SCAS News - 31 October, 2017

New Book in Honour of SCAS Collaborator Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt

In memory of the late Israeli sociologist Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt, the book Dynamics of Continuity, Patterns
of Change: Between World History and Comparative Historical Sociology, edited by Benjamin Z. Kedar, Ilana
Friedrich Silber and Adam Klin-Oron, was recently published by the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities
and the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute (2017). Eisenstadt was a close collaborator of the Swedish Collegium and
also a close colleague and friend of SCAS Principal Björn Wittrock.

Eisenstadt, who sadly passed away in September 2010 at the age of 87, and Wittrock worked together on e.g.
multiple modernities and the Axial Age, and Eisenstadt's work has inspired and influenced the scholarly profile
of the Collegium. The SCAS Fellowship programme with a focus on transformative periods in global history,
the Karlgren-Eisenstadt programme, has been named partly in honour of Eisenstadt.

Björn Wittrock is one of the contributors to the recently published book with the chapter "A Contemporary
Classic: Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt's Research Program in Its Contexts".

Contents
Preface
Benjamin Z. Kedar – On Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt: Opening Remarks
Irit Meir – On a Personal Note – My Father
Björn Wittrock – A Contemporary Classic: Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt’s Research Program in Its Contexts
Wolfgang Knöbl – Confronting World/Global History with Eisenstadt’s Civilizational Analysis: Promises
and Problems
Benjamin Z. Kedar – Cultural Persistence Despite Total Political Collapse: The Role of Elites
Yuri Pines – Post-imperial Emperors? Traditional Chinese Political Culture and Its Afterlife
Elisabeth S. Clemens – Dynamics of Nation-Building: Benevolence and Liberalism in American Political
Development
Luis Roniger – Multiple Modernities, World History and the Global Rise of Human Rights
Gabriel Motzkin – The Problem of Scale in Comparative History
Yuval Noah Harari – Does History Have a Direction?
S.N. Eisenstadt: List of Publications (compiled by B.Z. Kedar)

Read more about the book >>