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Philosophic History - John A. Hall: Powers and Liberties: The Causes and Consequences of the Rise of the West, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1985, 264 pp., £19.50.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

John Dunn
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Reviews
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 21 , Issue 3 , 01 July 1986 , pp. 379 - 382
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1986

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References

1 The analysis of counterfactuals remains a peculiarly unsatisfactory aspect of modern social and political understanding. The most sustained effort to formulate a coherent understanding of the main issues has been made by Jon Elster. (See particularly Logic and Society, Chichester, John Wiley, 1976 and Explaining Technical Change, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983.) For a somewhat different perspective see Geoffrey Hawthorn's forthcoming study Plausible Worlds.Google Scholar

2 Cf. Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship cmd Democracy, Boston, Beacon Press, 1966; Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State, London, New Left Books, 1974; Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1979. The contrast is, naturally, still more painful when it is drawn with the major historical or sociological texts (Cook and Crone, Dumont, Elvin, Gelher, Hodgson, Montagne) on which Hall is relying.Google Scholar