The dark valley illuminated

Historians are continually fascinated by the way a new idea, seemingly independently and simultaneously, emerges from many minds at once. Such ideas step assuredly into the mental environment that has been prepared for them by material conditions, but they seem to belong so naturally that it is easy to forget to question how they arrived. In the case of historians this often involves a re-examination of a historical period. The most recent years to emerge, reorganized in a novel interpretation, are those of World War Two. In several recent publications the war has been described as the crucible for Japan's postwar growth. This presents the embryo of a new theory of the origins of Japanese economic growth, competing with the earlier explanations of culture, miracles, and rational and evolutionary modernization

Aesthetics · Crucible (geodemography · Economics · Interpretation (philosophy · Modernization theory · Neoclassical economics · Period (music · Political economy · Political science · Sociology · Culture, Economy, and Development Studies · Economic Theory and Institutions · History · Law · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism