Demetrius the Chronographer and 141 BCE

We only have six fragments from a book written by Demetrius the Chronographer. Scholars claim he lived and worked in Alexandria about 225-200 BCE and he is an early witness for the date of the LXX. However, the few chronological details we have indicate that he used the year 141 BCE as the base year for his chronology. There are no early witnesses for the LXX and there are no reliable obstacles for lowering the date for the LXX to 130 B.C. or even lower.     

Inequality reconsidered

Lloyd A. Fallers. Inequality: Social Stratification Reconsidered. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1973. xii + 330 pp. Tables, figures, bibliography, and index. $12.50.     

Consuming relationships 1

Fred Hirsch. Social Limits to Growth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976. xi + 208 pp. $10.00. Paperback edition, 1978. $3.95. A Twentieth Century Fund Study.     

Two AHA Sessions: The Revolutionary Mr. Kuhn and the Evolutionary Mr. Bertalanffy

Abstract

Quantitative methods of content analysis have become established in most subfields of political science, but remain relatively unutilized in studies of political theory, despite the exclusive focus of that subfield on textual sources. This article develops a variation of content analysis—termed usage analysis—and employs it to resolve a standing debate in scholarship on Cicero's political theory regarding the synonymy of the major Latin terms for the state (civitas and res publica). The resulting distinction between these concepts then informs an exposition of Cicero's ideal state not as the Roman Republic itself or the mixed constitution alone, but as a universal, everlasting political society supported by justice, a mixed constitution, and active citizenship.     

South Africa's Departure from the Commonwealth, 1960–1961

Famine threatened the lives of over twenty million residents of north China in 1920, prompting a massive, and ultimately successful, relief effort. Scholarship on the famine has largely credited China's foreign and coastal, cosmopolitan Chinese circles with this humanitarian feat at the expense of what was in fact a surprisingly effective Chinese state apparatus that year, as well as local relief operations by many famine-stricken communities themselves. This study captures a very specific moment of US and European cultural production on ‘China’ and ‘the Chinese’ in which the great north China famine of 1920–1 occurred, to argue that our current understanding of Chinese relief culture circa 1920 remains largely a product of foreign characterization (by the celebrated likes of Somerset Maugham and Bertrand Russell) and political commentary by reformist Chinese during a period of post-May Fourth cultural turmoil. If we hold the output of these writers up to alternative original sources on events that year, it becomes clear that the historiography on China's greatest humanitarian crisis of the first quarter of the twentieth century remains insufficiently insulated from the raw discursive climate in which the crisis unfolded.