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[Those in the Boston area may find this of interest. There was a
significant debate of Landes' and Frank' work on Eh.Res last year. --
RBE]
David Landes and Andre Gunder Frank debate
"ReOrient" vs. "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations"
-- Two views of the World Economy in History
The World History Seminar at Northeastern University, with co-sponsorship
by the NU Department of Economics, presents a debate between David Landes
(Harvard University) and Andre Gunder Frank (University of Amsterdam,
emeritus)
Wednesday, Dec. 2nd
3:00-4:30 p.m.
450 Dodge Hall
Northeastern University
Event is free and open to the public.
Teachers are encouraged to bring their students.
for information contact World History Center Co-ordinator, Jeff Sommers
ph. 617-373-3676 email: <[log in to unmask]> or see our web page
http://www.whc.neu.edu
ReORIENT HISTORY, THEORY AND POLICY?
DEBATING THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF LANDES AND FRANK
Of Landes' work, J.K.GALBRAITH says "Truly wonderful. No question that
this will establish David Landes as preeminent in his field and in his
time."
ALBERT BERGESEN contends that Gunder Frank's ReOrient is "absolutely
essential to understanding world history."
LANDES maintains that Max Weber was right about the RISE OF THE WEST in
the past, Francis Fukuyama is right about THE END OF HISTORY and Harvard
colleague SAMUEL HUNTINGTON is right about the coming CLASH OF
CIVILIZATIONS between THE WEST AND THE REST. For Landes and them, the
key to the West's success has been the exceptionalism of its values and
institutions, that were and still are lacking in the Rest. Thus, Landes
refers to China as a culturally and intellectually homeostatic society
that had indifference to technology, lacked institutions for finding and
learning, abhorred mercantile success, showed deliberate introversion,
isolationism, risk aversion, irrationality, xenophobia, arrogance,
haughtiness, stunned submissiveness, self-defeating escapism and so on.
FRANK retorts that Weber got it all wrong, and Marx, Polanyi, Parsons,
Rostow, Braudel , Wallerstein and Frank [Mark I] too. Landes himself
already got it wrong in his 1969 book UNBOUND PROMETHIUS AND, and his
neglect or dismissal of the intervening 30 years of scholarship make him
still more wrong now. Received social theory, developed and uncritically
accepted by all of the above and most other historians, economists and
social scientists is vitiated by the ingrained EUROCENTRISM of
historiography and social theory that concentrate their inquiry under the
European American streetlight, which blacks out the evidence from the
rest of the world and distorts that of the West itself. This triumphalist
not to mention racist ideology masquerading as history and even science
neglects or altogether rejects holistic historical analysis of the
global economy and society , which shows that not Europe but instead
Asia, and particularly Middle Kingdom China, remained predominant in the
world until at 1800. The subsequent Decline of the East and the shift
of the center of gravity to the West were more globally than locally
determined temporary processes that have runtheir
historical course and are already coming full circle with the contemporary
renewed rise of East Asia and particularly of China. Therefore, it is high
time to ReORIENT our historiography, social theory and political policy as
well, all the more so in view of the reiteration of and accolades for the
poverty of Landesi empirically mistaken historyi and theoretically
unfounded analysis, which also dovetail with the equally unfounded and
socio-politically dangerous propaganda about End of History and Clash
of Civilizations.
ReORIENT blurbs refer to the fundamental rethinking by the iconoclast
Frank who challenges virtually all other significant scholarship about
the historical origins of the contemporary world in a benchmark study for
the millennium that is absolutely essential for understanding world
history.
LANDES retorts that Frank and his echoes are a magnet for fallacies and
fantasies [and] the invention of folklore. Bad history.
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