Challenges the powerful and pervasive ideas concerning political economy, international relations, and ethics in the modern world. This title provides a fundamental cultural critique of political economy and critically describes the nature of the mainstream understanding of economics.

Savage Exchange explores the politics of representation during the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) at a pivotal moment when China was asserting imperialist power on the Eurasian continent and expanding its local and long-distance (“Silk Road”) markets. Tamara T. Chin explains why rival political groups introduced new literary forms with which to represent these expanded markets. To promote a radically quantitative approach to the market, some thinkers developed innovative forms of fiction and genre. In opposition, traditionalists reasserted the authority of classical texts and advocated a return to the historical, ethics-centered, marriage-based, agricultural economy that these texts described. The discussion of frontiers and markets thus became part of a larger debate over the relationship between the world and the written word. These Han debates helped to shape the ways in which we now define and appreciate early Chinese literature and produced the foundational texts of Chinese economic thought. Each chapter in the book examines a key genre or symbolic practice (philosophy, fu-rhapsody, historiography, money, kinship) through which different groups sought to reshape the political economy. By juxtaposing well-known texts with recently excavated literary and visual materials, Chin elaborates a new literary and cultural approach to Chinese economic thought. Co-Winner, 2016 Harry Levin Prize, American Comparative Literature Association; Honorable Mention, 2016 Joseph Levenson Book Prize, Pre-1900 Category, China and Inner Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies

In Savage Economy: The Returns of Middle English Romance, Walter Wadiak traces the evolution of the medieval English romance from its thirteenth-century origins to 1500, and from a genre that affirmed aristocratic identity to one that appealed more broadly to an array of late medieval communities. Essential to this literary evolution is the concept and practice of “noble” gift-giving, which binds together knights and commoners in ways that both echo and displace the notorious violence of many of these stories. Wadiak begins with the assumption that “romance” names a particular kind of chivalric fantasy to which violence is central, just as violence was instrumental to the formation and identity of the medieval warrior aristocracy. A traditional view is that the violence of romance stories is an expression of aristocratic privilege wielded by a military caste in its relations with one another as well as with those lower on the social scale. In this sense, violence is the aristocratic gift that underwrites and reaffirms the feudal power of a privileged group, with the noble gift performing the symbolic violence on which romance depends in order to present itself as both a coded threat and an expression of chivalric values. Well-known examples of romance in Middle English, such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, are considered alongside more “popular” examples of the genre to demonstrate a surprising continuity of function across a range of social contexts. Wadiak charts a trajectory from violence aimed directly at securing feudal domination to the subtler and more diffuse modes of coercion that later English romances explore. Ultimately, this is a book about the ways in which romance lives on as an idea, even as the genre itself begins to lose ground at the close of the Middle Ages.

The American public has a fascination with railroad wrecks that goes back a long way. One hundred years ago, staged railroad accidents were popular events. At the Iowa State fair in 1896, 89,000 people paid $20 each, at current prices, to see two trains, throttles wide open, collide with each other. "Head-on Joe" Connolly made a business out of "cornfield meets" holding seventy-three events in thirty-six years. Picture books of train wrecks do good business presumably because a train wreck can guarantee a spectacular destruction of property without the messy loss of life associated with aircraft accidents. A "train wreck" has also entered the popular vocabulary in a most unusual way. When political manoeuvering leads to failure to pass the federal budget, and a shutdown is likely of government services, this is widely called a "train wreck. " In business and team sports, bumbling and lack of coordination leading to a spectacular and public failure to perform is also called "causing a train wreck. " A person or organization who is disorganized may be labelled a "train wreck. " It is therefore not surprising that the public perception of the safety of railroads centers on images of twisted metal and burning tank cars, and a general feeling that these events occur quite often. After a series of railroad accidents, such as occurred in the winter of 1996 or the summer of 1997, there are inevitable calls that government "should do something.

A pioneering book that takes us beyond economic debate to show how inequality is returning us to a past dominated by empires, dynastic elites, and ethnic divisions. The economic facts of inequality are clear. The rich have been pulling away from the rest of us for years, and the super-rich have been pulling away from the rich. More and more assets are concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Mainstream economists say we need not worry; what matters is growth, not distribution. In The Return of Inequality, acclaimed sociologist Mike Savage pushes back, explaining inequality’s profound deleterious effects on the shape of societies. Savage shows how economic inequality aggravates cultural, social, and political conflicts, challenging the coherence of liberal democratic nation-states. Put simply, severe inequality returns us to the past. By fracturing social bonds and harnessing the democratic process to the strategies of a resurgent aristocracy of the wealthy, inequality revives political conditions we thought we had moved beyond: empires and dynastic elites, explosive ethnic division, and metropolitan dominance that consigns all but a few cities to irrelevance. Inequality, in short, threatens to return us to the very history we have been trying to escape since the Age of Revolution. Westerners have been slow to appreciate that inequality undermines the very foundations of liberal democracy: faith in progress and trust in the political community’s concern for all its members. Savage guides us through the ideas of leading theorists of inequality, including Marx, Bourdieu, and Piketty, revealing how inequality reimposes the burdens of the past. At once analytically rigorous and passionately argued, The Return of Inequality is a vital addition to one of our most important public debates.

Classic analysis of the foundations of statistics and development of personal probability, one of the greatest controversies in modern statistical thought. Revised edition. Calculus, probability, statistics, and Boolean algebra are recommended.

This volume is not simply another general theory of world system. It is a theoretically and ethnographically informed collection of essays which opens up new questions through an examination of concrete cases, covering global and local questions of political economy.