Suchergebnisse

This is the first in-depth study of Sino-American relations during the Theodore Roosevelt administration. In its examination of the issues and problems that arose in U.S.-Chinese relations during this time, the book argues that a stereotyped perception of China and its people inhibited American policy responses during Roosevelt's presidency.

"The ideas contained in Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies--one of the most important tracts in political philosophy in the twentieth century--are relevant to anyone seeking to understand the recent history of the East Asian economies. Even though Popper wrote his tract to provide an explanation for both the rise and objectionable nature of totalitarian regimes in Europe in the twentieth century, many of the arguments that he advanced in this European context also explain the social, political and economic relationships that are seen in modern South Eastern Asian economies. The narrative of this book is driven by a research agenda that is inter-disciplinary in nature, since to make the link between the Popperian framework and East Asian socio-economic relationships the contributing authors needed to draw upon research fields as far apart as political philosophy and East-Asian studies. With one or two exceptions, however, nearly all of the contributing authors have a background in economics, and this background is reflected in the way that they have sought to tackle the research question. This book is, in short, an inter-disciplinary exercise undertaken from an economics perspective, and hence it may best be described as an exercise in political economy rather than pure analytical economics"--

John Neville Keynes is best known for being the father of John Maynard Keynes and for writing The Scope and Method of Political Economy (1891). The lesser of these achievements was widely accepted as the definitive methodological tract in the field of political economy in the late-Victorian period. In this publication Keynes shed new light on many of the pressing methodological and epistemological problems of the day; he supplied the methodological underpinnings to Alfred Marshall's majestic synthesis of late-Victorian theoretical opinion, as articulated in his Principles of Economics (1890); and, whatis of paramount concern to me in this paper, he employed some deft rhetoric to hasten the end of the long and acrimonious methodological debate between the orthodox and historical economists that is now generally referred to as the English Methodenstreit or "battle of methods." Keynes consciously strove to provide a solution to the "battle of methods" that would be acceptable to both the orthodox and historical economists and, for this reason, The Scope and Method is understandably characterized by a conciliatory tone and repeated, almost desperate, attempts to see value in arguments from both sides of the conceptual divide. Keynes nonetheless failed in his quest to be even-handed. He was a logician of the first order who was extremely impressed by the neat logical lines of the orthodox framework, and hence, for all his intellectual honesty and obvious good will, he could not help but interpret the debate through orthodox spectacles. The chief rhetorical ploy he drew upon to achieve this orthodox-leaning settlement between the principal antagonists was the unconscious one of the "passive-aggressive" in which the advocate repeatedly makes the outward motions of conceding ground while, in effect, conceding little. The specific mechanics of this strategy entailed reformulating each precept from the historicist conceptual framework so that it would not be in conflict with its nearest orthodox opposite (itself carefully reinterpreted by Keynes), either by showing that it was identical to this orthodox opposite or by arguing that different precepts were appropriate in different situations, and then dismissing the entire methodological debate—which was then in its third decade—as one long and lamentable misunderstanding. Keynes was ably assisted in executing this strategy by his Cambridge colleagues and, for this reason, the quest to settle the debate by providing orthodox interpretations of the precepts then at stake may be termed the "Cambridge solution." Marshall and Henry Sidgwick played particularly important roles in carrying this rhetorical assault, as the former's more genuine sympathy for many of the historicist ideas and the latter's celebrated honesty made the Cambridge quest appear sincere.