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A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balance economics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary to man′s finding the good life and society enduring as a civilized instrumentality. Looks for authority to great men of the past and to today′s moral philosopher: man is an ethical animal. The 13 essays are: 1. Evolutionary Economics: The End of It All? which challenges the view that Darwinism destroyed belief in a universe of purpose and design; 2. Schmoller′s Political Economy: Its Psychic, Moral and Legal Foundations, which centres on the belief that time‐honoured ethical values prevail in an economy formed by ties of common sentiment, ideas, customs and laws; 3. Adam Smith by Gustav von Schmoller – Schmoller rejects Smith′s natural law and sees him as simply spreading the message of Calvinism; 4. Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Socialist – Karl Marx, Communist: A Comparison; 5. Marxism and the Instauration of Man, which raises the question for Marx: is the flowering of the new man in Communist society the ultimate end to the dialectical movement of history?; 6. Ethical Progress and Economic Growth in Western Civilization; 7. Ethical Principles in American Society: An Appraisal; 8. The Ugent Need for a Consensus on Moral Values, which focuses on the real dangers inherent in there being no consensus on moral values; 9. Human Resources and the Good Society – man is not to be treated as an economic resource; man′s moral and material wellbeing is the goal; 10. The Social Economist on the Modern Dilemma: Ethical Dwarfs and Nuclear Giants, which argues that it is imperative to distinguish good from evil and to act accordingly: existentialism, situation ethics and evolutionary ethics savour of nihilism; 11. Ethical Principles: The Economist′s Quandary, which is the difficulty of balancing the claims of disinterested science and of the urge to better the human condition; 12. The Role of Government in the Advancement of Cultural Values, which discusses censorship and the funding of art against the background of the US Helms Amendment; 13. Man at the Crossroads draws earlier themes together; the author makes the case for rejecting determinism and the “operant conditioning” of the Skinner school in favour of the moral progress of autonomous man through adherence to traditional ethical values.

^∗ Indicates books which are especially recommended.

The purpose of this paper is to reveal the mechanism underlying three fascinating problems that have been investigated by many first class scholars in sociology throughout history.

The thinking logic and figurative method of the general systemic yoyo model, combined with laboratory experiments, are collectively employed to present a brand new methodology for the study of three unsettled problems in the research of civilizations.

The paper provides novel explanations for such fascinating but unsettled problems as: what factors determine whether a civilization is to live or die? What brings prosperity to a specific geographic region? How does a new emerging or reviving civilization adopt elements of existing or other civilizations to build or reconstruct its own organizational structure?

This paper presents how laws and conclusions developed in systems science in general and the systemic yoyo model in particular can bring forward tangible results in social science with solid scientific merits. Considering the importance of the conclusions drawn in this paper, it is expected that this paper will produce results that can be truly useful for policy makers at national and international levels.

The purposes of this study were to measure the relevance status of Index Islamicus, evaluate the semantic correlation between a query and documents and inquire the basis of its rank. Sorting the retrieved results from the most relevant to the least relevant is the common option of an information retrieval system. This sorting mechanism or relevance judgment is computed by measuring closeness of query with its documents.

Forming up 100 queries on Islamic History and Civilizations, with two indexing elements (keyword and concept), a laboratory experiment was generated on its first ten items of the rank. Throughout an experimental research design, the relevance status value formula was used to measure system-computed rank and compare it with mean average precision.

The results showed that the average status value of Index Islamicus’s ranking on relevance criterion was 18 per cent effective in terms of retrieving precise documents. Despite the main focus of this study being only on one subject domain and the items calculated were only 1,000, this small percentage of its ranking mechanism proved that semantic correlations between queries with subject domain did not achieve the satisfactory level.

Implication of this study could be a guideline for further research on ranking mechanism of other search engines because the limitation of this study was Index Islamicus being the only database, which was the focus of this study.

Throughout this study, Index Islamicus would be benefited knowing the status of its ranking mechanism as well as other databases can make further research on their own ranking method following this study.

Researchers and vendors of online databases can ensure their users a true platform of search engine with a proper ranking list.

Relevance status value model for Index Islamicus on Islamic History and Civilization that allows the system to rank documents according to the match between document and query and gives the idea of a better index. The model improves the system’s ranking mechanism, and promotes the use of semantic relationships. This research promotes the computation of relevance status value by domain for capturing subject-specific relevance criteria and semantic relationships.

The purpose of this paper is to reveal the mechanism underlying many inexplicable phenomena observed in social organizations and human history by using the general systemic yoyo model.

Such traditional tools as laboratory experiments, calculus‐based methods, quantitative reasoning of microeconomics, and set‐theoretical logic are collectively employed to present a brand new method for the study of many unsettled problems in the research of civilizations.

Among a whole series of open problems, novel explanations are provided for important questions like: how do civilizations or cultures form? Why did Western democracy not originate in Eastern Asian or other parts of the world? Why does each blown‐up that it bridges a transition between organizational expansion and contraction represents a weakest link in the evolution of a social entity? Why are there nation states within a civilization? Why is the Western civilization having multiple centers or core states, while the Sinic civilization has one core state and the Islamic civilization does not seem to have any core states? How can policy makers separate civilizations from each other?

This work presents how systems science in general and the systemic yoyo model in particular can bring forward tangible results in social science with solid scientific merits. Owing to the novelty of reasoning and sound conclusions derived on solid scientific foundations, it is expected that this work will produce such results that can be truly useful for policy makers at national and international levels.

Nobody concerned with political economy can neglect the history of economic doctrines. Structural changes in the economy and society influence economic thinking and, conversely, innovative thought structures and attitudes have almost always forced economic institutions and modes of behaviour to adjust. We learn from the history of economic doctrines how a particular theory emerged and whether, and in which environment, it could take root. We can see how a school evolves out of a common methodological perception and similar techniques of analysis, and how it has to establish itself. The interaction between unresolved problems on the one hand, and the search for better solutions or explanations on the other, leads to a change in paradigma and to the formation of new lines of reasoning. As long as the real world is subject to progress and change scientific search for explanation must out of necessity continue.

This chapter shifts contemporary debates on Eurocentrism from its focus on European social theory to an analysis of its moorings in non-Atlantic sociological traditions and especially those within ex-colonial countries. It discusses the sociological/anthropological visions of two first generation sociologists/anthropologists from India, G. S. Ghurye (1893–1983) and D. P. Mukerji (1894–1961), within Orientalist-Eurocentric positions and explores how these are reinvented in the work of contemporary sociologist T. N. Madan (1933–). It suggests that colonial processes and its institutions together with “derivative” nationalist ideas have played and continue to play important mediatory role in organizing these Orientalist-Eurocentric visions.

The chapter presents three sets of arguments. First it suggests that in order to understand postcolonialism it is imperative to lay out the organic links between Orientalism and Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism and its mirror Orientalism mediated to frame social science language in terms of the binaries of universal (the West) and particular (the East). The particular was represented in India through the discipline of anthropology. The latter studied “traditions” through the themes of religion, caste, and family and kinship. When sociology emerged as a discipline in India in the early twentieth century, it continued to use the language organized by anthropology to analyze the particular cultural traditions of the country. Second, I suggest that these binaries also framed nationalist thought and the latter mediated in framing the sociological ideas of G. S. Ghurye and D. P. Mukerji which were embedded in Eurocentric-Orientalist principles. Third, I analyze the ideas of the contemporary social theorist T. N. Madan to indicate how his perspective continues to derive its positions from Orientalist-Eurocentric positions and ignores an engagement with critics who have questioned Orientalist Eurocentrism. Disregarding these arguments implies the legitimation of the latter perspective derived from the disciplines of sociology/anthropology.

The chapter contends that a decolonized critique of colonial social science has existed in other regions of the world including India, and that this perspective needs to be retrieved by social theorists to reformulate the sociological discourse as a study of modern India. It also suggests that contemporary analysis of Eurocentrism needs to move out from within the circuits of knowledge defined by received colonial geopolitical enclaves in order to assess the way production, distribution, and consumption of Orientalist-Eurocentric perspectives have organized sociological traditions across the world including the Global South.

The purpose of this paper is to apply the general thinking logic and methodology of the systemic yoyo model to provide novel resolutions for some of the very important questions studied in the research of history and civilizations.

To lay the foundation for brand new results and conclusions, laboratory observations, such as the dishpan experiments, the theory of the general systemic yoyo model, and calculus‐based differential equations were combined into an organic whole of reasoning. What is obtained in this paper surely proves the merit of this approach.

By modeling the world of civilizations using systemic yoyos, the paper provides novel and convincing answers to such important questions as who we are, asked in search for identities, and whether or not the appearance of the global identity crisis in the 1990s is an indicator for the USA to cease its global dominance as the sole superpower. By using the figurative analysis, naturally available along with the systemic yoyo model, the paper analyzes external pressures each civilization experiences and when and why a prosperous civilization would possibly choose to isolate itself from the rest of the world. By introducing the concepts of stirring energies and stirring momentum, it will be possible to study three‐ringed circulations and explore the human desire for stability out of a universe of permanent instabilities.

Instead of using statistics, this paper is among the first of its kind in the study of civilizations that collectively applies rigorous mathematics, the systems research and laboratory experiments in the study of social phenomena. So, when compared to other studies in the area of civilizations that are either language or statistics based using short time‐series data, this work brings forward more affirmative conclusions without involving any chance or guess work.

“Communism has never concealed the fact that it rejects all absolute concepts of morality. It scoffs at any consideration of “good” and “evil” as indisputable categories. Communism considers morality to be relative, to be a class matter… It has infected the whole world with the belief in the relativity of good and evil.” Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Warning to the West, 1975.

The purpose of this paper is to re‐examine the views of Freud in his Civilization and its Discontents and compare his idea of civilization with that of other scholars in order to determine if we will ever be able to create a society which will endure in these days of nuclear power. The dangers to humanity are great, the solution difficult to see. Freud emphasized self‐interest and aggressiveness as the failings in man which would lead to the collapse of civilization, summed up in the Latin tag: homo homine lupus. Freud rejected out of hand religion as a remedy for man’s aggressiveness. This view of civilization is compared with that of Albert Schweitzer in his The Philosophy of Civilization. Schweitzer sees the enduring society as one in which man has become ethical and thereby dedicated himself to the good of society and in so doing shows a reverence for life. This study then examines the view of Ortega y Gasset, who finds in The Revolt of the Masses the success of society to lie in the efforts of men of talent, select men who have dedicated themselves to the advancement of society in accordance with the old adage, noblesse oblige. Finally we examine the Civilisation of Kenneth Clark, which is concerned with man’s development in the arts as he removes himself farther and farther from the state of the savage. The views of Arnold Toynbee on civilization are examined. Toynbee finds that our civilization, Western Christendom, will play an ever decreasing role in the global society. Toynbee also fears the coming of a nuclear holocaust but is confident there will be survivors. The possibility of a nuclear war attests the aggressiveness of man. Finally, to illustrate the evil effects of nuclear power, a brief glance is taken at the horrors that overtook the citizens of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki when they were the targets of the atomic bomb in 1945. The only feasible solution to this grave problem appears to be a nuclear‐weapon‐free world. Even then the world is not safe from the aggressive nature of some rogue nation which seeks to take advantage of such a situation and dominate the world. This contingency is commonly referred to as the genie is out of the bottle. The number of genies increased when North Korea, India and Pakistan claimed the addition of nuclear weapons to their arsenal. Man has to control his fellow man’s urge to advance his self‐interest at any cost, if we are to endure. As Freud in his perspicacity put it: homo homine lupus.