How did civilized life begin? How did government arise? These questions have intrigued philosophers and historians since ancient times. In this volume, Elman R. Service, an anthropologist widely known for his studies of evolution and social organization, uses a unique mix of ethnology, history, and archaeology in exploring the origins and early development of political organiza...(展开全部)

Few would deny the crucial role that entrepreneurs play in our increasingly global economy-but exactly what is this vital, yet loosely defined business force we call the entrepreneurial spirit? This landmark study is the first to examine analytically the nature of the opportunities that entrepreneurs pursue, the problems they face, the traits they require, and the social and ec...(展开全部)

A new theory about the origins of consciousness that finds learning to be the driving force in the evolutionary transition to basic consciousness. What marked the evolutionary transition from organisms that lacked consciousness to those with consciousness—to minimal subjective experiencing, or, as Aristotle described it, “the sensitive soul”? In this book, Simona Ginsburg and E...(展开全部)

In 1937, Ronald H. Coase published "The Nature of the Firm," a classic paper that raised fundamental questions about the concept of the firm in economic theory. Coase proposed that the comparative costs of organizing transactions through markets rather than within firms are the primary determinants of the size and scope of firms. Coase won the 1991 Nobel Prize in Economics for ...(展开全部)

If, as Darwin suggests, evolution relentlessly encourages the survival of the fittest, why are humans compelled to live in cooperative, complex societies? In this fascinating examination of the roots of human trust and virtue, a zoologist and former American editor of the Economist reveals the results of recent studies that suggest that self-interest and mutual aid are not at...(展开全部)

Historian Roger Chartier, part of a school now at work refashioning the Annales tradition, analyzes the causes of the French Revolution not simply by investigating its "cultural origins", but by pinpointing the conditions that "made it possible because conceivable". Chartier has set himself two important tasks. First, while acknowledging the seminal contribution of Daniel Morne...(展开全部)

Ambitious and elegant, this book builds a bridge between evolutionary theory and cultural psychology. Michael Tomasello is one of the very few people to have done systematic research on the cognitive capacities of both nonhuman primates and human children. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition identifies what the differences are, and suggests where they might have come...(展开全部)

迈克尔·托马塞洛是马克斯·普朗克进化人类学研究所的联合主任，该研究所位于德国的莱比锡。他的其他著作有：《最初的动词：早期语法发展的个案研究》(First Verbs: A Case Study of Early Grammatical Development)，还有与人合著的《灵长类动物的认知》(Primate Cognition)。

What is “Chinese” about China’s modern state? This book proposes that the state we see today has developed over the past two centuries largely as a response to internal challenges emerging from the late empire. Well before the Opium War, Chinese confronted such constitutional questions as: How does the scope of political participation affect state power? How is the state to sec...(展开全部)