This paper draws on early twentieth-century philosophical anthropology as well as cognitive science and evolutionary anthropology to examine how humans compensated for their biological under-determination by becoming second-natured, empathetic, cooperative, symbol-using creatures. Examining the capacities for cooperation that emerged in...
Southeast Asia is an extremely diverse region on Earth. It consists of many large and small ecological areas. It has a staggering variety of economic, social, and cultural niches. Hundreds of ethnic groups and languages coexist in the space between...
Neoclassical economics focuses on the economic exchange process itself, driven by “sovereign” consumers and producers. There is a strong reliance on the market as self-equilibrating, and it is assumed that the collective action of self-interested economic agents still produces a...
This short excerpt from the beginning of Wundt’s Outlines of Psychology, 1897, discusses the starting point of the discipline of psychology as an empirical discipline. Wilhelm Wundt opened the Institute for Experimental Psychology at the University of Leipzig in Germany...
Humanistic psychology is a psychological perspective that emphasizes the study of the whole person. Humanistic psychologists look at human behavior not only through the eyes of the observer, but through the eyes of the person who acts, thinks, or experiences...
This is an extract from a short text by Gordon Allport (Becoming, 1955) subtitled: Basic Considerations for a Psychology of Personality. In these passages, the human being is seen as characterized by a process of individuation (personal) and socialization (tribal)....
Abraham Maslow has become famous as a psychologist for his “hierarchy of needs.” He focuses more on the healthy personality, rather than on forms of psychopathology. He belongs to the tradition of existential-humanistic thinking in America. These extracts from texts...
In this short extract from , Erich Fromm rejects the idea that an instinct of territorialism exists that leads humans and animals to defend vast areas of territory they inhabit. He argues instead that there is a tendency to invade...
During the years 1960-1963 Stanley Milgram carried out some experiments on obedience while working in the Department of Psychology at Yale University. Years later, in 1972-1973, he was granted a Fellowship and, while living in Paris, he wrote a book...
Max Horkheimer: Feudal Lord, Customer, and Specialist. The End of the Fairy Tale of the Customer as King. Source: . Published by Continuum 1974; Now that the bourgeois world is entering a new situation which may be interpreted either as...
What happens when a creative and original psychologist like Carl Rogers writes down his ideas about learning? The following two excerpts are from his book: , published in 1969. The contains basic ideas on learning from a humanistic perspective, taking...
Introduction Marx’s speech on free trade was given before the Democratic Association of Brussels on January 9, 1848. It was published in French in Brussels, in early February 1848. The German translation appeared in the same year and was done...
The following excerpt is Chapter 7 of Joseph Schumpeter’s book “Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy, originally written in 1942. It describes Capitalism as an evolutionary process, with continuous creative destruction of old structures. The theories of monopolistic and oligopolistic competition and their...
These are selected passages from an essay on the “Sociology of Imperialism” (1919) written by Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950). For a short time, he was the Finance Minister of Austria in 1919, and later he became a Harvard professor of economics. He is...
This is a short summary from “”, originally written in 1998. Kevin Kelly is one of the co-founders of Wired Magazine, and has been on the forefront of the technology revolution and its consequences for society. The following passages from...
From very early on, since science studies started, I have not considered the social to be at the center of sociology, and from this starting point I slowly developed an argument about the anthropology of modernity. So, it actually goes...