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NONTHEMATIC / Vol. 53, No. 4 (Winter 1986)

Arien Mack, Editor

In the preface, Keynes describes the composition of the General Theory as “a long struggle of escape … from habitual modes of thought and expression.” This paper examines the possibility that this included a struggle of escape from the utilitarian motivational assumptions of orthodox economics.

Notes the environment of hostile conflict that Freud worked under in Vienna, chronicling his antagonism toward fellow social critic Karl Kraus and analyzing Kraus's criticism of psychoanalysis as the mental illness of which it considers itself the cure.

Why did Marx have so little to say about the institutions of socialist society? Marx often states that an association of free producers controls production—but how do they do that? On this matter, Marx is uncharacteristically brief. Marx does, however, say a lot about the opposite situation, that is, when producers do not control production.

During the last three and a half decades, Indian economists and social anthropologists have been preoccupied with the study of rural India. Yet there has been hardly any serious communication between the two disciplines. The purpose of this paper is to argue that such a communication involves much more than a mere conference across a coffee table.

Michael Foucault, epistemologist, historian, critical thinker, and “superstar” of the College de France, died in 1984, at 57 years old. At the time, he was working on the third and fourth volumes of his History and Sexuality, a history employing the discursive method he had developed in The Order of Things and The Archeology of Knowledge.

Chinese ritual and law both address the status of the child: sometimes directly, sometimes obliquely. This article discusses Chinese "coming of age" rituals for both men and women, noting special legal treatment of children during the Han, Sung, and Qing dynasties.

Examines the increased value placed on the care and preservation of children during the past five centuries, noting that the modern feeling for childhood is symptomatic of profound upheaval in beliefs and behavior as the idea of life based on lineage and community gave way to the idea of a close-knit nuclear family.

Byzantium, from the inauguration of Constantinople as its capital in A.D. 330 until the Crusaders’ capture of the city in 1204, was a complex society which combined Greco-Roman cultural traditions with the morality of Christian Orthodoxy. There are a number of scholarly studies available which analyze the legal and social complexities of the Eastern Roman Empire, but little attention has been paid to the place of children in this society.

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