City Intelligible: A Philosophical and Historical Anthropology of Global Commoditisation Before Industrialisation

City Intelligible seeks to integrate a transcendental philosophical anthropology of commoditisation before industrialisation with a social and cultural, thus empirical anthropology of commodity production and exchange that is global, thus inter-cultural. It treats commodification as a singular and privileged evidence of the universal status of human reasoning, and one that grounds the translational character of human exchange throughout the early centuries, and yet that simultaneously founds ubiquitous cultural differentiation. The book constitutes, therefore, a refutation of the predominant tendency in the humanities to represent cultural difference as inhibiting the very possibility of effective intercultural translation.
It treats the factors of economic history as forms of cultural expression, but determined, in their turn, by a continuum of complex societal formation from the very beginnings of intensive agricultural and social settlement. It seeks to derive evidence for the universal foundations of human reasoning through analysis of the culture of commoditisation in marrying a thoroughgoing Kantian analysis with the historical evidence, an approach aspiring to ground the very concept and possibility of a universal human cultural nature underlying all human differentiation.

Frank Perlin, University of London BA History Honours First Class; University of Leiden PhD; author of The Invisible City, and Unbroken Landscape, and substantial articles. Specialisations: historical-anthropological archival research; methodology interdisciplinary and comparative; philosophy of knowledge; derivation of the universal foundation of human reason and difference.