This book project began in the summer of 1998. I spent two weeks of that summer at Radi, a small village outside Siena, discussing the contents of the MS with a sociologist and fellow doctoral student from the Zentrum für Höhere Studien (ZHS) at the University of Leipzig, Andreas Westerwinter1. Our discussions were mostly about the value, if any, of the discipline of geopolitics and the limited usefulness of neoclassical economics and modern political science for trying to explain current economic events, in particular the emergence of China as an economic superpower. From a wider methodological perspective the aim was to look at which ideas.
