BOOK REVIEWS and PRESENTATIONS HSS IV.1 (2015) DOI: 10

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BOOK REVIEWS and PRESENTATIONS HSS IV.1 (2015) DOI: 10.1515/hssr -2015-0009 BOOK REVIEWS: Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, Bucharest, Humanitas, 2014, 528 p. ISBN 978-9735042547 ; Robert J. Holton and Bryan S. Turner, Max Weber on Economy and Society, New York, Routledge, 2011, 224 p. ISBN 978-0415611176 ________________________________________________________

Robert J. Holton and Bryan S. Turner, Max Weber on Economy and Society, New York, Routledge, 2011, 224 p. Sanjoy KUMAR CHANDA Sociology Discipline, Khulna University, Bangladesh

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The book Max Weber on Economy and Society written by Robert J. Holton and Bryan S. Turner includes Weber’s sociology with its focus on law, religion, politics, and economic life. First published in 1989, this book emphasizes the key tenets of Weber’s sociology and points to the valuable legacy of Weber’s thought in contemporary intellectual debate, focusing on secularism and the rationalization of global cultures, the crisis of Marxism, the rise of the New Right, and the emergence of post-modernism. But, this new edition in 2011, the authors have tried to defend a version of social liberalism against both left and right wing criticism via an analysis of Weber’s position. One of the fundamental residual problems left unanswered by Marxist thought, radical sociology, and political economy was the robustness of the market model of social exchange as a means of coordinating relations between producers and

Book Reviews and Presentations HSS, vol. IV, no. 1 (2015): 139-152

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consumers. It was underestimated that market as a social institution. The problem with this challenge is that it does not give sufficient attention to the continuing functioning of those impersonal relations of social coordination, such as markets and bureaucracies characteristic of modern society. Reviewing the challenges overall, Holton and Turner, in Weberian terms, recognize an enduring model of rationality-impersonal, calculative and efficacious and enabling- and the substantive rationality of those committed to value-position stressing the transcendental importance of participatory decision making through interpersonal consensus. Moreover, authors examine some of the moral and political dimensions of Max Weber’s work in order to throw some sociological light on the political and economic problems. This book also endures the understanding of the source of modern society. Structurally, it contains six chapters with introduction, bibliography and index. Each chapter analyses different specific issue.

Chapter one is written on “Sociology, Individualism and Liberalism,” and includes the boundaries of individual rights and associational forms to secure autonomous individual and geopolitical boundaries. Weber in his sociological insight identifies that violation of human rights come from existing social inequality and scarcity of resource related to state affairs. So authors identify Weber’s feeling to maintain standard of social welfare, democracy, and personal rights through securing one’s boundaries.

Chapter two on “Max Weber, Austrian Economics, and The New Right” emphasizes that Weber’s affinities with Austrian economics testify to a shared libertarian emphasis on individual moral responsibility and private provision-medical care, housing as New Right. The development of Weber’s methodology comes into existence to involve the application of multidimensional framework to historical ‘particulars’ (p.50). Here is also identified a rational legal institutional framework of citizenship rights is contrast to the populist Gemeinschaft of the ‘moral majority’ (p.65).

Chapter three of the Max Weber on Economy and Society is titled “Modernism, Post-Modernism, and World Religion” incorporates some themes from Weber’s sociology of religion. Weber attempted controlling the ambiguity and uncertainty of modernization through the advocacy of


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an ethic of responsibility. Holton and Turner identify two versions of Weber’s modernization process: first is optimistic as it includes the inevitability of modernization, secularization and bureaucratic management; and second is pessimistic and ambiguous that shows self-defeating of modernization process and limitation of knowledge.

Chapter four on “On Law, Morality, and Modern Society” represents debates about status. Writers have shown an argument involved a defense of Weber’s analysis of law against Marxist legal theory. Marxist theory of law criticized Weber’s position by arguing that law in capitalism becomes abstract, systematic and formal as capitalist economic relations require legal stability for their maximization of profit. In this book, some major problems are identified in Weber’s historical sociology of law. For example, there are well-known difficulties with his views on English case-law and Islamic qadi justice (Turner, 1974). The importance of Weber’s sociology of laws located within the context of late nineteenth-century Germany. For example, under Bismarck’s leadership, Germany had experienced rapid political integration. The creation of a unified legal system was important for both economic and administrative purposes.

Chapter five on “Status Politics in Contemporary Capitalism” identifies the debate of status between European and North American sociology. It has been observed that while European sociology has been fascinated by the problem of social class, North American sociology has far more extensively focused on issue of status and culture. These contradictions are permanent features of these societies but they have been intensified within the contemporary global recession. The implication of this argument is to underline the theoretical and explanatory value of Weber’s notion of status politics as a framework for the analysis of multi-cultural societies.

Finally, chapter six is focused on “Has Class Analysis a Future?” emphasizes the challenge of liberalism to accounts of class. While Tönnies identifies indirect interactions, impersonal roles, formal values, and beliefs are the key elements of Gesellschaft, Weber conceptualizes it as “rational agreement by mutual consent,” the best example of which is a commercial contract (p.194). The neo-Weberian extension of class theory is found in Dahrendorf’s attempt to subsume property-based inequalities within wider structural inequalities dependent on authority


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relations. By this means the same overarching framework is as applicable in capitalist as in socialist societies. This liberalistic vision of a world of autonomous morally responsible private individuals and households is not, however, redundant even in the world of massive state intervention and corporatism. The threat of the iron cage may be ever present but it is equally possible that Weber’s liberal despair was premature and unduly defeatist.

This book is well written in a sense that authors Holton and Turner point out the productive legacy of Weber’s thought in areas of present intellectual debate, notably the secularization and modernization of global cultures, the crisis of Marxism, the rise of the New Right and the emergence of post modernism. To criticize left and right wing like Tönnies’ Gesellschaft, the authors use Weber’s position in the sociological tradition. The conceptualization of this book is very helpful to understand different phenomena and their linkages that help to understand sociological inquiry. Moreover, this book shows argument against the consistency of earlier concept at present time. For example, Holton and Turner, in this book, identify Daniel Bell’s current debates about aesthetic justification. With the emergence of a modernist problematic, there is a transition from the ethical to the aesthetic-cultural turn in the following way:

For the modern, cosmopolitan man, culture has replaced both religion and work as a means of self-fulfillment or as a justification-an aesthetic justification- of life. But behind this change, essentially from religion to culture, lies the extraordinary crossover in consciousness, particularly in the meanings of expressive conduct in human society (Bell, 1976:156).

To find out the weakness of this book, it is firstly mentioned that

Weber is presented more to criticize other theories or concepts than addressing his ideal building. For example, if I go back to the concept Gesellschaft that is based on indirect interactions, impersonal roles, formal values, and beliefs identified by Tönnies (1887) where Weber is used to provide economic emphasize as a criticism of Gesellschaft. But Weber in his rational sense defines Gesellschaft as “rational agreement by mutual consent” (Weber, 1978 [1921]). Moreover, Holton and Turner criticize Weber in many ways rather than identifying the importance of Weber’s


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imagination in the development of sociology. For example, they criticize the validity or truth of Weber’s methodology. They claim that Weber’s methodology does not have any aim at absolute but they never mention that Weber demonstrates the path of reality of social scientific knowledge.

This book is suitable for all levels of tertiary studies starts from bachelor to doctorate as it gives many worldwide examples and relevant sources. This book gives information about building Weber’s methodology, concepts related to economic sociology and also arguments indicating other sources. Students and researchers will be more benefitted to use methodological interpretation of Weber as he shows how to resolve methodological problem of the relations between economic and social theory. Besides, this book provides many important and new concepts like “the New Right” and “Status Politics” as key issues for the development of social science. To count the contribution in social science, this book provides Weber’s sociological extension of the logical categories of utilitarian economics, methodological development, and the correlation between social and economic aspects- asceticism and production. This book specifically is recommended to the audiences who have social science background as here information is related to economic sociology. It is written very easy way so that people can get the idea quickly. Audience will not drop their interest as this book maintains coherence and not too long.

References

Bell, Daniel. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. London: Heinemann, 1976. Tönnies, Ferdinand. Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. Leipzig: Fues's Verlag,

1887. Turner, B. S. Weber and Islam, a Critical Study. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,

1974. Weber, Max. Economy and Society. University of California Press, 1978 [1921].


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________________________________________________________ Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, Bucharest, Humanitas, 2014, 528 p. Aurelian-Petrus PLOPEANU Senior Researcher (CS III) Department of Interdisciplinary Research in Social-Human Sciences, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iasi

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Liaquat Ahamed is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. In 2010 he was awarded with this prestigious prize for his book, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World. According to the biography from www.pulitzer.org, Liaquat Ahamed “has been a professional investment manager for twenty-five years. He has worked at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., and the New York based partnership of Fischer Francis Trees and Watts, where he served as chief executive. He is currently an adviser to several hedge fund groups, including the Rock Creek Group and the Rohatyn Group; a director of Aspen Insurance Co.; and is on the board of trustees of the Brookings Institution. Ahamed has degrees in economics from Harvard and Cambridge universities.”

After World War I, the financial system based on the gold standard was destroyed. Several years later it seemed the world economy was restored and the gold standard ensured this stability. But the gold couldn’t prevent future crisis and bubbles. It was a time when the rhythm of spatial interconnections and the speed of news and information impulses were much slower than we imagine today. The most important decisions were taken with great difficulty also because the economic and financial statistics just appeared.

The author found a pattern that characterizes any crisis: the short road from greed to fear. An initial exacerbated optimism of investors,


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together with low risk-taking behavior from the banks, soon generated an excessive confidence or even “madness”. When this scenario happened a “black swan”, like a bankruptcy or an unanticipated fraud, the crush of domino-castle began, the panic started and banks, investors and depositors soon found out the effects of that fall.

Liaquat Ahamed (2014) stresses that the global economy collapsed between 1929 and 1933 not because of a single trigger, but of an accumulation of interrelated events, started in many places: the German economic crisis that began in 1928, the Wall Street Crash in 1929, the banking panic triggered in the United States in 1930 and the financial crisis experienced by Europe in 1931. Interesting is the fact that the author finds analogies and similarities between these past crises and other much recently triggered: the Mexican peso crisis from 1994, the dotcom bubble in 2000 and the global financial crisis that started in 2007.

Such a financial and economic cataclysm produced panic, numerous social revolts and panic, waves of unemployed and poor people, strikes of several industries. The banking system became extremely fragile because in many countries like United States of America, Austria or Germany, important banks collapsed. Also, the City of London felt the turbulence with severe consequences. Such a crisis launched the fear that the capitalist system will implode sooner or later. Communists and Nazis won popular support and, as a consequence, votes and political legitimacy.

For the period 1929-1933, the moral authors of the economic policy decision errors were few major players. First, the politicians who took the major decisions by the end of World War I, at Paris Peace Conference, created the desire for revenge and many severe national antipathies since they established huge international debts which had a negative impact on the international financial system. Secondly, in “the most exclusive club” (New York Herald Tribune, 1927) of that time, the “most magnificent” four bankers were: the Governor of Bank of England, sir Montagu Norman, considered “the monarch of an invisible empire” (Kathleen Woodward, 1932); the Governor of Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Benjamin Strong; the President of Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht and the Governor of Banque de France, Émile Moreau.


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They excessively and stubbornly tried to revive the gold standard, considered responsible by many economists and economic historians for the economic and financial distress at the time, as well as the difficulties for harmonizing international relations.

One of the most powerful conclusion of this book is that these bankers have obstinately followed the economic paradigm that does not always work perfectly: in crisis, the economies automatically adjust, so there is no need for any intervention. The ignorance to act decisively in such important moments, the imperfect knowledge and the lack of understanding about how the economy works blurred the possibility for a new and efficient therapeutic: the need for concerted intervention. Also, the return at the wrong time to the gold standard was a tough obstacle and threw their economies in a generalized deflation. The disaster eventually followed…

That is why, today, every decision-makers, especially the bankers and politicians, should read this book! Again and again…

BOOK PRESENTATIONS

Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014, 672 p., ISBN 978-0374227357

With this volume two (coming after Origins of Political

Order), Francis Fukuyama completes the most important work of political thought in at least a generation. Taking up the essential question of how societies develop strong, impersonal, and accountable political institutions, the author follows the story from the French Revolution to the so-called Arab Spring and the deep dysfunctions of contemporary American politics. He examines the effects of corruption on governance, he explores the different legacies of colonialism in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and offers a clear-eyed account of why some regions have thrived and developed more quickly than others. And he boldly reckons with the future of democracy in the face of a rising global middle class and entrenched political paralysis in the West.


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James Grant, The Forgotten Depression: 1921 – The Crash That Cured Itself, Simon&Schuster, 2014, 254 p. ISBN 978-1451686456

In his latest work, the financial analyst, historian,

journalist, and value investor James Grant, who is informed by both Austrian economics and the value investing theory of the late Benjamin Graham, analyzes the Depression of 1920–1921, helping us to better understand the current economic environment. Grant understands

that despite the pseudo-natural science veneer of mainstream economics the fact remains that economic value is inherently subjective and thus economic measurement is also subjective.The author has two missions: to bring this fascinating chapter of economic history back to life, and to demonstrate that a laissez-faire approach can cure slumps better than government activism managed in the 1930s, or in 2008.

Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, Holt, Henry & Company, Inc., 2014, 304 p. ISBN-13: 9780805095159

Atul Gawande is a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, a staff writer for The New Yorker, and a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. In Being Mortal, he tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending. Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the human spirit. Gawande asserts that medicine can comfort and enhance our experience even to the end, providing not only a good life but also a good end.


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Michio Kaku, The Future of the Mind The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind, Doubleday, 2014, 400 p. ISBN 978-0385530828

Michio Kaku is a well known American communicator

and popularizer of science, futurist, theoretical physicist, and Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics at the City College of New York. The Future of the Mind is an authoritative and compelling look at the astonishing research being done in top laboratories around the world,

all based on the latest advancements in neuroscience and physics, including recent experiments in telepathy, mind control, avatars, telekinesis, and recording memories and dreams. The book is an extraordinary, mind-boggling exploration of the frontiers of neuroscience. Kaku’s story of the mind is for the most part a story of the brain. Minds need brains but they are also embedded in social and cultural dimensions and, not least, they are entities arising from millions of years of evolution. Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014, 416 p. ISBN 978-0374280741

Evan Osnos is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where

he served as the China correspondent from 2008 to 2013. In his latest book, Osnos speaks about China’s appetites, challenges and dilemmas, in a way few have done. He describes the clash between the rise of the individual and the Communist Party’s struggle to retain control and he asks probing questions: Why does a government with more success lifting people from poverty than any civilization in history choose to put strict restraints on freedom of expression? Why do millions of young Chinese professionals - fluent in English and devoted to Western pop culture - consider themselves “angry youth,” dedicated to resisting the West’s influence?, etc.


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Michael S. Roth, Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters, Yale University Press, 2014, 240 p. ISBN 978-0300175516

Michael S. Roth is president of Wesleyan University, a professor in history and the humanities and the author of several books of intellectual history. Beyond the University is a lucid, helpful and accessible account of the current challenges to higher education. The book’s supporting framework is the idea that two distinct traditions of liberal education have “uneasily co-existed” in America, the

“skeptical” and the “reverential”. The first is a philosophical tradition emphasizing preparation for inquiry, freeing the mind to investigate the truth. The second is a rhetorical tradition emphasizing initiation into a common culture through the study of canonical works. The central argument is that liberal education is some combination of these two traditions that aims at serving the needs of the “whole person.”

Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Belknap Press, 2014, 696 p. ISBN 978-0674430006

Professor at the Paris School of Economics, Thomas

Piketty deals with an impressive array of data going back centuries, arguing that the underlying mechanisms of capitalism are likely to reassert themselves, once again generating “arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.” Piketty shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality and thus the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values.


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Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking, Penguin Press, 2014, 480 p. ISBN ISBN 978-1594205224

Professor of maths at Wisconsin University, specialized

in number theory, Jordan Ellenberg writes a cheery manifesto for the utility of mathematical thinking in informal and robust, irreverent yet serious prose. Math allows us to see the hidden structures underneath the messy and chaotic surface of our world. It's a science of

not being wrong, hammered out by centuries of hard work and argument. Armed with the tools of mathematics, we can see through to the true meaning of information we take for granted. Ellenberg’s tone is by turns anecdotal and computational, but this book’s most essential chapters have to do with probability and statistics, the spookier and more counterintuitive precincts of mathematical thinking pertaining to what might happen and how likely something is to be true.

Edward Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence, Liveright, 2014, 208 p. ISBN 978-0871401007

E. O. Wilson is Darwin’s great successor, a scientist of astounding breadth, experience, and brilliance who offers us a new understanding of humanity. The author, a famous biologist retired from Harvard, chews over issues that have long concentrated his mind: the environment; the biological basis of our behavior; the necessity of science and humanities finding common cause; and the things we can learn from ants, about which Wilson is the world’s leading expert. Calling himself “at heart a congenital optimist,” the author considers that we can avoid undermining the natural conditions on which civilization depends by drawing on our “social intelligence,” another legacy of our evolutionary journey.


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William A. Haviland, Harald E. L. Prins, Bunny McBride, Dana Walrath, Cultural Anthropology: The Human Challenge, Cengage Learning, 2013, 480 p. ISBN 978-1133957423

All four anthropologists share overlapping research interests and a similar vision, in exploring the most fascinating, creative, dangerous, and complex species alive today: ourselves and our neighbours in the global village. With compelling photos, engaging examples, and select studies by anthropologists in far-flung places, the authors

of this text provide a holistic view of anthropology to help us make sense of today's world. With this text one discovers the different ways humans face the challenge of existence, the connection between biology and culture in the shaping of human beliefs and behavior, and the impact of globalization on peoples and cultures around the world. Elaine P.Miller, Head Cases: Julia Kristeva on Philosophy and Art in Depressed Times, Columbia University Press, 2014, 245 p. ISBN 9780231166829 Elaine Miller, professor of philosophy at Miami University, uses the device of couples to relate Kristeva to modern aesthetics and theories of the imagination from Kant to Melanie Klein. Although Hegel appears repeatedly, Kristeva's ideas are largely counterposed to his idealist aesthetics. Thinkers and writers in aesthetic theory and literature after Hegel form the couples productive of an understanding of Kristeva's thought on art and literature: Kristeva with Benjamin, with Adorno, with Kafka, with Proust. Miller draws upon an ever-widening field of aesthetic ideas to show how Kristeva transforms modern aesthetics in her way of writing on art and literature. What unifies this field is the stamp of the melancholia of the modern age.


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Sergei Prozorov, Agamben and Politics: A Critical Introduction, Edinburgh University Press, 2014, 2008 p. ISBN 978-0748676217

Agamben’s commentators tend to focus on his powerful critique of the Western political tradition. But this narrow focus serves to obscure the overall structure of Agamben’s political thought, which is neither negative nor critical but affirmative. Sergei Prozorov, researcher at the University of Helsinki, brings out the affirmative mood of

Agamben’s political thought and the concept of inoperativity, which has been central to Agamben’s work from his earliest writings. Tracing how the logic of inoperativity works in the domains of language, law, history and humanity, Agamben and Politics systematically introduces the fundamental concepts of Agamben’s political insight in the wider context of contemporary philosophy.

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BOOK REVIEWS and PRESENTATIONS HSS IV.1 (2015) DOI: 10