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This chapter examines the intersection between psychology and the study of conversational interaction. People's self-understanding as ethical beings is most often instigated by the very dynamics of interaction. It is those very dynamics that give rise to explicit ethical accounts. There is nothing inherent about people's judgments as such that requires them to be fully self-aware about their ethics or able to verbalize it. However, it is important that people do become ethically self-aware and verbal and do project themselves forward in time as ethical persons—and that is crucial to the ways in which psychology and social history feed into one another. The chapter then argues that ethical implications of the basic features of interaction are registered in the ways people probe one another's intentions and character, for example, or to take others to be according or denying them recognition.

The major misunderstanding about cliometrics comes from the subsequent spread of Douglass North's new institutional approach. North claims to have challenged traditional economic theory, which he found inadequate. This chapter shows how this approach, besides being patently unhistorical, rests on flimsy foundations. In order to do so, it draws on a variety of evidence from the social and historical sciences. It also compares North's synthesis with the example of social science history offered by Moses Finley, the eminent ancient economic historian. Finley made a powerful argument against the application of modern economic theory to the past. Furthermore, he developed an alternative interpretation for the origin of institutions, rigorously demonstrating the logical precedence of society over the economy. The chapter begins by considering the criticism that Karl Polanyi made against neoclassical economics in the mid-twentieth century. In fact, both North's and Finley's works can be read as a response to Polanyi.

This chapter covers macroeconomic issues, including economic cycles, money, price levels, the nature of growth, and the historical roots of underdevelopment. It shows how the micro level is logically linked to the macro level. It also argues that the crisis of the French-style economic history in the past twenty years is due more to French historians transferring their interest to cultural history. However, abandoning quantitative history in favor of the histoire des mentalités does not imply there is no room for economic history alongside the new political history and other aspects such as the history of the body and the history of death that were once considered eccentric.

This chapter briefly discusses multiple factors which have come to shape global social history by the nineteenth century. It demonstrates that the making of the middle classes across the world can be explained only by considering the increasing worldwide circulation of people, ideas, and goods. It was from its start closely connected to global interactions and interconnections in the age of empire. In fact, the middle classes, whether in European metropoles or in colonial peripheries, were deeply affected by global entanglements. Many social structures that emerged in the long nineteenth century can be traced back to activities of such cosmopolitan bourgeoisies and in turn can be considered a reason for the emergence of these groups. Still, these structures were shaped by, and often the result of, highly uneven power relations, such as imperialism and the emergence of a global economy that was increasingly dominated by Western Europe during the long nineteenth century.

This chapter provides a brief social history of the Bowery as told through the transformation of its bars and nightlife. It first examines how bars and nightlife corresponded to and helped along the Bowery's eventual gentrification before discussing how new bars and contemporary nightlife development have shaped community life in downtown neighborhood bars. A vignette of the people at Milano's Bar, a bar that has evolved alongside the changes occurring in the Bowery and the nightlife scene, is presented. Through an analysis of its multiple generations of customers, its bartenders, and its owners, the chapter reveals the tensions that have arisen from the bar's own transformation as a refuge for the homeless to a public gathering place for residents to a “dive bar” for young visitors. The reactions of the people at Milano's to these changes illustrate how urban forces have shaped a fundamental aspect of life for people in these downtown neighborhoods, namely, community socializing.

This chapter examines the historical problem of how to gain an understanding of the fundamental traits that were original to the Enlightenment. More specifically, it considers how the Enlightenment arose over the intellectual, political, and social life of eighteenth-century élites, so as to produce a cultural revolution that transformed European society. Franco Venturi interpreted the Enlightenment as the “history of a movement,” a movement of a political nature that was created by self-conscious intellectual minorities. The chapter considers Venturi's proposal to go back to a view of the Enlightenment as a movement and as a fundamental chapter in the new history of intellectuals. In particular, it discusses Venturi's project for a political history of the Enlightenment, his denunciation of scholars engaged in the social history of the Enlightenment, and the emergence of a new cultural history in the 1980s.