ABSTRACT
The first sociology course I ever took, in my junior year at the University of Kansas in 1964, was a course comparing China and Japan. The instructor of that course, Norman Jacobs, had received his doctorate from Harvard University, was a student of Talcott Parsons, and entitled his first book The Origin of Modern Capitalism and Eastern Asia (1958). The course to some extent followed the book, and the book to a very great extent flowed from the man. To my eyes at the time, his view embodied a grand vision that offered a solution to a complex historical puzzle. As Fernand Braudel (1982: 586, his emphasis) would later commend, “In making his comparison (in this book), Jacobs (did) not hesitate to set side by side the entire history of China and Japan”, in order to show how “the preconditions of capitalism” came out of a “very long-term evolution over many centuries”. To Jacobs, this grandiose dissection of history, laying bare the functional prerequisites of capitalism, in the end yielded the answer to the puzzle explaining, in the year 1958, why Japan and not China had developed into the only capitalist country in Asia. I can say, without exaggeration, that Norman Jacobs and his first book brought me, simultaneously, into Sociology and Asian Studies, and there I have been ever since.
