21,393 research outputs found
ADAM SMITH'S OPTIMISTIC TELEOLOGICAL VIEW OF HISTORY
No full textAdam Smith's four-stage theory provides the framework for his writings on history. The fourth stage is the commercial epoch; the culmination of history in this stage is a key component in the conventional interpretation of Adam Smith as a prophet of commercialism. In two historical case studies Smith shows the capacity of commercial society to regenerate itself. This potent capacity suggests that commercial society is inevitable. At a certain point in time it also overcomes the major obstacles to its permanence. Smith's philosophy of history anticipates the end of history views of Kant and Hegel.Political Economy,
How Might Adam Smith Pay Professors Today?
No full textAdam Smith’s proposal for paying professors was intended to induce increased faculty knowledge. If students have imperfect information about what they learn, and universities can only imperfectly measure the input of faculty time in student learning, publications may be used to measure faculty knowledge. If professors’ ability to publish is positively related to their ability to produce student learning, which universities can imperfectly measure, publications may be necessary to attract more able professors. Since research signals faculty knowledge, schools that do not value publications per se could require higher publication standards and pay higher wages than schools that value only publications.
ADAM SMITH'S VIEW OF HISTORY: CONSISTENT OR PARADOXICAL?
No full textThe conventional interpretation of Adam Smith is that he is a prophet of commercialism. The liberal capitalist reading of Smith is consistent with the view that history culminates in commercial society. The first part of the article develops this optimistic interpretation of Smith's view of history. Smith implies that commercial society is the end of history because 1) it supplies the ends of nature that he identifies; 2) it is inevitable; and 3) it is permanent. The second part of the article shows that Smith has some dark moments in his writings where he seems to reject completely such teleological notions. In this more civic humanist mood he confesses that commercial society does not supply the ends of nature, nor is it inevitable, nor is it permanent. Both views exist in Smith and the commentator is forced to choose between passages in Smith's work in order to support a particular interpretation of the former's view of history.Political Economy,
Adam Smith and Roman Servitudes
No full textThis essay is a preprint of an article that appeared at: Tijdschrift voor Rechstsgeschiedenis, 72 (2004), 327–57.This essay discusses Adam Smith historical jurisprudence and his use of Roman law materials in his Lectures on Jurisprudence. It argues that Smith found it difficult to maintain his theory of legal development in the face of a highly developed body of Roman law literature
THE THEOLOGICAL FOUNDATION OF ADAM SMITH'S WORK
No full textThe paper will discuss the theological foundation to Smith's writings. Teleology, final causes and divine design were initially seen as central to understanding Smith's writings. Over time, this view fell out of fashion. In the period after World War II, with the rise of positivism, commentators tended to overlook or downplay this interpretation. In the last decade, or so, teleology has started to be restored to its former position as an essential element in understanding Smith. After spelling out Smith's teleology and his view of final causes, divine design and the ends of nature, we try to explain the Panglossian nature of the 'new theistic view' of Smith. While our view differs somewhat, we agree with the essence of the 'new view' claim: a theological view exists in Smith which underpins his moral and economic theories.Political Economy,
Interview. Matthew Joseph with Adam Gussow, musician and author
No full textInterview in which Adam Gussow discusses hill country blues musi
Postwar Englishness in the fiction of Pat Barker, Graham Swift and Adam Thorpe
No full textThe widely-recognised crisis of Englishness in the 1980s and 1990s has generally been explained as a response to the end of empire. If the place of memories of the
First and Second World Wars in this crisis has been considered at all, these have generally been assumed to support a nostalgic version of English or British national
identity. Taking three contemporary British novelists-Graham Swift, Pat Barker and Adam Thorpe-as examples, however, this thesis argues that the late-twentiethcentury
memory of these conflicts is strikingly ambivalent, and that the contemporary crisis of Englishness must be understood not only as postcolonial, but also, in a
strong sense, as postwar.
The Introduction sets out the parameters of critical discussion of latetwentieth-century Englishness to date and explains my use of the term 'postwar', as marking the continuing cultural legacy of the world wars, and the process of interrogative re-reading of that legacy undertaken in the contemporary fiction I discuss. It also challenges the assumption that 'nostalgia' and a 'healthy' attitude to the past can necessarily be easily distinguished, through a discussion of postFreudian
psychoanalytic approaches to mourning and melancholia. Chapter One considers three writers of the early to mid-twentieth century, Siegfried Sassoon, J. B.Priestley, and Elizabeth Bowen, in order to suggest the nature of the questions about Englishness, war and violence which re-emerge with the breakdown of Britain's postwar social and political consensus from the mid-1970s onward. Chapter Two
then discusses Graham Swift's early novels, The Sweet Shop Owner, Shuttlecock and Waterland, arguing that critical attention to his metafictional concerns in Waterland
has meant that his interest in suburban English life as encrypting memories of war has been overlooked. Chapter Three proceeds to Pat Barker's The Regeneration Trilogy, charting a two-way process of haunting through which contemporary concerns with violence are read back into the historical and literary record of the First World War, and simultaneously seem to re-emerge in the present as the return of the violence underpinning a melancholic cultural attachment to the very English narrative of 'doomed youth'. My discussion in Chapter Four of Adam Thorpe's novels Ulverton, Still and Pieces of Light emphasises their exploration of the violence at the heart of the 'deep England' evoked in heritage representations of Englishness. I suggest, however, that Thorpe's attempts to find appropriate fictional forms for ambivalence and melancholia are at times closer to paralysed repetitions than to interrogations of Englishness. My argument concludes with a reading of Swift's Last Orders, which I contend enacts the beginnings of a movement beyond the wartime end of a certain England and Englishness. Its misreading by critics as parochial and nostalgic, I suggest, indicates the extent of critical misunderstanding of the troubled memory of the world wars in contemporary Britain. It also testifies to
the difficulty and the necessity of the creative and critical work on postwar Englishness undertaken by the writers considered in this study
Książę Adam Jerzy Czartoryski i jego stronnicy w świetle historiografii ukraińskiej
No full textIn 1937, the Warsaw historian Marceli Handelsman published a work entitled Ukraińska polityka
ks. Adama Czartoryskiego przed wojną krymską [Ukrainian politics of Prince Adam Czartoryski
before the Crimean War]. So far, this book has been used by historians as the primary source of
information on the Ukrainian issue in the views of the Hotel Lambert’s leader. The author of this
text has decided to collect Ukrainian works referring to the topic inaugurated by Handelsman. Unfortunately, no larger study has been prepared on the Ukrainian side. However, a number of articles
and encyclopaedic notes showing Prince Adam and his Eastern policy (especially during his stay
at the court of Tsar Alexander I Romanov) has been published. Ukrainian authors paid much more
attention to Czartoryski’s associates, who tried to put his ideas into practice. Ukrainian researchers
wrote mainly about Michał Czaykowski (Sadyk Pasha) organizing the Cossack troops in the Ottoman Empire, about Hipolit Terlecki striving for the union of the Orthodox and Roman Catholic
Churches, and finally about the ethnographer and writer Franciszek Duchiński clearly separating
Ukraine from Russia in his writings
Adam smith and the Church of Scotland
No full textIn contrast to the French Enlightenment, the Scottish Enlightenment was neither anticlerical nor anti-religious. Intellectuals such as William Robertson, a historian, Hugh Blair, professor of rhetoric and belles letters, Adam Ferguson, professor of natural and later moral philosophy, John Home, playwright, Alexander Carlyle, author of numerous pamphlets were all ministers in the Church of Scotland and belonged to the Moderate party. Adam Smith shared the culture of intellectuals of this party. They had a love of learning, faith in reason and science, a preference for social order and stability and a commitment to religious tolerance and freedom of expression. Smith was one of the founding members of the Select Society and one of contributors of Edinburgh Review with William Robertson and others. In Wealth of Nations Smith had mentioned on the Church of Scotland. He praised ministers as ‘a learned, decent, independent and respectable sets of men’ and that they maintained ‘the uniformity of faith, the spirit of order, regularity, and austere morals in the great body of the people’.departmental bulletin pape
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