European Economic History. Vol. 1: The Ancient World.

From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - Minimal staining on bottom edge, allover very good and clean. / Minimale Anschmutzung auf dem Fu�chnitt, insgesamt sehr gut und sauber. - It was William James who said that any subject, even science, when studied from the historical point of view, becomes a humane study. Communism and National Socialism, for example, become something quite different when they are viewed as the culmination of a long line of millenary dreams of the dispossessed from the time of Maccabeean Jews down to Thomas Muenzer and the Peasant Revolt during the German Reformation. Lenin� if not Stalin�might have had second thoughts about the use of the secret police, if he had not been completely captive of the Marxian view of history as a theory. Either might have acted differently if he had seen that the structure he was rearing was the continuation of the Czarist police, itself the descendent of the Byzantine, which in turn derived from the agentes in rebus of the Emperor Hadrian in the second century A.D. So, too, the study of economic history should tell us something of the direction in which we are moving and should liberate us from the dogmas of the recent past by making clear that, whatever the validity of particular theories of economics, none possesses an absolute value and any number of past experiences may be of value in today�s choices. Economics, when looked at from the historical point of view, has a real existential value, for it helps us make decisions by revealing something about what choices are open to us today. ISBN 089197153X