Contesting Marshall Sahlins on Kinship

In a recent two‐part article on the nature of kinship, Marshall Sahlins maintains that performative criteria for kin‐reckoning are at least as salient as procreative ones, and that, at conception, an individual is endowed with a wide circle of kin, including the ancestral dead. For both reasons, he argues, there is no warrant for granting privileged status to what anthropologists have called ‘primary’ kinship. The contentions here are that performative criteria are modeled upon procreative ones; that ties to ancestral figures are seen as antithetical to procreative ties; and that, therefore, all kinship constructs are derived from nuclear family relationships. Evidence in support of these contentions is provided from the Mae Enga, Fiji, the Trobriands, and Aboriginal Australia.     

Reasons of the Heart: Weber and Arendt on Emotion in Politics

In many fields of contemporary thought and scholarship, the classical construct of a clean division between “emotion” and “reason” has been revised. As a result, politics is no longer seen as a sphere in need of protection against the dark forces of emotion that might creep in where they do not belong. Against the backdrop of this conceptual shift the article examines the theme of emotion in the political thought of Max Weber and Hannah Arendt. The aim is to gauge the extent to which these thinkers can be read as having prepared the ground for a reassessment of the role of emotion in public life that moves beyond the classical European dichotomy of reason vs. passion. Two claims are being made. Both thinkers were still immersed in a conceptual world in which emotions were irrational, disruptive of appropriate ways of reasoning and as such closely linked to the dark powers of the masses. Yet both also held subtler positions on the relationship between reason, emotion, and democracy, and these positions are less well understood.     

Max Weber on Causal Analysis,Interpretation, and Comparison

Max Weber's methodological writings offered a model of singular causal analysis that anticipated key elements of contemporary Anglo‐American philosophy of the social and cultural sciences. The model accurately portrayed crucial steps and dimensions of causal reasoning in these disciplines, outlining a dynamic and probabilistic conception of historical processes, counterfactual reasoning, and comparison as a substitute for counterfactual argument. Above all, Weber recognized the interpretation of human actions as a subcategory of causal analysis, in which the agents‘ visions of desired outcomes, together with their beliefs about how to bring them about, cause them to act as they do.     

马克斯·韦伯与古代史研究

一、引言马克斯·韦伯 (ＭａｘＷｅｂｅｒ)由于在方法论、比较宗教研究和社会经济学领域的开创性著作 ,①长期以来作为“社会学之父”著称于世 ,相对而言 ,他的带有历史学色彩的早期著作则较少受到人们的关注和重视。这种偏差由于学科体制形成方面的原因而受到进一步强化。在韦伯的时代 ,社会学作为一门自成体系的学科尚处于草创时期 ,“在海德堡 ,尽管已经以社会学为出发点来考虑许多问题 ,但作为研究社会的科学尚未在学院体系中出现。”②其前身在日耳曼地区是被称为国家学的学科 ,它由 (用现在的学科分类标准 )经济史、法理学、社会学和…     

马歇尔计划与美元霸权的确立

二战结束之际诞生的布雷顿森林体系虽为美元霸权提供了国际制度的平台,但美元霸权地位的真正起步却缘于冷战开始之际的马歇尔计划。通过援助西欧重建,美元实际上在布雷顿森林体系发挥作用之前已全面介入了西欧的经济,并由此起步演变成为战后世界的霸权货币。     

John Marshall Harlan's Political Memoir

Near the end of his life, John Marshall Harlan wrote a number of biographical essays, presumably at the request of his children. Most of the essays relate to his experiences in the Civil War. The essay reprinted here instead recounts Harlan's political career before he joined the Supreme Court. Although he rarely won any elections and only held a couple of offices, Harlan's political odyssey is significant in that it shows how his social views were formed. Harlan's transformation from a staunch anti‐abolitionist to a civil‐rights advocate can be viewed as a series of reactions against various opponents as he struggled to find his political identity after the collapse of the Whig party in the 1850s.