8.05.2005

春秋之“士”

“国之大事,惟祀与戎”。

“士”,国王、诸侯、大臣豢养的专事征战的武士,不事耕稼而专于武功,是社会分工专业化的产物。“士”字原初指执干(盾)、戈、佩弓、矢的武士,其后渐渐 演变为专指读书议论的文人。因为“士”始终指特别接受过教育的人,春秋以前的社会教育主要是马上步下行军拔寨的武“士”教育,春秋中叶则演变为坐而论道谈 诗论文的文“士”教育,士之手教育的特征未变,只是教育的内容前后有所不同了。

士的主要训练方式是裸着臂腿习御射干戈,此外还有舞乐和礼仪。校射和会舞都有音乐相伴,但彼时的音乐和现在的音乐大不相同。那时的音乐是极其庄严肃穆的活 动,“士无故而不鼓瑟”。舞技则大有讲究。此外,武士除了要有“技”,更要有“忠”。


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“表里山河”的由来

春秋战国时期,晋国疆域的西南角被黄河划出了一块,又有一部分疆域被山地隔开,则称之为“表里山河”的地带。此地为军事要 冲,遏制着秦人东向出路的咽喉:秦人始终对中原虎视眈眈,而向东开进的必经之地就是晋国“表里山河”。三大夫分晋后,此地为魏国所有,魏代替晋继续肩负起 此一重担。后魏衰,秦乘势东顾,终于给中原六国带来切肤之痛,并彻底改变了中原版图。
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中世纪封建生产关系的形成

随着罗马帝国的崩溃,原本依据契约和罗马法建立起的相对稳定的社会关系结构也跟着崩溃了,暴力和残杀充斥着社会,人们痛苦地发现自己的所有财产、甚至生命 都无法得到有效保障,危机接踵而至。此时基于理性的权衡,他选择委身于某一强有力人物的保护之下,确保他的财产和生命安全。作为报酬,他的财产(甚至生 命?)也需交由保护的施与者,从而形成一种新的社会关系。被保护人最重要的财产——土地——成为保护施与者的所有物,被保护者只拥有其经营权,此时的土地 称“封邑”,被保护者丧失人身自由;另一方面,按实力大小,保护者仍然向上臣服,屈从于拥有更强大力量的保护者,于是形成逐层排列的新的关系结构,此即封 建制度的肇始。
然而仅由暴力关系织就的关系结构只能是不稳定和易变的,由此宗教——主要是天主教——登上了历史舞台。原本是下层人民所信仰的基督教与既得利益者合作,通 过哲学、道德等论证手段赋予统治者以既有封建关系的合法性统治地位,以神赐的名义捍卫统治者既得的社会、经济特权,进一步巩固、强化封建的制度结构。进 而,宗教无孔不入渗透到世俗生活的每一个角落,基督教庇护下的封建制度关系结构成为中世纪的重要特征。
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土地与人口的价值比变化所带来的

14世纪欧洲大规模的黑死病过后,人口稳步增加,相应的土地较之劳动力的价值逐渐升高。经济上的利益成为封建土地所有者做 出制度改动的动机,他们将不可随意转让的固定土地所有制转变为灵活的可转让的土地所有权制度,同时将原本牢固附着于土地上的劳动者(佃农)从土地转让制度 中剥离出去。制度转化为原本的土地所有者产生了更大的利益,如圈地运动等历史事件所表现出来的;客观上这又为资本主义制度的兴起产生了积极的副作用:大量 被强制与土地相剥离的、“自由”的劳动力——自由一方面是说他们不再受制于领主阶层,重新成为具有行动自主权的个体,另一方面是说,当他们一无所有、尤其 是失去了土地这最重要的生产资料时,他们就成了源源不断的劳动力供应源。
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7.30.2005

在制度经济学框架下分析altruism的三个动力

在制度经济学框架下分析altruism的三个动力。(1)爱、团结等精神鼓舞下作出的利他行为;(2)受到胁迫、被暴力威胁强制作出的利他行为;(3)出于明智的预期,即自己对他人的利他行动会得到他人同样的利他行动的回报,从而对自己有利。

(1)当时让我想到的就是一些伦理价值标准、尤其是宗教方面的内容。但没有一种普适性宗教能在人们心中建立起共同的行为准则,因而它的适用范围必定有限, 仅仅存在小范围的、有限的作用域;而且我也怀疑,秉持不同价值标准的群体间会产生严重的、甚至是毁灭性的冲突,同样强调爱、强调为真理为上帝献身的基督教 文明和伊斯兰文明就是例子。(2)将随着暴力的消失而迅速崩溃。(3)以自己的动机行利他之实,主效应是自利,副产品才是利他。从点来看,雷锋叔叔是否有 些太不食人间烟火了?

柯武刚说完这段话之后,进而强调,(3)自然要求在制度建构上确保人们对私有产权的权利…
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信息悖论

1:我需要依据一些知识(信息)作出行动;
2:我知道自己的无知,即知晓为了使行动达到最好的收效(收益最大化),需要更多的、目前我尚不知晓的知识(信息);
3:因而,追求自身利益的最大化就驱使我掌握更多本不为我所知的知识(信息);
4:但获取知识需要成本。我如何知道需要掌握多少信息才能作出利益最大化的行为?MR=MC还是as much as possible?
5:悖论于是产生。我不知道需要多少知识来引导追求利益最大化的行为,因为如果我知道,我就不是无知的了。而我怎么可能利用尚未掌握的知识获得最大效用?
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7.16.2005

Natural Law词条 Britannica

in philosophy, system of right or justice held to be common to all humankind and derived from nature rather than from the rules of society, or positive law. Throughout the history of the concept, there have been disagreements over the meaning of naturallaw and over its relation to positive law.

Aristotle held that what was “just by nature” was not always the same as what was “just by law”; that there was a natural justice valid everywhere with the same force and “not existing by people’s thinking this or that”; and that appeal could be made to it from the positive law. He drew his instances of the natural law, however, chiefly from his observation of the Greeks in their city-states, with their subordination of women to men, of slaves to citizens, and of barbarians to Hellenes. The Stoics, on the other hand, conceived an entirely egalitarian law of nature in conformity with the “right reason,” or Logos, inherent in the human mind. The Roman jurists paid lip service to this notion, and St. Paul seems to reflect it when he writes of a law “written in the hearts” of the Gentiles (Romans 2:14–15).

St. Augustine of Hippo took up the Pauline mention and developed the idea of man having lived freely under the natural law before his fall and his subsequent bondage under sin and the positive law. Gratian in the 11th century simply equated the naturallaw with the divine law, that is, with the revealed law of the Old and the New Testament, in particular the Christian version of the Golden Rule.

St. Thomas Aquinas propounded an influential systematization. The eternal law of the divine reason, he maintained, though it is unknowable to us in its perfection as it is in God’s mind, is yet known to us in part not only by revelation but also by the operations of our reason. The law of nature, which is “nothing else than the participation of the eternal law in the rational creature,” thus comprises those precepts that humankind is able to formulate, namely, the preservation of one’s own good, the fulfillment of “those inclinations which nature has taught to all animals,” and the pursuit of the knowledge of God. Human law must be the particular application of the natural law.

Other scholastic philosophers, for instance John Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, and, especially, Francisco Suárez, emphasized the divine will instead of the divine reason as the source of law. This “voluntarism” influenced the Roman Catholic jurisprudence of the Counter-Reformation, but the Thomistic doctrine was later revived and reinforced to become the main philosophical ground for the papal exposition of natural right in the social teaching of Leo XIII and his successors.

The epoch-making appeal of Hugo Grotius to the natural law belongs to the history of jurisprudence. But whereas his fellow Calvinist Johannes Althusius (1557–1638) had proceeded from theological doctrines of predestination to elaborate his theory of lawnatural law “even if we were to suppose . . . that God does not exist or is not concerned with human affairs.” A few years later Thomas Hobbes was arguing not from the “state of innocence” in which man had lived in the biblical Eden but from a savage “state of nature” in which men, free and equal in rights, were each one at solitary war with every other. After discerning the right of nature (jus naturale) to be “the liberty each man hath to use his own power for the preservation of his own nature, that is to say, of life,” Hobbes defines a law of nature (lex naturalis) as “a precept of general rule found out by reason, by which a man is forbidden to do that which is destructive of his life” and then enumerates the elementary rules on which peace and society can be established. Grotius and Hobbes thus stand together at the head of that “school of natural law” which, in accordance with the tendencies of the Enlightenment, tried to construct a whole edifice of law by rational deduction from a fictitious “state of nature” followed by a social contract. In England, John Locke departed from Hobbesian pessimism to the extent of describing the state of nature as a state of society, with free and equal men already observing the natural law. In France, where Montesquieu had argued that natural laws were presocial and were superior to those of religion and of the state, Jean-Jacques Rousseau postulated a savage who was virtuous in isolation and actuated by two principles “prior to reason,” self-preservation and compassion (innate repugnance against the sufferings of others). binding on all peoples, Grotius insisted on the validity of the

The Declaration of Independence of the United States refers only briefly to “the Laws of Nature” before citing equality and other “unalienable” rights as “self-evident.” The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen asserts liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression as “imprescriptible natural rights.” The philosophy of Immanuel Kant renounced the attempt to know nature as it really is, yet allowed the practical or moral reason to deduce a valid system of right with its own purely formal framework; and Kantian formalism contributed to the 20th-century revival of naturalistic jurisprudence.

On the level of international politics in the 20th century, the assertion of human rights was the product rather of an empirical search for common values than of any explicit doctrine about a natural law.


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7.15.2005

Britannica 中有关Hanse League的词条


also called Hansa, German Hanse, organization founded by north German towns and German merchant communities abroad to protect their mutual trading interests. The league dominated commercial activity in northern Europe from the 13th to the 15th century. (Hanse was a medieval German word for “guild,” or “association,” derived from a Gothic word for “troop,” or “company.”) Northern German mastery of trade in the Baltic Sea was achieved with striking speed and completeness in the late 12th and early 13th centuries. After its capture by Henry the Lion in 1158, Lübeck became the main base for Westphalian and Saxon merchants expanding northward and eastward; Visby, on the Swedish island of Gotland, was soon established as a major transshipment centre for trade in the Baltic and with Novgorod, which was the chief mart for the Russian trade. From Visby, German merchants helped establish important towns on the east coast of the Baltic: Riga, Reval (now Tallinn), Danzig (now Gdansk), and Dorpat (now Tartu). Thus, by the early 13th century Germans had a near-monopoly of long-distance trade in the Baltic. In the meantime, merchants from Cologne (Köln) and other towns in the Rhineland had acquired trading privileges in Flanders and in England. The decisive steps in the formation of the Hanseatic League took place in the second half of the 13th century. While overseas, the German merchants had tended increasingly to form associations (“hanses”) with each other in order to secure common action against robbers and pirates. From the mid-13th century this cooperation became much more extensive and regularized, and by 1265 all the north German towns having the “law of Lübeck” had agreed on common legislation for the defense of merchants and their goods. In the 1270s a Lübeck-Hamburg association that had acquired trading privileges in Flanders and England united with its rival Rhenish counterpart, and in the 1280s this confederation of German merchants trading in the west was closely joined to the association trading in the Baltic, thus creating the Hanseatic League. The Hanseatic League attempted to protect its ship convoys and caravans by quelling pirates and brigands, and it fostered safe navigation by building lighthouses and training pilots. Most importantly, it sought to organize and control trade throughout northern Europe by winning commercial privileges and monopolies and by establishing trading bases overseas. The league established permanent commercial enclaves (Kontore) in a number of foreign towns, notably Bruges in Flanders, Bergen in Norway, Novgorod in Russia, and the Steel Yard in London. The league’s principal trade consisted of grain, timber, furs, tar, honey, and flax traded from Russia and Poland to Flanders and England, which in turn sent cloth and other manufactured goods eastward to the Slavs. Swedish copper and iron ore were traded westward, and herring caught off the southern tip of Sweden was traded throughout Germany southward to the Alps. The Hanseatic League’s aggressively protectionist trading practices often aroused opposition from foreign merchants. The league typically used gifts and loans to foreign political leaders to protect its commercial privileges, and when this proved inadequate, it threatened to withdraw its trade and occasionally became involved in embargoes and blockades. Only in extreme cases did the league engage in organized warfare, as in the 1360s, when it faced a serious challenge from the Danish king Valdemar IV, who was trying to master the southwestern Baltic and end the league’s economic control there. The league’s members raised an armed force that defeated the Danes decisively in 1368, and in the Peace of Stralsund (1370) Denmark was forced to recognize the league’s supremacy in the Baltic. In the 14th century the Hanseatic League claimed a membership of about 100 towns, mostly German. Though basically a mercantile rather than a political organization, the league tried to ensure peace and order at home; warfare between member towns, civic strife within towns, and robbery on the roads were all suppressed as far as possible. The league had no constitution and no permanent army, navy, or governing body except for periodic assemblies (diets). These were convened less and less frequently from the early 15th century, as the towns’ peculiar and regional interests began to outweigh their common concerns. The Hanseatic League declined partly because it lacked any centralized power with which to withstand the new and more powerful nation-states forming on its borders. Lithuania and Poland were united in 1386; Denmark, Sweden, and Norway formed a union in 1397; and Ivan III of Moscow closed the Hanseatic trading settlement at Novgorod in 1494. The Dutch were growing in mercantile and industrial strength, and in the 15th century they were able to oust German traders from Dutch domestic markets and the North Sea region as a whole. New maritime connections between the Baltic and Mediterranean seas and between the Old World and the Americas caused a gradual diversion of trade westward to the great Atlantic ports. By the mid-16th century, Dutch ships had even won control of the carrying trade from the Baltic to the west, dealing a serious blow to Lübeck. The league died slowly as England contested with the Netherlands for dominance in northern European commerce and Sweden emerged as the chief commercial power in the Baltic Sea region. The Hanseatic League’s diet met for the last time in 1669.
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7.11.2005

词条 Fabian Society

socialist society founded in 1883–84 in London, having as its goal the establishment of a democratic socialist state in Great Britain. The Fabians put their faith in evolutionary socialism rather than in revolution. The name of the society is derived from the Roman general Fabius Cunctator, whose patient and elusive tactics in avoiding pitched battles secured his ultimate victory over stronger forces. Its founding is attributed to Thomas Davidson, a Scottish philosopher, and its early members included George Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb, Annie Besant, Edward Pease, and Graham Wallas. Shaw and Webb, later joined by Webb’s wife, Beatrice, were the outstanding leaders of the society for many years. In 1889 the society published its best-known tract, Fabian Essays in Socialism, edited by Shaw. It was followed in 1952 by New Fabian Essays, edited by Richard H.S. Crossman. The Fabians at first attempted to permeate the Liberal and Conservative parties with socialist ideas, but later they helped to organize the separate Labour Representation Committee, which became the Labour Party in 1906. The Fabian Society has since been affiliated with the Labour Party. The national membership of the Fabian Society has never been very great (at its peak in 1946 it had only about 8,400 members), but the importance of the society has always been much greater than its size might suggest. Generally, a large number of Labour members of Parliament in the House of Commons, as well as many of the party leaders, are Fabians; and in addition to the national society, there are scores of local Fabian societies. The principal activities of the society consist in the furtherance of its goal of socialism through the education of the public along socialist lines by means of meetings, lectures, discussion groups, conferences, and summer schools; carrying out research into political, economic, and social problems; and publishing books, pamphlets, and periodicals. In 1931 the New Fabian Research Bureau was established as an independent body. The bureau and the society amalgamated in 1938 to form a new and revitalized Fabian Society. In 1940 the Colonial Bureau of the Fabian Society was established, and it produced a continuous stream of discussion and writing on colonial questions. The Fabian International Bureau was started in 1941 to cater to the growing concern of Fabians with foreign policy and the great issues of war and peace. Copyright © 1994-2002 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
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7.10.2005

广告

卖者争夺买者的手段通常包括:
a.价格变化(价格竞争)
b.抱着吸引更多忠诚用户的目的改良产品(针对对价格不那么敏感的消费者),投入R&D成本
c.广告。付出额外交易成本为自己谋求市场地位。
d.销售组织建设,如分销渠道等。
e.对消费者的融资支持,如贷款、分期付款等。
f.售后服务。
g.对竞争施加政治性游说。

其中a-f属于经济型竞争,a为价格竞争,b-f为非价格竞争;g为非经济竞争,供应者串通政府强制或限制买家的干预。(新古典教科书大都忽视b-f的非价格竞争,而假定零令交易成本的市场行为。)

新制度经济学分析现实经济活动后认为,新古典主义经济学的完全竞争市场假设是不正确的。市场通常状态都是一个非完全竞争的寡头垄断市场,几个供应商之间彼 此熟悉而共同争取客户,从而存在寡头竞争的情况。其中供应者往往通过b-f的非价格竞争手段部分的培养消费者对它们产品的忠诚度,从而在一定的价格范围 内,该供应商面对的价格需求弹性相当之小,以至于可以忽略不计,并因而使他的需求曲线出现两个拐折点(关于拐折的需求曲线,请参照保罗斯威齐的原始论 述)。如在图中所示,当价格在P1P2之间时,企业的需求曲线E1E2的弹性非常之小,企业进入适合生存发展的市场小生境(market niche)之中。在市场小生境范围内,价格的变动对需求量产生的影响很小,只要企业能够有效控制成本不出现大的决策失误,使得成本始终盘踞在P1P2之 间,从而可以在相当程度上弥补企业因决策失误带来的成本损失并尽可能转嫁到消费者头上去。因而企业总是想方设法进入这个市场小生境范围内并盘踞下来。影响 市场小生境的外部力量主要有:来自其他供应商的竞争会给这个企业的小生境造成压力,进一步缩小|p1p2|的值,从而降低该企业的利润;相应地,通过g (政府游说,即寻租活动,通过向政府谋求政治干预来保护其市场小生境)的非经济手段,与b-f的非价格竞争一起发挥作用,也可以带来提到|p1p2|的动 态张力。压力和张力此消彼长不断变化,使得整个经济活动呈现不停的动态流动。残酷的市场竞争中也因而不断涌现出新的知识,带动社会向前发展。

消费者会欢迎这种结果,充分竞争将带来更大的效用和更多地满足,以使购买者付出更少的钱获得更大的效益。供应者则会感到更大的压力,从而被逼着不断寻求新的知识和信息,以确保在市场竞争中至少不会落于人后,保住既有的市场份额。
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