John Rawls is the most significant and influential philosopher and moral philosopher of the 20th century. His work has profoundly shaped contemporary discussions of social, political and economic justice in philosophy, law, political science, economics and other social disciplines. In this exciting collection of new essays, many of the world's leading political and moral theorists discuss the full range of Rawls's contribution to the concepts of political and economic justice, democracy, liberalism, constitutionalism, and international justice. New readers will find this the most accessible guide to Rawls currently available.

Metals, Culture and Capitalism is an ambitious, broad-ranging account of the search for metals in Europe and the Near East from the Bronze Age to the Industrial Revolution and the relationship between this and economic activity, socio-political structures and the development of capitalism. Continuing his criticism of Eurocentric traditions, a theme explored in The Theft of History (2007) and Renaissances (2009), Jack Goody takes the Bronze Age as a starting point for a balanced account of the East and the West, seeking commonalities that recent histories overlook. Considering the role of metals in relation to early cultures, the European Renaissance and 'modernity' in general, Goody explores how the search for metals entailed other forms of knowledge, as well as the arts, leading to changes that have defined Europe and the contemporary world. This landmark text, spanning centuries, cultures and continents, promises to inspire scholars and students across the social sciences.

Review
'All the essays in Wealth and Virtue touch on issues of central significance in understanding why some of the most profound eighteenth-century thinkers felt that greater freedom in the pursuit of commerce and profit would provide a secure foundation for the stability, prosperity and peace of mankind.' Eighteenth-Century Studies
' ... a significant contribution to our understanding of the Scottish Enlightenment.' Economic Journal
'All thirteen essays combine to make this volume an important study which will repay close reading.' Economic History Review
'This collection of thirteen essays is undoubtedly the high point, for the time being, in the revival of the study of the Scottish Enlightenment during the last fifteen years or so.' International Review of Social History
'The focus is Scotland, but the perspectives are wide, a strong Cambridge awareness from contemporary historical practice, but also a healthy willingness to question the received Scottish view, and to add to that view an English, a North-American, and in one valuable essay an Italian view.' Books in Scotland
' ... it is clear that the provocative, erudite essays in Wealth and Virtue deserve to become the new point of departure for anyone seeking to understand eighteenth-century Scottish political economy within the philosophical context from which it sprang.' Philosophical Books
Product Description
Wealth and Virtue reassesses the remarkable contribution of the Scottish Enlightenment to the formation of modern economics and to theories of capitalism. Its unique range indicates the scope of the Scottish intellectual achievement of the eighteenth century and explores the process by which the boundaries between economic thought, jurisprudence, moral philosophy and theoretical history came to be established. Dealing not only with major figures like Hume and Smith, there are also studies of lesser known thinkers like Andrew Fletcher, Gershom Carmichael, Lord Kames and John Millar as well as of Locke in the light of eighteenth century social theory, the intellectual culture of the University of Edinburgh in the middle of the eighteenth century and of the performance of the Scottish economy on the eve of the publication of the Wealth of Nations. While the scholarly emphasis is on the rigorous historical reconstruction of both theory and context, Wealth and Virtue directly addresses itself to modern political theorists and economists and throws light on a number of major focal points of controversy in legal and political philosophy.

This is a masterly introduction to the modern and rigorous theory of probability. The author adopts the martingale theory as his main theme and moves at a lively pace through the subject's rigorous foundations. Measure theory is introduced and then immediately exploited by being applied to real probability theory. Classical results, such as Kolmogorov's Strong Law of Large Numbers and Three-Series Theorem are proved by martingale techniques. A proof of the Central Limit Theorem is also given. The author's style is entertaining and inimitable with pedagogy to the fore. Exercises play a vital role; there is a full quota of interesting and challenging problems, some with hints.

This book is a translation of a classic work of modern social and political thought, Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Hegel's last major published work, is an attempt to systematize ethical theory, natural right, the philosophy of law, political theory and the sociology of the modern state into the framework of Hegel's philosophy of history. Hegel's work has been interpreted in radically different ways, influencing many political movements from far right to far left, and is widely perceived as central to the communication tradition in modern ethical, social and political thought. This edition includes extensive editorial material informing the reader of the historical background of Hegel's text, and explaining his allusions to Roman law and other sources, making use of lecture materials which have only recently become available. The new translation is literal, readable and consistent, and will be informative and scholarly enough to serve the needs of students and specialists alike.

An extensively revised and expanded second edition of the successful textbook on social network analysis integrating theory, applications and network analysis using Pajek. The main structural concepts and their applications in social research are introduced with exercises. Pajek software and data sets are available so readers can learn network analysis through application and case studies. Readers will have the knowledge, skill and tools to apply social network analysis across the social sciences, from anthropology and sociology to business administration and history. This second edition has a new chapter on random network models, for example, scale-free and small-world networks and Monte Carlo simulation; discussion of multiple relations, islands and matrix multiplication; new structural indices such as eigenvector centrality, degree distribution and clustering coefficients; new visualization options that include circular layout for partitions and drawing a network geographically as a 3D surface; and using Unicode labels.

In this 2009 book, Peter Ahrensdorf examines Sophocles' powerful analysis of a central question of political philosophy and a perennial question of political life: should citizens and leaders govern political society by the light of unaided human reason or religious faith? Through an examination of Sophocles' timeless masterpieces - Oedipus the Tyrant, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone - Ahrensdorf offers a sustained challenge to the prevailing view, championed by Nietzsche in his attack on Socratic rationalism, that Sophocles is an opponent of rationalism. Ahrensdorf argues that Sophocles is a genuinely philosophical thinker and a rationalist, albeit one who advocates a cautious political rationalism. Ahrensdorf concludes with an incisive analysis of Nietzsche, Socrates and Aristotle on tragedy and philosophy. He argues, against Nietzsche, that the rationalism of Socrates and Aristotle incorporates a profound awareness of the tragic dimension of human existence and therefore resembles in fundamental ways the somber and humane rationalism of Sophocles.

A mechanism is a mathematical structure that models institutions through which economic activity is guided and coordinated. There are many such institutions; markets are the most familiar ones. Lawmakers, administrators and officers of private companies create institutions in order to achieve desired goals. They seek to do so in ways that economize on the resources needed to operate the institutions, and that provide incentives that induce the required behaviors. This book presents systematic procedures for designing mechanisms that achieve specified performance, and economize on the resources required to operate the mechanism. The systematic design procedures are algorithms for designing informationally efficient mechanisms. Most of the book deals with these procedures of design. When there are finitely many environments to be dealt with, and there is a Nash-implementing mechanism, our algorithms can be used to make that mechanism into an informationally efficient one. Informationally efficient dominant strategy implementation is also studied.

Most models of party competition assume that citizens vote for a platform rather than narrowly targeted material benefits. However, there are many countries where politicians win elections by giving money, jobs, and services in direct exchange for votes. This is not just true in the developing world, but also in economically developed countries - such as Japan and Austria - that clearly meet the definition of stable, modern democracies. This book offers explanations for why politicians engage in clientelistic behaviours and why voters respond. Using newly collected data on national and sub-national patterns of patronage and electoral competition, the contributors demonstrate why explanations based on economic modernization or electoral institutions cannot account for international variation in patron-client and programmatic competition. Instead, they show how the interaction of economic development, party competition, governance of the economy, and ethnic heterogeneity may work together to determine the choices of patrons, clients and policies.

A third edition of The Stages of Economic Growth brings this classic work up to date with current economic and political changes. In a new preface and appendix, Professor Rostow extends his analysis to include recent economic and political developments as well as the advances in theory concerning nonlinear and chaotic phenomena. For those coming to his work for the first time, the original text and the introductions and appendices from earlier editions are included. This volume will not only be of interest to those concerned with the theory of economic growth, but also to students of policy since the 1960s. In the text Professor Rostow gives an account of economic growth based on a dynamic theory of production and interpreted in terms of actual societies. Five basic stages of economic growth are distinguished with detailed discussions of each stage including illustrative examples. He also applies the concept of stages of growth to an examination of the problems of military aggression and the nuclear arms race. The final chapter includes a comparison of his non-communist manifesto with Marxist theory. Materials from the second edition include an appendix in which he responds to some of his critics.

Few economic events have had a more profound or enduring impact than the German hyperinflation of 1923, still remembered popularly as a root cause of Hitler's rise to power. Yet many historians have argued that inflationary policies were, on balance, advantageous to post-1918 Germany, both boosting growth and helping to reduce reparations. The scholarly consensus is that there was no viable alternative to inflation. In Paper and Iron Niall Ferguson takes a different view. He argues that inflation was indeed an economic and political disaster, and further that there were alternative economic policies which could have stabilised the German currency in 1920. To explain why these were not adopted he points to long-term defects in the political institutions of the Reich which went back as far as the 1890s and which persisted beyond 1918. The book therefore reveals the Wilhelmine origins of Weimar's failure, as well as casting light on the origins of the Third Reich.

Richard Stanley's two-volume basic introduction to enumerative combinatorics has become the standard guide to the topic for students and experts alike. This thoroughly revised second edition of Volume 1 includes ten new sections and more than 300 new exercises, most with solutions, reflecting numerous new developments since the publication of the first edition in 1986. The author brings the coverage up to date and includes a wide variety of additional applications and examples, as well as updated and expanded chapter bibliographies. Many of the less difficult new exercises have no solutions so that they can more easily be assigned to students. The material on P-partitions has been rearranged and generalized; the treatment of permutation statistics has been greatly enlarged; and there are also new sections on q-analogues of permutations, hyperplane arrangements, the cd-index, promotion and evacuation and differential posets.

China has one of the longest continuous literary traditions in the world. From the beginnings of the Chinese written language to the lively world of internet literature, these two volumes tell the story of Chinese writing, both as an instrument of the state and as a medium for culture outside the state. The chapters, organized chronologically, treat not only poetry, drama, and fiction, but also historical writing and other prose forms. Written by internationally recognized experts in the field, the History frequently challenges current scholarship, from taking recent archeological discoveries into consideration to understanding Chinese modernity not as a sudden rupture with the past but as part of a longer process. The History offers both an integrated narrative, situating literature in its larger cultural context, and an overview of the key developments of the past millennia accessible to non-specialist readers as well as scholars and students of Chinese.

Buddhism Under the Tang is a history of the Buddhist Church during the T'ang dynasty (618-907), when Buddhist thought reached the pinnacle of its development. The three centuries spanned by the T'ang saw the formation of such important philosophical schools as the Fa-hsiang and Hua-yen, the consolidation of the T'ien-t'ai school, the introduction of Esoteric Buddhism from India, and the emergence of the Pure Land and Chan schools as the predominant expressions of Buddhist faith and practice. Professor Weinstein draws extensively upon both secular and ecclesiastical records to chronicle the vicissitudes of the Buddhist Church. The main focus is on the constantly changing relationship between the Buddhist Church and the T'ang state. Among the topics discussed in detail are the various attempts to curb the power of the Buddhist monasteries, the governance of the Buddhist clergy, the use of Buddhism to promote secular political ends, and the violent suppression of Buddhism by Emperor Wu (840-846) and its formal restoration under the last T'ang emperor.

Now in paperback, this highly acclaimed volume brings together some of the world's foremost historians of ideas to consider Machiavelli's political thought in the larger context of the European republican tradition, and the image of Machiavelli held by other republicans. An international team of scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds (notably law, philosophy, history and the history of political thought) explore both the immediate Florentine context in which Machiavelli wrote, and the republican legacy to which he contributed.