In City Intelligible Perlin marries a transcendental-critical philosophical approach with one historical and empirical in order to penetrate the culture of commodification dominating global societal development over many centuries prior to industrialisation. Commodification represents a dense and abundant global evidence for the essential translatability informing all cultural difference and enabling exchange of cultural goods transiting all settled society. Perlin investigates the two anthropologies — one universalist and the other particularist — in order to reach an eventual synthesis that reinterprets societal relationship both in detail and in general, leading to a derivation of the universal foundations of human reasoning and formation of culture both logically and empirically (historically), and that in founds a comprehension of human differentiation.

Description based on print version record.