Reflections on Commercial Life, an anthology of writings, from the ancient Greeks to contemporary thinkers, provides students, scholars, and general readers an opportunity to develop a more self-conscious and critical relationship to commercial life. Selections are drawn from seminal works of high intellectual and literary quality. Through an inquiry into history, nature, and outcomes, this volume offers the opportunity to explore, as never before, alternatives to modern commercial life.

Reflections on Commercial Life, an anthology of writings, from the ancient Greeks to contemporary thinkers, provides students, scholars, and general readers an opportunity to develop a more self-conscious and critical relationship to commercial life. Selections are drawn from seminal works of high intellectual and literary quality. Through an inquiry into history, nature, and outcomes, this volume offers the opportunity to explore, as never before, alternatives to modern commercial life.

The nature of ethics has been the subject of much controversy and argument in recent decades. Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics tackles these various debates, offering a wide-ranging, comprehensive, and provocative statement of the nature of theological ethics in global times. Offers an accessible, lively, and provocative statement of the nature of moral philosophy and theological ethics in contemporary times. Tackles various perspectives on debates about distinctly Christian ethics. Argues that we need to reframe the arena in which moral questions are asked. Engages a range of positions, exploring distinctively modern issues such as moral and cultural relativism, globalization, problems of consumption and violence, and religious pluralism. Addresses the complexity of certain ethical decisions, which are difficult and far from clear-cut, and yet presents an ethical understanding which is both humane and deeply religious.

The terms “capitalism” and “socialism” continue to haunt our political and economic imaginations, but we rarely consider their interconnected early history. Even the eighteenth century had its “socialists,” but unlike those of the nineteenth, they paradoxically sought to make the world safe for “capitalists.” The word “socialists” was first used in Northern Italy as a term of contempt for the political economists and legal reformers Pietro Verri and Cesare Beccaria, author of the epochal On Crimes and Punishments. Yet the views and concerns of these first socialists, developed inside a pugnacious intellectual coterie dubbed the Academy of Fisticuffs, differ dramatically from those of the socialists that followed. Sophus Reinert turns to Milan in the late 1700s to recover the Academy’s ideas and the policies they informed. At the core of their preoccupations lay the often lethal tension among states, markets, and human welfare in an era when the three were becoming increasingly intertwined. What distinguished these thinkers was their articulation of a secular basis for social organization, rooted in commerce, and their insistence that political economy trumped theology as the underpinning for peace and prosperity within and among nations. Reinert argues that the Italian Enlightenment, no less than the Scottish, was central to the emergence of political economy and the project of creating market societies. By reconstructing ideas in their historical contexts, he addresses motivations and contingencies at the very foundations of modernity.

Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation is generally acclaimed as being among the most influential works of economic history in the twentieth century, and remains as vital in the current historical conjuncture as it was in his own. In its critique of nineteenth-century ‘market fundamentalism’ it reads as a warning to our own neoliberal age, and is widely touted as a prophetic guidebook for those who aspire to understand the causes and dynamics of global economic turbulence at the end of the 2000s. Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market is the first comprehensive introduction to Polanyi’s ideas and legacy. It assesses not only the texts for which he is famous – prepared during his spells in American academia – but also his journalistic articles written in his first exile in Vienna, and lectures and pamphlets from his second exile, in Britain. It provides a detailed critical analysis of The Great Transformation, but also surveys Polanyi’s seminal writings in economic anthropology, the economic history of ancient and archaic societies, and political and economic theory. Its primary source base includes interviews with Polanyi’s daughter, Kari Polanyi-Levitt, as well as the entire compass of his own published and unpublished writings in English and German. This engaging and accessible introduction to Polanyi’s thinking will appeal to students and scholars across the social sciences, providing a refreshing perspective on the roots of our current economic crisis.

In the late 20th century, the world has grown increasingly smaller because of advances in technology and the erosion of the nation-state as a political paradigm. The process of globalization-with its promises of a common culture, a common currency, and a common government-offers a new political model for the world that fosters unity and community. At the same time, however, this process threatens to destroy the values, norms, and ideals that particular cultures have wrought and established and to thereby diminish the power of each culture's unique identity. As globalization occurs, society must decide which values will be normative and what roles that social institutions like religion and education will play in selecting and fostering these values. The contributors to this volume examine both the promise and the threat of globalization using the tools of theological ethics to understand and evaluate the "social contexts of life at the deepest moral and spiritual levels." This inaugural volume of a projected four volume series, Theology for the 21st Century: God and Globalization, examines five spheres of life-economics (Mammon), political science (Mars), psychology and sexuality (Eros), the mass media and the arts (Muses), and religion-that foster normative values for society. As the writers argue, their efforts attempt to determine whether "God is behind globalization in any substantive way." Contributors to the volume include: Roland Robertson, University of Pittsburgh; Yersu Kim, UNESCO; Donald W. Shriver, Jr., New York; William Schweiker, University of Chicago; Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, Eastern College; David Tracy, University of Chicago. Max L. Stackhouse teaches at Princeton Theological Seminary and is the author of Covenant and Commitments: Faith, Family, and Economic. Peter Paris teaches at Princeton Theological Seminary.

Student projects sponsored by Princeton, Hong Kong, and Tongji universities and reviewed by critics.

At a time when so many cracks have emerged within the imagined community of ‘the West', this important new book, by one of the leading social scientists in Europe, examines the intellectual history of comparing Europe and the United States. Claus Offe considers the perspectives adopted by three of Europe’s greatest social scientists – Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Weber and Theodor W. Adorno – in their comparative writings on Europe. While traveling, studying and working in the US, all three constantly looked back to their European origins, trying to decipher from their American experience what the future may hold for Europe, be it for better or worse. Alexis de Tocqueville, the French aristocrat, observed the functioning of American democracy with a mix of admiration, envy and deep concerns about the fate of liberty in the ‘democratic age'. Max Weber, the German sociologist, reported enthusiastically about the youthful energy he found in the United States, which, however, he saw as gradually succumbing to the stifling tendencies of European bureaucratization. Theodor W. Adorno, the critical theorist and refugee from Nazi Germany, observed with a sense of despair the workings of the American ‘culture industry’ which he equated to the totalitarian experience of Europe, only to switch to a much more favorable picture upon his return to Germany. Europe and the US are conventionally assumed to share the same trajectory and develop according to some common pattern of ‘occidental rationalism', with the observed differences resulting from mere lags and relative advances on one side or the other. In this insightful book, Offe questions the relevance of this paradigm to transatlantic relations today.

Businesses and other organizations are increasingly hiring anthropologists and other ethnographically-oriented social scientists as employees, consultants, and advisors. The nature of such work, as described in this volume, raises crucial questions about potential implications to disciplines of critical inquiry such as anthropology. In addressing these issues, the contributors explore how researchers encounter and engage sites of organizational practice in such roles as suppliers of consumer-insight for product design or marketing, or as advisors on work design or business and organizational strategies. The volume contributes to the emerging canon of corporate ethnography, appealing to practitioners who wish to advance their understanding of the practice of corporate ethnography and providing rich material to those interested in new applications of ethnographic work and the ongoing rethinking of the nature of ethnographic praxis.