PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY'S RETURN

Kojin Karatani's Structure of World History seeks to rescue the philosophy of history and restore to it the relationship between philosophical reflection and historical practice. This connection is particularly pertinent in Karatani's case since he had earlier worked out the philosophical scaffolding of this monumental study in his book Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, which embarked on a “return to Capital once more to read the potential that has been overlooked.” By juxtaposing Marx to Kant and vice versa to discover the importance of exchange over production, he found what was to become the informing principle of his later philosophy of history. While Karatani's accounting of the structure of world history presumes to recount the passage of the world's history from nomadic societies to the present as a condition to rethink “social formations” from a perspective that recalls the form of a stagist philosophy of history attributed to Marx and Engels, he has abandoned its informing principle of the modes of production. Instead, he offers the perspective of modes of exchange, which means waiving any consideration concerning who owns the means of production: the putative “economic base” underlying superstructural representations like the state, religion, and culture upheld by a vulgate tradition of Marxian historical writing and discounted by bourgeois historiography as deterministic. The decision to shift to modes of exchange means rooting the primary mode of exchange taking place first in nomadic societies, rather than forms of production and archaic communal ownership of land. Although his revised scheme still accords priority to the economic, the putative division between base and superstructures still persists, even though the latter are still produced by the former, which is now the mode of exchange. Whereas Marx privileged commodity exchange as dominant, Karatani places greater emphasis on the earliest mode of exchange, which consists of the “pure gift,” associated with early nomadic social formations and reciprocity practices by clans, and seems to offer nomadic/clan communalism as a model that resembles Marx's own strategic linking of the surviving Russian commune and contemporary capitalism. The point to this project is to transcend the hegemonic trinity of capital, nation, and state and satisfy a desire to share with other globalists a vision that aims to overcome the defects of capitalism and the nation‐state and the failure of a Marxian expectation that nation‐states will simply wither away with the final surpassing of capitalism. To this end, Karatani's appeal to Kant offers to inject a moral element absent in the merely economic structure of history that will thus provide the promise of “world peace,” which ultimately requires an abolition of the nation‐state as a condition for realizing a “simultaneous bourgeois revolution” that would finally overcome state and capital and establish a world federation.     

Epidemiologists explain pellagra: gender,race, and political economy in the work of Edgar Sydenstricker

Between 1900 and 1940, at least 100,000 individuals in the southern United States died of pellagra, a dietary deficiency disease. Although half of these pellagra victims were African-American and more than two-thirds were women, contemporary observers paid little attention to these gender and racial differences in their analyses of disease. This article reviews the classic epidemiological studies of Joseph Goldberger and Edgar Sydenstricker, who argued that pellagra was deeply rooted in the political economy of cotton monoculture in the South. The methods that Sydenstricker brought to epidemiology from early work on political economy obscured the role of gender inequalities in pellagra, and his focus on economic underdevelopment led him to ignore the prominent role of African-Americans as pellagra's principal victims. Research methods and traditions, no less than more overt ideologies, played a role in maintaining the subordinate social position of women and African-Americans in the southern United States.     

Reviews

John W. Burton, Global Conflict: The Domestic Sources of International Crisis. Wheatsheaf Books‐Harvester Press, 1984 (paperbacked edition 1987), pp. xiiv + 194. $27.95.

Michael Banks (ed.), Conflict in World Society: A New Perspective On International Relations. Wheatsheaf Books‐Harvester Press, 1984 (paperback edition 1987), pp xxi + 234. $29.95.

Adam Watson, Diplomacy: The Dialogue Between States. Methu‐en, London, 1984, pp. 239. $14.95.

David Steele, The Reform of the United Nations. Croom Helm, London and Sydney, 1987, pp. 191. £22.50.

Brian Urquhart, The United Nations and International Law. The Rede Lecture, 1985. Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp.20. $10.50.

Christine Jennett and Randal G. Stewart (eds), Three Worlds of Inequality: Race, Class and Gender. Macmillan, South Melbourne, 1987, pp. x+395. $24.95.

Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Basil Black‐well, Oxford, 1986, pp. xviii + 312. $87.50. Paul Brass (ed.), Ethnic Groups and the State. Croom Helm, London and Sydney, 1985, pp.341. £17.95.

Michael MccGwire, Military Objectives in Soviet Foreign Policy. The Brookings Institution. Washington, D.C., 1987, pp. xiv + 530. $US18.95.

Mark Frankland, The Sixth Continent — Russia and Mikhail Gorbachev, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1987, pp. x+292. $39.59.

Martin Gilbert, Shcharansky — Hero of Our Time, Penguin Books, Harmonsworth, 1987, pp. ix +467. $14.95.

Bundesinstitut fur ostwissenschaftliche und internationale Stu‐dien, Cologne, The Soviet Union 1982–83. Holmes and Meier, London, 1985, pp. xi + 392. No price given.

Arthur R. Day, East Bank/West Bank: Jordan and the Prospects for Peace. Council on Foreign Relations, New York, 1986, pp. x + 166. $US17.5 (doth), $US8.95 (paper).

Michael Petit, Peacemakers at War — A Marine's Account of the Beirut Catastrophe. Faber and Faber, Boston, 1986, pp.229. $36.95.

Research Institute for Peace and Security, Tokyo, Asian Security Annual Report 1986. RIPS/Brassey's Defence Publishers, London, 1986, viii + pp. 204. $77.00 (cloth), $38.50 (paper).

Economics & Pacific Security: The 1986 Pacific Symposium. National Defense University Press, Washington DC, 1987, xi + pp. 260. No price given.

Alan Rix, Coming to Terms. The Politics of Australia's Trade with Japan 1945–57. Allen & Unwin Australia, Sydney, 1986, pp.267. $29.95 (cloth), $17.95 (paper).

David Anderson, An Analysis of Japanese Coking Coal Procurement Policies: The Canadian and Australian Experience. Centre for Resources Studies, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, 1987, pp. xvii + 222. No price given.

Phillip Darby, Three Faces of Imperialism: British and American Approaches to Asia and Africa 1870–1970. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1987, pp.vii + 267. $US22.50.

Neville and Yu‐Ying Brown, South Africa: Sanctions or Targetted Aid? Muirhead Foreign Policy Papers No 1, University of Birmingham, 1987, pp. 51. £3.50.

William Minter, King Solomon's Mines Revisited: Western Interests and the Burdened History of Southern Africa, Basic Books, New York, 1986.

Jan Knippers Black, The Dominican Republic, Politics and Development in an Unsovereign Slate. Allen & Unwin, Boston, 1986, pp.xi+164. $27.95.

Glenyys Romanes, Eve Scarfe & John Scott‐Murphy: Central America. A Report from the ACFOA Fact Finding Mission to Guatemala, EL Salvador and Nicaragua, August‐September 1986. Australian Council for Overseas Aid, Canberra, 1987, pp.vi + 50. $5.00.

Edward Dommen and Philippe Hein (eds), States, Microstates and Islands. Croom Helm, London and Sydney, 1985, pp. 216. £19.95.

Commonwealth Secretariat, Vulnerability. Small States in the Global Society. Report of a Commonwealth Consultative Group. Commonwealth Secretariat, London, no date (1986?), pp. xii + 126. £5.00.

Te'o IJ. Fairbarin, Island Economies. Studies from the South Pacific. Institute of Pacific Studies, University of the South Pacific, Suva, 1985, pp. xxi + 442. No price given.     

The Validity of Hierarchical Information Integration Choice Experiments to Model Residential Preference and Choice

Integrated conjoint choice models have recently been introduced in the consumer choice literature as an approach to include a large number of influential attributes in a choice experiment and statistically test its assumed hierarchical structure. In the present article, the validity of integrated conjoint choice models is tested using housing choice as an example. The results of this study suggest that the parameters of housing utility functions derived from integrated conjoint choice models are not statistically different across experiments nor are they different from those derived from nonhierarchical conjoint models. This yields support for the validity of these models. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

An Efficient Search Strategy for Site-Selection Decisions in an Expert System

This paper describes an algorithm for spatial search, which is used in an expert system for site selection. The algorithm, named ProfMat, is able to find the best site in the area of interest even when the number of possible sites is large and many decision criteria are involved. Compared to commonly used search procedures, ProfMat improves the efficiency of spatial search in two ways. First, the best site is identified through an iterative rather than a linear process of selection and evaluation of optional sites. Second, an area is searched by narrowing down the focus to increasingly smaller areas and, thus, sites are evaluated as much as possible groupwise. The ProfMat procedure is illustrated by analyzing the problem of retail site selection. A comparison with alternative search procedures shows that ProfMat considerably reduces the evaluation costs needed to find the best site. The implementation of the algorithm in an expert system shows how ProfMat can be used in combination with specialist's knowledge to solve site-selection problems. The efficiency of the procedure allows considering large sets of optional sites, so that it may improve the quality of the outcome.