Paperback. Blue cover with black title.

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• THIS FROST PAPERBACK is a USED book which a member of the Frost family has checked for condition, cleanliness, completeness and readability. When the buyer collects their book from Frost’s shop, the delivery charge of £3.00 is deducted

For conditions, please view our photographs. An original  book from the library gathered by the famous Cambridge Don, computer scientist, food and wine connoisseur, Jack Arnold LANG.Please view the back cover in the photographs for further details.

                                This is truly a foundational study.

Sir Moses Israel Finley FBA (born Finkelstein; 20 May 1912 – 23 June 1986) was an American-born British academic and classical scholar. His prosecution by the United States Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security during the 1950s resulted in his relocation to England, where he became an English classical scholar and eventually master of Darwin College, Cambridge. His most notable publication is The Ancient Economy (1973), in which he argued that the economy in antiquity was governed by status and civic ideology rather than rational economic motivations.

Among his works, The World of Odysseus (1954, revised ed. with additional essays 1978) proved seminal. In it, he applied the findings of ethnologists and anthropologists like Marcel Mauss to interpret Homer, a radical method that was thought by his publishers to require a reassuring introduction by an established classicist, Maurice Bowra. Paul Cartledge asserted in 1995, “… in retrospect Finley’s work can be seen as the seed of the present flowering of anthropologically-related studies of ancient Greek culture and society”.

Following the example of Karl Polanyi, Finley argued that the ancient economy should not be analysed using the concepts of modern economic science, because ancient man had no notion of the economy as a separate part of society, and because economic actions in antiquity were determined not primarily by economic, but by social concerns. This text was later criticized by, amongst others, Kevin Greene, who argues that Finley underplays the importance of technological innovation, and C. R. Whittaker, who rejects the concept of a “consumer city”.