{"id":6069,"date":"2012-03-14T05:00:50","date_gmt":"2012-03-14T09:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/?p=6069"},"modified":"2012-03-11T21:11:30","modified_gmt":"2012-03-12T01:11:30","slug":"eugen-weber-and-the-western-tradition-in-26-hours","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/6069","title":{"rendered":"Eugen Weber and the Western Tradition in 26 Hours"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In college, I declared economics as my major before doing a Masters in economics and a PhD in applied economics. Having been trained as an economist through-and-through, I am thus woefully ignorant of what the humanities and other social sciences have had to say about development policy.<\/p>\n<p>While I did read outside of economics during my minor in philosophy, my philosophical readings were largely confined to political philosophy and epistemology &#8212; two topics that are of direct relevance to economics.<\/p>\n<p>In recent years, however, I have decided to remedy my ignorance by reading classic social sciences books surrounding development policy. I was thus very happy when Chris Blattman posted his list of <a title=\"Books Development Economists and Aid Workers Seldom Read but Should?\" href=\"http:\/\/chrisblattman.com\/2011\/06\/21\/books-development-economists-and-aid-workers-seldom-read-but-should\/\" target=\"_blank\">books development economists should read but usually don&#8217;t<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/peasants.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-6077\" title=\"peasants\" src=\"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/peasants.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"180\" height=\"280\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I have so far read six of the titles on Chris&#8217; list. All were very enlightening. Perhaps more importantly, all contributed in some way to my research and teaching.<\/p>\n<p>One of my favorite books on the list was Eugen Weber&#8217;s <em><a title=\"Peasants into Frenchmen\" href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Peasants-into-Frenchmen-Modernization-1870-1914\/dp\/0804710139\/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1331484332&amp;sr=8-1\" target=\"_blank\">Peasants into Frenchmen<\/a><\/em>, which is an account of how France modernized between 1870 and the end of World War I. It has also become my favorite nonfiction book. When I realized that Weber had been teaching at UCLA, I imagined how interesting it must have been to take a class with him.<\/p>\n<p>I no longer need to imagine it. A student in my principles of micro class, who noticed the book on my desk when she visited during my office hours, brought to my attention <a title=\"The Western Tradition\" href=\"http:\/\/www.learner.org\/resources\/series58.html\" target=\"_blank\">this series of video lectures on the Western tradition<\/a>, taught by Weber himself. There are 52 lectures, each lasting 30 minutes. Watching these lectures should be a very nice way to spend my next 26 hours of spare time.<\/p>\n<p>(HT: Haoxiaohan Cai.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In college, I declared economics as my major before doing a Masters in economics and a PhD in applied economics. Having been trained as an&#8230;<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/6069\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Eugen Weber and the Western Tradition in 26 Hours<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,16,45,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-development","category-miscellaneous","category-social-sciences","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1gPg8-1zT","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6069"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6069\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6099,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6069\/revisions\/6099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}