================== HES POSTING ====================== [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. ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]