The Mystery of Capital and the Construction of Social Reality

by Smith, Barry; Mark, David; Ehrlich, Isaac

• ISBN13: 9780812696158
• ISBN10: 0812696158
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-05-28
• Publisher: Open Court

Summary

This trail-blazing collection of original essays brings together the distinctive themes of two provocative and influential systems of thought: Hernando de Soto's analysis (in his Mystery of Capital) of why market capitalism is slow to 'take' in many third-world and post-Soviet countries, and John Searle's exploration (in his Construction of Social Reality) of the manner in which human society is constructed by the common acceptance of certain abstract mental categories. Book jacket.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. vii
What I Do, and How Philosophy Has Helped Me	p. 1
Social Ontology and Political Power	p. 19
Searle and de Soto: The New Ontology of the Social World	p. 35
The Construction of Social Reality: Searle, de Soto, and Disney	p. 53
How Philosophy and Science May Interact: A Case Study of Works by John Searle and Hernando de Soto	p. 79
Language and Institutions in Searle's The Construction of Social Reality	p. 97
The Mystery of Human Capital as Engine of Growth, or Why the U.S. became the Economic Superpower in the Twentieth Century	p. 113
Allocation and Misallocation of Human Capital: Some Lessons from Japan and Russia	p. 159
On the Essential Nature of Human Capital	p. 173
Property Law for Development Policy and Institutional Theory: Problems of Structure, Choice, and Change	p. 193
The Institutionalization of Real Property Rights: The Case of Denmark	p. 229
A Case for Simple Laws	p. 261
Postscript by Carlos Alejandro Cabrera Del Valle	p. 276
Sovereigns, Squatters, and Property Rights: From Guano Islands to the Moon	p. 281
The Property Rights Prescription: Urban Migrants versus Rural Customary Land Tenure in the Developing World	p. 291
Geographic Regions as Brute Facts, Social Facts, and Institutional Facts	p. 305
Collective Intentionality, Documentation, and Real Estate	p. 317
Real Institutions, and Really Legitimate Institutions	p. 331
Contributors	p. 347
Index	p. 351
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