Ethically Challenged: Private Equity Storms U.S. Health Care

Abstract

sociology and moral systems,’’ which makes up almost two-thirds of the whole volume (pp. 151–432). Nandan points out that juridique should not be understood narrowly in the sense of law and jurisprudence alone, but also includes customs, habits, domestic organization, and political organization, along with an astonishing variety of penal, property, contract, and international laws across a wide range of historical and cultural contexts. As Durkheim and Mauss put it in an introductory note from 1910, ‘‘A juridic system is defined by the social structure it represents: it is this structure that best indicates the direction in which it is moving’’ (p. 152). Morals and laws thus give order to social relationships within such groupings as totemic clans, tribal societies, and national collectives even as they are subject to processes of development or decay over time. The writings of Joseph Kohler and Otto Stoll, for instance, who do not figure in Durkheim’s other publications, stand out in shaping his emerging concerns with nonwestern and premodern societies, the former for his focus on complex exogamous domestic arrangements (pp. 165–71, 234– 44, 267–71, 295–96, 341–42), the latter for his cross-cultural perspective on techniques of sexual ornamentation (pp. 354–60). These and other reviews in this section are important for tracing the evolution of Durkheim’s ideas from his lecture course in the 1890s, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, to the book he outlined before he died, La Morale (Ethics/Morality). Besides showing us the breadth and diversity of empirical materials and theoretical ideas that Durkheim and his colleagues were grappling with apart from their most well-known essays and published books, this collection of reviews also gives us a glimpse into what ‘‘social anthropology’’ contributed to sociology before they went their separate ways. Durkheim and Mauss’s 1913 ‘‘Note on the Concept of Civilization’’ suggests an ambitious program in the ethnography and prehistory of the ‘‘complex and united systems’’ that make up the ‘‘various civilizations that dominate and wrap the collective life of every group of people’’ and that often cut across territorial borders and extend beyond national boundaries (pp. 96–99). Likewise, Durkheim’s 1901 remark on ‘‘Technology’’ proposes that the study of the everyday use of implements in familiar places like the household should be considered a branch of sociology, since ‘‘the instruments which men use (such as tools, weapons, clothes, utilities of all kinds, etc.) are products of collective activity’’ (p. 438). These ambitious statements point beneath the integration of sociology into the mechanisms of the nation-state and reach beyond the function of anthropology as a tool of colonial administration. They also recover a dimension of the critical mission of the social sciences that is independent of their institutionalization in the university and that serves as a provocation for imagining other ways of being and thinking from those we have become all too familiar with.