Minds of caste – Discrimination and its affects

This guest editorial considers the relevance of caste in today's world in terms of ‘castes of mind’.     

The Welfare Economics of Rural-To-Urban Migration: The Harris-Todaro Model Revisited

In this paper we extend the Harris-Todaro model of rural-to-urban migration to include urban agglomeration effects, some urban real wage flexibility, and a government budget constraint. Without employment subsidies laissez-faire migration is excessive unless real wage flexibility and agglomeration effects are high. Laissez-faire migration is too low compared with the first-best outcome supported by a subsidy, if its financing involves no costs. Simulations suggest that such a program would imply a substantial increase in taxation. If, as seems likely, an increase of this magnitude involves economic costs then the optimal outcome falls well short of first-best.     

马的胸椎异常及其利用方式的演变

马的驯化及使用深刻影响到人类文明的进程。马不仅为人类提供肉、奶等蛋白性食物,而且极大地提高了人类运输和战争能力,推进了人类的迁徙、民族的融合、语言和文化的传播等等。可以说,没有一种家畜像马一样,在战争、运输和人类社会交往方面,发挥出如此重要的作用。骑乘无疑是人类使役马匹的重要方面。如何研究遗址出土的马骨,探讨其是否被骑乘,一直是考古学家关心的课题。本文的作者玛莎·莱文(Marsha Levine)博士等运用古病理学对马的利用方式进行了探讨,研究了马的被骑乘与否和马的第11-18胸椎异常之间的关联。他们对比了未被人骑乘的现代马骨和明确被人骑乘的早期铁器时代和中世纪的马骨,认为在早期铁器时代的马胸椎上出现的异常模式很可能与骑乘有关,从而表明从动物古病理学的角度探讨古代人类对家马的利用是切实可行的,这一研究思路非常值得我们借鉴。动物古病理学研究在国外开展已久,然而这一研究在国内尚十分薄弱,这正是我们今后努力的方向之一。     

Western women and imperialism: Complicity and resistance

The eighteenth-century moral philosopher Archibald Campbell is now largely forgotten, even to specialists in the Scottish Enlightenment. Yet his work is worth recovering both as part of the immediate reception of Bernard Mandeville and Francis Hutcheson's rival moral philosophies, and for better understanding the state of Scottish moral philosophy a decade before David Hume published his Treatise of Human Nature. This paper offers a reading of Campbell as deploying a specifically Epicurean philosophy that resists both the Augustinianism of Mandeville, and the Stoicism of Hutcheson. This leads him onto ground later claimed more conclusively by Hume, whilst helping us to better conceptualise the deployment and recovery of Hellenistic thought in the early modern period.     

Book reviews

COMPARING FOREIGN POLICIES: Theories, Findings, and Methods. JAMES N. ROSENAU (ed.) Beverley Hills, Sage Publications distributed by John Wiley & Sons, New York, 442 pp., ISBN 0–470–73613–5, $A23.

NATIONS IN CONFLICT: National Growth and International Violence. NAZLI CHOUCRI and ROBERT C. NORTH, W.H. Freeman and Company, San Francisco, 356 pp., ISBN 0–7167–0773‐X, $US12.95.

CHINA'S FOREIGN RELATIONS SINCE 1949. ALAN LAWRANCE (ed.) Routledge & Kegan Paul, London and Boston, 1975. xii + 261pp. 0–7100–8092–1. $20.80 hardcover.

THE FATE OF THE ATLANTIC COMMUNITY. ELLIOT R. GOODMAN. Praeger, for the Atlantic Council of the United States, New York, 1975. pp.xx, 583. $27.50.

AFTER HITLER: REPORT FROM A WEST GERMAN CITY. JÜRGEN NEVEN‐DU MONT. Translated by Ralph Manheim. Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1974. 319 pp. $2.20