Critical and scarce: the remarkable career of limestone 1850–1914

ABSTRACT

Over the past decade, the notion of ‘critical raw materials’ has appeared as a political concept. The reliance on these raw materials is characterized by the ambivalence of enabling future development and indicating vulnerability posed by the risks of potential scarcity. In this paper, Haumann argues that the concept of ‘criticality’ can be extended to historical research on resource scarcity. It highlights the importance of the construction of value added chains, analysed as dynamic technological systems, as a background for the social reflection on scarcity. As an example, the paper analyses how the use of limestone became ‘critical’ when it was adopted as flux in iron- and steel-making during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, enabling unprecedented economic growth. It stresses the interrelation of the reflection on vulnerability and scarcity on the one hand and the dynamic (re-)construction of the technological system attuned to this material on the other.     

Waller R. Newell,Tyrants: A History of Power,Injustice, and Terror

Waller Newell's historical typology of tyrants looks even more interesting from the philosophical perspective of Plato's Gorgias. Socrates pinpoints a blind spot typical of the reformer tyrant in Gorgias, whose success depends on his personal, not his principled, influence. Polus, the garden-variety tyrant, wants to acquire more and more with impunity, an old story with the usual bad ending. Callicles pushes furthest of all: it's only the exceptional individual like himself who steels himself to follow ideology to the bitter end. The Socratic rejoinders do not persuade the interlocutors, but they might serve to educate liberal democrats: some tyrants are just incurable.     

宋子文、孔祥熙与国民政府的税制改革

中国封建社会的税收制度延续两千多年,到民国北京政府时期已被废弃,但新的资本主义税收制度还没有建立起来,财政税收特别混乱,致使北京政府根本没有什么税收可言,只能靠借债度日。南京国民政府成立后,极力改变这种状况,大力进行税制改革。宋子文出任财长时,基本上完成国、地税收系统的划分,并同时进行了对中央税收制度的改革。孔祥熙接任财长后,又对地方税收制度进行整顿和改革。在他们的精心策划和推动下,中国的资本主义财政税收制度已初步建立起来。一、对中央税制的整顿和改革宋子文出任财长后,首先划分了中央和地方财政收支…