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8261133
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Many critics of the Crusades would seem to suppose that after the Muslims had overrun a major portion of Christendom, they should have been ignored or forgiven; suggestions have been made about turning the other cheek. This outlook is certainly unrealistic and probably insincere. Not only had the Byzantines lost most of their empire; the enemy was at their gates. And the loss of Spain, Sicily, and southern Italy, as well as a host of Medite..
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crusades
holy-land
conquest
christians
muslims
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Rodney Stark |
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c6636d0
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The Crusades were not unprovoked. They were not the first round of European colonialism. They were not conducted for land, loot, or converts. The crusaders were not barbarians who victimized the cultivated Muslims. They sincerely believed that they served in God's battalions.
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Rodney Stark |
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409609a
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In fact, all known societies above the very primitive level have been slave societies--even many of the Northwest American Indian tribes had slaves long before Columbus's voyage.46 Amid this universal slavery, only one civilization ever rejected human bondage: Christendom. And it did it twice!
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Rodney Stark |
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d5822f3
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No doubt Western modernity has its limitations and discontents. Still, it is far better than the known alternatives--not only, or even primarily, because of its advanced technology but because of its fundamental commitment to freedom, reason, and human dignity.
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Rodney Stark |
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bc9e99d
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No doubt it was "unenlightened" of the crusaders to have been typical medieval warriors, but it seems even more unenlightened to anachronistically impose the Geneva Conventions on the crusaders while pretending that their Islamic opponents were innocent victims."
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Rodney Stark |
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c56fee0
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current Muslim memories and anger about the Crusades are a twentieth-century creation, prompted in part by 'post-World War I British and French imperialism and post-World War II creation of the state of Israel.
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Rodney Stark |
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c784b70
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IN 1710, THE ENGLISH FREETHINKER Thomas Woolston (1670-1731) expressed his confidence that religion would vanish by 1900.1 Voltaire (1695-1778) thought this much too pessimistic and predicted that religion would be gone from the Western world within the next fifty years--by about 1810.
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Rodney Stark |
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e2e0d8e
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In any event, should you doubt that your knowledge of Western history is distorted by the work of these distinguished bigots, consider whether you believe any of the following statements: The Catholic Church motivated and actively participated in nearly two millennia of anti-Semitic violence, justifying it on grounds that the Jews were responsible for the Crucifixion, until the Vatican II Council was shamed into retracting that doctrine in ..
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Rodney Stark |
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0290b61
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It is difficult to know how anyone, even the most bitter anti-Catholic, could truly have believed any of this! By itself, the biography of Moses Maimonides (1135-1204) makes a travesty of all these claims. In 1148, the Maimonides family pretended to convert to Islam when the Jews of Cordoba were told to become Muslims or leave, upon pain of death. Note that when most historians mention that in 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella ordered the Jews of..
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Rodney Stark |
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d46bb97
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for many people conversion is simply a matter of aligning their religious life with that of their family, friends, and neighbors who already have joined--thus creating a self-sustaining network of growth. Finally, for many people of privilege and ambition, their abandonment of paganism was a matter of opportunism--many people professed Christianity or were discreet about their paganism in order to gain social and political advantages.
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Rodney Stark |
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54efa44
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Thus it is that the statement on the Jews issued by Vatican II in 1965 was nothing more (or less) than a forceful restatement of the traditional church teachings in language appropriate for the time. Unfortunately, this particular manifestation of anti-Catholic history lives on with renewed venom in recent indictments of Pope Pius XII as Hitler's collaborator in the Holocaust, which also is said to be quite in keeping with the pope's suppor..
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Rodney Stark |
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b40cc0d
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SCIENCE AROSE ONLY IN Europe because only medieval Europeans believed that science was possible and desirable. And the basis of their belief was their image of God and his creation. This was dramatically asserted to a distinguished audience of scholars attending the 1925 Lowell Lectures at Harvard by the great philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), who explained that science developed in Europe because of the wide..
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Rodney Stark |
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e6ad520
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IN WHAT CAME TO BE KNOWN as his farewell address, Muhammad is said to have told his followers: "I was ordered to fight all men until they say 'There is no god but Allah.'"1 This is entirely consistent with the Qur'an (9:5) : "[S]lay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them [captive], and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush." In this spirit, Muhammad's heirs set out to conquer the world."
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Rodney Stark |
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43b3c46
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Now, shouts of "Dieu li volt!" (God wills it!) began to spread through the crowd, and men began to cut up cloaks and other pieces of cloth to make crosses and sew them against their chests. Everyone agreed that the next year they would set out for the Holy Land. And they did." --
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Rodney Stark |
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18f509b
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The European Middle Ages collected innovations from all over the world, especially from China, and built them into a new unity which formed the basis of our modern civilization.
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Rodney Stark |
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10a13c1
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But following these Stone Age discoveries, progress was slow. It is estimated that in terms of the standard of living, things were pretty much the same for the next seven thousand years.1 People ate about the same amount, lived about the same lifespan, and buried about the same high percentage of their children. Even in the West, as recently as the seventeenth century life was hard and short. But then an era of immense and stunningly rapid ..
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Rodney Stark |
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83b5836
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In contrast, a number of innovations can plausibly be attributed to the Little Ice Age: glass windowpanes, storm doors, skis, ice skates, sunglasses (first used for preventing snow blindness), distilled liquor, trousers, knitted clothing, buttons, and chimneys.
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Rodney Stark |
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712a713
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Science arose in the West--and only in the West--precisely because the Judeo-Christian conception of God encouraged and even demanded this pursuit.
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Rodney Stark |
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6c4727e
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The Greeks were the first people in the world to play, and they played on a great scale. All over Greece there were games, all sorts of games; athletic contests of every description ... contests in music, where one side outsung the other; in dancing ... games so many that one grows weary with the list of them.... Wretched people, toiling people, do not play. Nothing like the Greek games is conceivable in Egypt or Mesopotamia.... Play died w..
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Rodney Stark |
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33ee415
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The Byzantine governor assembled an army considerably larger than that of the Normans and rebels. He then sent a herald to the opposing camp offering either the Normans' safe return to Lombard territory or battle. In response, an enormous Norman knight smashed his mailed fist on the head of the Byzantine herald's horse; the horse fell dead on the spot. (Yes, this actually happened, historians agree.)23 The battle began the next day.
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Rodney Stark |
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218f861
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only One True God can provide an adequate religious basis for the moral order. Divine essences such as the Tao do not command us to love one another. The "first mover" does not forbid us to covet another's spouse. Paul Tillich's conception of God as the "ground of our being" is not a being and therefore is incapable of having, let alone expressing, moral concerns. As for the little "beings" who populate pagan pantheons, they seem to concern..
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Rodney Stark |
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47697f5
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Impoverished Spain depended on imports not only for manufactured products but even for sufficient food. Spanish agriculture was hampered by poor soil and by the strange institution known as the Mesta. Spanish sheep grew high-quality fleeces--not as good as those of English sheep but better than could be found elsewhere--and Spain had, in fact, replaced England as the source of wool for the Flemish and Italian cloth industries. The Mesta was..
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Rodney Stark |
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2a06e71
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In any event, there was no "fall" into "Dark Ages." Instead, once freed of the bondage of Rome, Europe separated into hundreds of independent "statelets."16 In many of these societies progress and increased production became profitable, and that ushered in "one of the great innovative eras of mankind," as technology was developed and put into use "on a scale no civilization had previously known."
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Rodney Stark |
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5073472
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For example, at the fall of Rome there was very extensive slavery everywhere in Europe; by the time of the "Renaissance" it was long gone."
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Rodney Stark |
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af63b5f
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How many victims were consumed by these ceremonies? In 1487, well before any contact with Europeans, the Aztecs inaugurated their great new Templo Mayor. The day began with four lines of victims, each line stretching for two miles. The historian and anthropologist Inga Clendinnen has estimated the total number sacrificed on that occasion as twenty thousand, although others have placed the number as high as eighty thousand.12 This was, of co..
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Rodney Stark |
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08b923e
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As the world learned of the horrors of the Nazi death camps, Pope Pius XII was widely praised for his vigorous and devoted efforts to saving Jewish lives during the war. In 1943, Chaim Weizmann, who would become the first president of Israel, wrote: "the Holy See is lending its powerful help wherever it can, to mitigate the fate of my persecuted co-religionists."77 Moshe Sharett, soon to be Israel's first foreign minister and second prime m..
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Rodney Stark |
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e602381
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An additional indication of economic growth in ancient Greece comes from the major increases in the average size of Greek houses: in the eighth century BC it was 53 square meters; by the sixth century BC it had grown to 122 square meters; and by the fifth century BC it was 325 square meters.54
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Rodney Stark |
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98f15a9
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More recently, faculty at the University of Texas condemned "Western Civilization" courses as inherently right wing, and Yale even returned a $20 million contribution rather than reinstate the course."
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Rodney Stark |
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610d91f
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Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the rise of science is not that the early scientists searched for natural laws, confident that they existed, but that they found them. It thus could be said that the proposition that the universe had an Intelligent Designer is the most fundamental of all scientific theories and that it has been successfully put to empirical tests again and again.
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Rodney Stark |
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f42bc93
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Rather than a great tragedy, the fall of Rome was the single most beneficial event in the rise of Western civilization.
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Rodney Stark |
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ceb1453
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Keep in mind that democracy merely gives power to the people; it does not ensure that power will be used wisely or humanely.
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Rodney Stark |
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c61998f
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The Industrial Revolution was the culmination of the rise of Western civilization that began in Greece twenty-seven centuries ago. It was the product of human freedom and the pursuit of knowledge, which is precisely why it happened where and when it did.
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Rodney Stark |
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9e8ae6c
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It is well known that the Chinese had gunpowder by the thirteenth century and even cast a few cannons. But when Western voyagers reached China in the sixteenth century the Chinese lacked both artillery and firearms, whereas the Europeans had an abundance of both.
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Rodney Stark |
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1acd704
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It needs to be emphasized that the Church vigorously advocated and defended democracy in northern Italy. Not only did the Church unequivocally assert moral equality, but it also ventured into the political arena, with bishops and cardinals playing a leading role on behalf of expanding the franchise.
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Rodney Stark |
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3b103b0
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So much, then, for the "mystery" of how Muslim culture was somehow lost or left behind. The notion that in the medieval era Islamic culture was advanced well beyond Europe is as much an illusion as recent ones about an "Arab Spring." The Islamic world was backward then, and so it remains."
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Rodney Stark |
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b83d893
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Although many sociologists still echo Max Weber's (1864-1920) claim that capitalism originated in the Protestant Reformation, capitalism actually originated in the "depths" of the "Dark Ages."
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Rodney Stark |
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5c40c12
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Sweden's Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs was Alva Myrdal, wife of the famous economist Gunnar Myrdal, and herself a famous leftist economist and non-believer.
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Rodney Stark |
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0633831
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However, as in Scandinavia, the Church of England clergy are unionized and recently forced the Church to rescind a rule defrocking clergy convicted of felonies, on grounds that such convictions might have been miscarriages of justice.
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Rodney Stark |
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e08824d
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Merton was given an unusual amount of space in the American Journal of Sociology to argue on behalf of his thesis that to reject it on the basis of the evidence against it would be to commit what he called the 'Fallacy of the Latest Word'. This 'fallacy' involves abandoning a theory 'as soon as it appears to have been empirically falsified'. He then asked, 'When are we to retain a hypothesis or theoretical conception in the face of facts th..
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Rodney Stark |
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1c2bcef
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that there was no scientific revolution, only the culmination of normal scientific progress over several centuries and, moreover, that science arose only in Christian Europe because only medieval Europeans believed that science was possible and desirable.
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Rodney Stark |
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d683b6c
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As for Islam, the orthodox conception of Allah is hostile to the scientific quest. There is no suggestion in the Qur'an that Allah set his creation in motion and then let it run. Rather, it is assumed that he often intrudes in the world and changes things as it pleases him. Thus, through the centuries many of the most influential Muslim scholars have held that all efforts to formulate natural laws are blasphemy in that they would seem to de..
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Rodney Stark |
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606d00e
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My explanation is that England led the way in science for the same reasons that it led the way in the Industrial Revolution31 - its substantially greater political and economic liberty had produced a relatively open class system that enabled the emergence of an ambitious and creative upper middle class, sometimes called the bourgeoisie. While the rise of the bourgeoisie occurred all across western Europe, it did so earlier and to a far grea..
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Rodney Stark |
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863c985
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As is obvious, the English scientific stars were overwhelmingly from the bourgeois, while more than half of the European stars were from the 'leisure class', gentry and the nobility - only 16 per cent were from the bourgeois.
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Rodney Stark |
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e987a80
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What is a peasant society? It can be defined many ways, such as when most people live in rural areas and farm for a living. But that's not what Marx, Weber and the others had in mind. For them, peasant society referred to family structure.
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Rodney Stark |