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In Complexity, the widely applauded work by Mitchell Waldrop that introduced the exciting and important work of the Santa Fe Institute to a wide audience, Brian Arthur and his ideas played a pivotal role and were shown connecting creatively with the many aspects of the Institute's work. This book brings together Professor Arthur's pioneering articles and provides a comprehensive presentation of his exciting vision of an economics that incorporates increasing returns. After a decade of resis-tance from economists, these ideas are now being widely discussed and adopted, as Kenneth Arrow recounts in his foreword. In fundamental ways they are changing our views of the working economy. The essential ideas are first introduced at a popular level with an article originally published in the Scientific American. They are then shown in powerful and convincing application to a variety of questions, including competition between technologies and the development of industrial clusters such as Silicon Valley. The volume also contains the technical articles that underpin the creation of this important and original work in economics. Brian Arthur's work establishes a whole new domain for economics, a new perspective on many contemporary economic problems, and an explanation for many puzzling features of the high technology economy. This book provides the ideal introduction to and a comprehensive exposition of Arthur's work.

This volume focuses on how the national elites in Central and South-Eastern Europe perceived the peasantry during the process of building the modern state and democratic political systems. The central theme of the discussion is the integration of peasants into the political system, with the aim of transforming them from the dependent subjects of various public figures to active citizens. The politicization of the rural world, in terms of increasing peasants’ participation in public affairs and their identification with ideas concerning the “common good,” was integral to the modern transformation of societies in these regions. The studies in this volume examine the relationship between the peasantry and central and local state institutions, such as the administration, schools and the army; associations of all kinds; and social figures, including intellectuals, teachers, local notables and priests, who sought to uplift the rural world as part of the modernization agenda.