Book Review: Jules Monchanin (1895-1957) as Seen from East and West, volumes 1 and 2

A review of Jules Monchanin (189501957) as Seen from East and West, volumes 1 and 2 edited by Thomas matus and Sister Sarananda

The Controversy and its Theological Implications

The controversy concerning evangelization and conversions in contemporary India may be productively interpreted as a conflict between stories, between what John Haught refers to as power-bestowing narratives, or between what Gerald Larson calls comprehensive interpretive frameworks. These Hindu stories and Christian stories are discordant, not only with each other, but with other stories within their own traditions, thus fostering the mutual mistrust that thoroughly colors the debate. My task is to sketch four such narrative frameworks, each centered upon an image of India and corresponding to one of four communities involved in the controversy: conservative Hindu nationalists, more secularist Hindus, Evangelical Christian missionaries, and Roman Catholic theologians in India

Ernst Freund as Precursor of the Rational Study of Corporate Law

Gindis, David, Ernst Freund as Precursor of the Rational Study of Corporate Law (October 27, 2017). Journal of Institutional Economics, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2905547, doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2905547The rise of large business corporations in the late 19th century compelled many American observers to admit that the nature of the corporation had yet to be understood. Published in this context, Ernst Freund's little-known The Legal Nature of Corporations (1897) was an original attempt to come to terms with a new legal and economic reality. But it can also be described, to paraphrase Oliver Wendell Holmes, as the earliest example of the rational study of corporate law. The paper shows that Freund had the intuitions of an institutional economist, and engaged in what today would be called comparative institutional analysis. Remarkably, his argument that the corporate form secures property against insider defection and against outsiders anticipated recent work on entity shielding and capital lock-in, and can be read as an early contribution to what today would be called the theory of the firm.Peer reviewe