ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews social scientific approaches to the analysis of the social production of livelihood and offers an agenda for the analysis of the historical trajectories of the extant polities of East Asia. In human livelihood, first, is an overview organized in formal terms: a spread of approaches ranging from the more or less interpretive through to the more or less positivist. Ordinarily the running order would be reversed, first the positivistic claims of mainstream liberal market economics and then the other forms of analysis and this implicitly grants the status claims of the mainstream. The running orders are interpretive analyses, historical institutionalism, institutional economics, political economy and mainstream neo-liberal economics. The chapter gives a note on the argument strategies used by the various schools of thought. It draws on the resources of the classical European tradition of social theorizing, with its central concern to elucidate the dynamics of change in the unfolding shift to the modern world.
