey
phenomena as diverse and fascinating as the uniqueness of the European family,
the development of romantic love, the evolution of national and regional cuisine's,
the globalisation of Chinese food, and the histories
of various taboos on certain types of food and drink, at all times effortlessly
ranging from Europe to Asia and to Africa. In a final bracing section
challenging dominant relativist conceptions, Goody considers the difficulties
and complexities of cross-cultural and comparative analysis, and he picks apart
the doubts involved in the very process of representation and symbolic
communication. Throughout the book, Goody demonstrates that the ethnocentricity
of much of Western scholarship has distorted not only the comprehension of the
East but also developments in
關於作者：
Jack
Goody is Professor of Anthropology at
On
History
(New Press, 1998)
Few historians have
done more to change the way we see the past than Eric Hobsbawm.
From his early books on the Industrial Revolution and European empires, to his
magnificent study of the "short twentieth century," The Age of
Extremes, Hobsbawm has come to be known as
one of the finest practitioners of his craft. Available now for the first time
in an affordable paperback edition, On History brings together his most
important essays on the study and practice of history. Ranging from early
considerations of "history from below" and the "progress"
of history, to recent debate on the relevance of studying the past, On History
is an essential work from one of our preeminent thinkers. (From: http://www.amazon.com)
註：本書即將由台北麥田出版公司譯成繁體中文發行。
關於作者：
Eric Hobsbawm為現代英國馬克斯派史學大家，有關其學術生平及著作大旨，中文讀者可參考下面文章：林春，〈廿世紀史與「歷史共產主義」：Hobsbawm的《極端年代》評析〉，收於黃瑞祺編《馬學新論：從西方馬克思主義到後馬克思主義》（台北：中研院歐美所，1998），頁271-299。
The
Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor
(W.W. Norton & Company,
1998)
By David S. Landes
Professor David S. Landes takes a historic approach to the analysis of the
distribution of wealth in this landmark study of world economics. Landes argues that the key to today's disparity between the
rich and poor nations of the world stems directly from the industrial
revolution, in which some countries made the leap to industrialization and
became fabulously rich, while other countries failed to adapt and remained
poor. Why some countries were able to industrialize and others weren't has been
the subject of much heated debate over the decades; climate, natural resources,
and geography have all been put forward as explanations--and are all brushed
aside by Landes in favor of his own controversial
theory: that the ability to effect an industrial revolution is dependent on
certain cultural traits, without which industrialization is impossible to
sustain. Landes contrasts the characteristics of
successfully industrialized nations--work, thrift, honesty, patience, and tenacity--with
those of nonindustrial countries, arguing that until
these values are internalized by all nations, the gulf between the rich and
poor will continue to grow. (From: http://www.amazon.com)
註：本書已有中譯本，書名《新國富論：人類窮與富的命運》（汪仲譯，台北：時報文化公司，1999）。
這本書的主旨在寫一部人類近一千年的世界史，試圖「論証」過去一千年中歐洲之所以是人類文明「發展與現代化最大動力」的諸種原因。諸如，歐洲早自中古時代即已逐漸發展出適合商業進一步發展的「一連串系統與組織的改革與轉換」，而由中古到十八世紀之間，歐洲也不斷出現生產、計時、交通技術方面的新發明，同時，歐洲的政治與社會制度發展也比較能夠容許許多新發明的自由傳播；除此之外，西歐良好宜人的地理氣候條件，以及一套適合增加商品生產與消費的「文化」機制，使相關的知識與技術能夠持續累積、不斷「堆建」（buildup）進而「突破」（breakthrough）原有的生產力門檻，也被作者列為歐洲鉅大經濟成長的主因。
儘管作者的主要論敵是那些「主張平等史觀的全球主義份子（globalists）」、是那些「反歐洲中心」的「反知識論」（anti-intellectual）思想風潮，但是，全書也充滿了使用中國「失敗」而歐洲「成功」的對照式分析。作者的中國史知識很有限，卻又喜歡做一些「超級式」的評斷；可是，他對歐洲十八世紀「工業革命史」的嫻熟，以及書中提出一些「大歷史」的問題，則仍值得讀者深思。
作者雖然強調「文化」對經濟發展的重要影響（culture
makes all the difference），但他對「文化」的理解其實有限。
關於作者：
David
S. Landes is professor emeritus at
The
Enigma of the Gift
(The University of Chicago
Press, 1999)
By Maurice Godelier
(Translated from
French 1996 edition by Nora Scott)
When we think of
giving gifts, we think of exchanging objects that carry with them economic or
symbolic value. But is every valuable thing a potentially exchangeable item,
whose value can be transferred? In The Enigma of the Gift, the distinguished
French anthropologist Maurice Godelier reassesses the
significance of gifts in social life by focusing on sacred objects, which are
never exchanged despite the value they possess. Beginning with an analysis of
the seminal work of Marcel Mauss and Claude
Levi-Strauss, and drawing on his own fieldwork in
Elegantly translated
by Nora Scott, The Enigma of the Gift is at once a major theoretical contribution
and an essential guide to the history of the theory of the gift. (From: http://www.press.uchicago.edu)
關於作者：
Maurice Godelier任職於法國巴黎的社會科學高等研究院，為結構馬克思主義人類學家。其學術立場可見陳其南先生〈結構化的馬克思：最近人類學理論的發展〉（刊於《當代》雜誌19期，1987年11月），以及余舜德先生的介紹（收入黃應貴先生編《見証與詮釋：當代人類學家》，台北：正中書局，1992年，頁414-442）。Godelier成名作為《經濟中的理性與非理性》；要簡單的體會Godelier重新論述馬克思有關「經濟基礎」和「上層結構」的關係，也有一篇原作於1988年的中文翻譯論文可讀：〈李維史陀馬克思及馬克之後？重新估價結構主義和馬克思主義方法論：一個社會邏輯分析〉（張寧譯，《當代》57期，1991年元月，頁16-47）。
Social
Power and Legal Culture: Litigation Masters in Late Imperial
(The Stanford
University Press, 1998.)
By Melissa Macauley
Asserting that litigation in late
imperial
The
author characterizes litigation masters as entrepreneurs of power,
intermediaries who typically emerge in the process of limited state expansion
to provide links between local interests and the infrastructure of the state.
These powermongers routinely acted in the interests
of the local elite and the male lineage. But cases preserved in criminal
archives also reveal a clientele surprisingly composed of the subordinate
actors in legal disputes𨫎idows
fighting in-laws and other men, debtors contesting creditors, younger brothers
disputing older ones, and common people charging the rich. Challenging earlier
scholarship claiming that the Chinese legal system simply maintained the hegemony
of elites and the patriarchal order, this study shows how the legal tools of
domination were often transformed into weapons of social resistance and
revenge.
The
book also examines the manifold ways in which legal practice, Confucian
ideology, and popular entertainments like opera and storytelling coalesced into
Chinese legal culture. Popular traditions in particular did not simply reflect
legal culture but actively influenced it, shaping common presumptions about law
that transcended differences of class and region. Exploring Chinese legal
culture in the structural contexts of commercialization, changes in property
transactions, and ineradicable litigation backlogs, the author explains why
litigation was condemned by all classes of Chinese men and women even as all
classes litigated. (From:
www.sup.org/searchindex.html)
註：本書收入「中國的法律•社會與文化」（Law,
Society, and Culture in China）叢書，該叢書迄西元2000年止已出版五種（含本書在內），皆為 Stanford University Press 出版。第一種為論文集：《Civil
Law in Qing and Republican China》（1994），編者為Kathryn Bernhardt與 Philip C.C. Huang（黃宗智）；第二種為《Civil Justice in
關於作者：
Melissa Macauley
現職為美國Northwestern University助理教授
Colonizing Hawaii
( The
By Sally Engle Merry
How does law
transform family, sexuality, and community in the fractured social world
characteristic of the colonizing process? The law was a cornerstone of the
so-called civilizing process of nineteenth-century colonialism. It was
simultaneously a means of transformation and a marker of the seductive idea of
civilization. Sally Engle Merry reveals how, in
關於作者：
Sally Engle Merry is Class of 1949 Professor of
Ethics in the Anthropology Department at
註：本書收入 Sherry B. Ortner, Nicholas B. Dirks與Geoffrey Eley 合編之「文化 / 權力 / 歷史」（Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History）叢書（該叢書目錄可見： http://pup.princeton.edu/catalogs/series/pscph.html ）。
A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the
Sciences of Wealth and Society
(The University of Chicago Press, 1998)
By Mary Poovey
How did the fact
become modernity's most favored unit of knowledge? How did description come to
seem separable from theory in the precursors of economics and the social
sciences?
Mary Poovey explores these questions in A History of the
Modern Fact, ranging across an astonishing array of texts and ideas from
the publication of the first British manual on double-entry bookkeeping in 1588
to the institutionalization of statistics in the 1830s. She shows how the
production of systematic knowledge from descriptions of observed particulars
influenced government, how numerical representation became the privileged
vehicle for generating useful facts, and how belief--whether figured as credit,
credibility, or credulity--remained essential to the production of knowledge.
(From: http://www.press.uchicago.edu)
關於作者：
Mary Poovey 為美國 New York University 英文系教授與「知識生產歷史研究所」（the Institute for the History
of the Production of Knowledge）所長。
Provincializing Europe : Postcolonial
Thought and Historical Difference
(
By Dipesh
Chakrabarty
Can European thought be
dislodged from the center of the practice of history in a non-European place?
What problems arise when we translate cultural practices into the categories of
social science? Provincializing
Provincializing Europe is a sustained
conversation between historical thinking and postcolonial perspectives. It
addresses the mythical figure of
Acknowlegments ix
Introduction: The Idea of Provincializing Europe 3
Part One: Historicism and the Narration of Modernity
Chapter 1. Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History 27
Chapter 2. The Two Histories of Capital 47
Chapter 3. Translating Life-Worlds into Labor and
History 72
Chapter 4. Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts 97
Part Two: Histories of Belonging
Chapter 5. Domestic Cruelty and the Birth of the Subject 117
Chapter 6. Nation and Imagination 149
Chapter 7. Adda: A History of Sociality 180
Chapter 8. Family, Fraternity, and Salaried labor 214
Epilogue. Reason and the Critique of Historicism 237
Notes 257
Index
299
(From: http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/6965.html )
關於作者：
Dipesh Chakrabarty is
professor in Department of History and in the Department of South Asian
Languages and Civilizations. His research interests are in modern South Asian
history and historiography, in postcolonial theory and its impact on history-writing,
and in comparative studies of questions and politics of modernity. He is a
founding member of the series Subaltern Studies. He is a co-editor of Critical
Inquiry and a founding-editor of the journal Postcolonial Studies.
He has also served on the editorial committee of Public Culture and the American
Historical Review. Professor Chakrabarty was elected a fellow of the
Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation
(The
By William H. Sewell Jr.
While social
scientists and historians have been exchanging ideas for a long time, they have
never developed a proper dialogue about social theory. William H. Sewell Jr.
observes that on questions of theory the communication has been mostly one way:
from social science to history. Logics of History argues that both
history and the social sciences have something crucial to offer each other.
While historians do not think of themselves as theorists, they know something
social scientists do not: how to think about the temporalities of social life.
On the other hand, while social scientists’ treatments of temporality are
usually clumsy, their theoretical sophistication and penchant for structural
accounts of social life could offer much to historians.
Renowned for his work at the crossroads of history, sociology, political
science, and anthropology, Sewell argues that only by combining a more
sophisticated understanding of historical time with a concern for larger theoretical
questions can a satisfying social theory emerge. In Logics of History,
he reveals the shape such an engagement could take, some of the topics it could
illuminate, and how it might affect both sides of the disciplinary divide.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface
1. Theory,
History, and Social Science
2. The Political Unconscious of Social and Cultural
History, or, Confessions of a Former Quantitative Historian
3. Three Temporalities: Toward an Eventful Sociology
4. A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation
5. The Concept(s) of Culture
6. History, Synchrony, and Culture: Reflections on the Work of Clifford Geertz
7. A Theory of the Event:
8. Historical Events as Transformations of Structures: Inventing Revolution at
the Bastille
9. Historical Duration and Temporal Complexity: The Strange Career of
Marseille's Dockworkers, 1814-70
10. Refiguring the "Social" in Social Science: An Interpretivist
Manifesto
References
Index
(From: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/153695.ctl
)
關於作者：
Professor William
Sewell studies culture and politics in comparative perspective. He also has
interests in social theory and political sociology. Sewell has published
important studies of French social and cultural history including Work and
Revolution in
(From: http://political-science.uchicago.edu/faculty/sewell.html )