Economy and Society: Essays on Interpretive Sociology (an excerpt)

Essays on Political Economy

This collection of essays investigates issues related to elections and wars. In the first essay, we present an auction-type model of war and characterize its unique equilibrium. We offer three different explanations for the causes of wars. First, as an individual-level explanation of war, we show that wars occur due to information asymmetry between governments. Second, as a societal-level expla...

Essays on Political Economy

This essay develops a stochastic model of electoral competition in order to study the economic and political determinants of trade policy. Ideal policies of the different socioeconomic groups in society (landlords, industrialists, labor and skilled workers) are explicitly derived from a small open economy model. Then those ideal policies (trade policy and local public goods) are used to model t...

Editor’s Introduction: Methods of Interpretive Sociology

The Rationale The term 'interpretive' in the discussion of sociological methods is the most common translation of the German word 'verstehen,' but the German term is also translated as 'understanding'. There are many discussions and disputes over the translation of words between languages. What can be said about the meaning of interpretive method in sociology can be seen in discussions and disp...

Structuralist Marxism, urban sociology and geography: reflections on Urban sociology: critical essays

Urban sociology: critical essays is largely a set of translations of articles on urban development, first published in French in 1968-72, and written by authors adopting a Marxist perspective. Chris Pickvance's collection was one of the first attempts to introduce to an English-language audience a new research tradition that profoundly influenced not just urban sociology but also urban, regiona...

The History of Renaissance Cartography: Interpretive Essays