The Existential Foundations of Political Economy PDF Download

Author: Christopher M. England
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527542041
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
This volume argues that economic thought has long been shaped by deeply human forms of attachment, anxiety, desire, fear of suffering and death, and even historical speculation about the ultimate destiny of humanity. Starting in the 17th century, modern economics began to incorporate patterns of speculation and rhetoric that mirror postulates found in religion and the philosophy of history. This text demonstrates that the political significance of economic theory can only be fully understood when the existential commitments that motivated its seminal thinkers, from Smith and Marx to Hayek and beyond, have been excavated. Featuring incisive examinations and revisionist interpretations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, F.A. Hayek, and Karl Polanyi, it is powerfully written and exhaustively researched. It will appeal to anyone interested in political economy, the history of political thought, or the roots of contemporary ideologies.

Author: Adelino Zanini
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783039113422
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
The book investigates the relationship between the economic and political writings of four seminal authors: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Joseph A. Schumpeter, and John M. Keynes. It underlines how in their works the nexus between ethics, economics, and politics has produced four exemplary solutions. They represent the most relevant modern formulations of the idea of 'political interest', to which the philosophical and political debate constantly returns, as the thought of Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, and Michel Foucault demonstrates. The author discusses the different interpretations by considering economic science not as a natural, but as moral and political science.

Author: Mohammed A. Bamyeh
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810124416
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 147

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Book Description
Death is the opposite not of life, but of power. And as such, Mohammed Bamyeh argues in this original work, death has had a great and largely unexplored impact on the thinking of governance throughout history, right down to our day. In Of Death and Dominion Bamyeh pursues the idea that a deep concern with death is, in fact, the basis of the ideological foundations of all political systems. Concentrating on four types of political systems—polis, empire, theocracy, and modern mass society systems—Bamyeh shows how each follows a specific strategy designed to pit power against the equalizing specter of death. Each of these strategies—consolation, expansion, preparation, and repression—produces a certain style of political behavior, as well as particular psychic traumas. In making his argument, Bamyeh revisits a wide range of empirical and theoretical discussions in existentialist philosophy, psychoanalysis, comparative historical sociology, literary studies, and anthropology. By demonstrating how schemes of power are by definition also schemes for defying death—despite their claims to the contrary—his book encourages us to think of a new style of politics, one oriented toward life.

Author: Matthew Watson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1137040807
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Despite a burgeoning debate on substantive issues in IPE, little attention has been devoted to its theoretical foundations. In this important new text, Matthew Watson reviews the main current theoretical approaches to IPE and highlights the problems that arise from treating 'states' and 'markets' as separate and contesting units of analysis. Foremost among these problems is the lack of attention given to theorizing the constitution of the individual as both an economic agent and a moral being.

Author: Paul Dragos Aligica
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1786605627
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
James M. Buchanan, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1986, was a pioneer of public choice and constitutional political economy, as well as contributing to many fields of study, including philosophy, political science, and public finance. Each chapter in this volume seeks to explore, critique, and emphasize the continuing relevance of the vast contributions of Buchanan to our understanding of political economy and social philosophy. The diversity in topics and approaches will make the volume of interest to readers in a variety of fields, and accessible to scholars from a variety of backgrounds providing the opportunity to further a cross-disciplinary exploration and discussion on market process theory.

Author: Jean-Charles-Léonard Simonde Sismondi
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Author: Peter Bloom
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319765027
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
Innovatively combining existentialist philosophy with cutting edge post-structuralist and psychoanalytic perspectives, this book boldly reconsiders market freedom. Bloom argues that present day capitalism has robbed us of our individual and collective ability to imagine and implement alternative and more progressive economic and social systems; it has deprived us of our radical freedom to choose how we live and what we can become. Since the Great Recession, capitalism has been increasingly blamed for rising inequality and feelings of mass social and political alienation. In place of a deeper liberty, the free market offers subjects the opportunity to continually reinvest their personal and shared hopes within its dogmatic ideology and policies. This embrace helps to temporarily alleviate growing feelings of anxiety and insecurity at the expense of our fundamental human agency. What has become abundantly clear is that the free market is anything but free. Here, Bloom exposes our present day bad faith in the free market and how we can break free from it.

Author: Christian Arnsperger
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135169764
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 442

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Book Description
Economics is essential in today’s world, and yet mainstream economists are increasingly under criticism for not taking into account sufficiently many dimensions of real life, such as political and moral values, human development, spirituality, and people’s widely shared aspiration to live more liberated lives. This book offers a critical assessment of contemporary mainstream economics by showing that the discipline has become much too narrow and misses out on the full spectrum of human existence. The book presents a careful, detailed analysis of the limitations of neoclassical economics and of its post-neoclassical successors: behavioral economics, neuroeconomics, and experimental economics. It offers a deconstruction rooted in the "Integral" philosophy developed over the past three decades by the contemporary American thinker Ken Wilber. Distinguishing between exterior and interior dimensions of human existence, it suggests that economics could be made into a more inclusive and more emancipatory science if it started to truly honor the genuinely interior aspects of individuals and communities. Instead of remaining stuck in the limitations of post-neoclassical theory, we should make the move toward a new paradigm that, in the name of science, promotes objectivity as well as subjectivity, and material causality as well as existential awareness. The result is a highly expanded sense of relevance for economists, sociologists, and social scientists in general. Combining methodologies from systems science, brain science, ethno-methodology, and existentialism as well as from the great spiritual traditions of humanity, Christian Arnsperger delineates the requirements of a genuinely integral economics beyond today’s crippling reductionism.

Author: Kerry H. Whiteside
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400859735
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
Drawing on previously unexplored sources, Kerry H. Whiteside presents the political theory of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), one of France's best-known twentieth-century philosophers. Whiteside argues that Merleau-Ponty's objective in his political writings was to make existentialism into the foundation for a philosophically consistent mode of political thinking. This study discusses the inadequacies Merleau-Ponty found in the traditional philosophies of empiricism and idealism, and then examines the subject-object dualism that he believed deprived previous forms of existentialism of political significance. Whiteside shows how Merleau-Ponty overcame these problems by grounding political reasoning in a theory of consciousness that emphasized both its individuality and its need for socially created meaning. After explaining Merleau-Ponty's modifications of the views of Sartre, Aron, and others, the book investigates how he applied his political theory in editorial exchanges with Communists and liberals. Throughout this study, Whiteside traces and criticizes the changes in the philosopher's concept of Marxism and points to his many ideas that bear on current controversies in political theory. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Author: James Bonar
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 9781412830812
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
This volume is one of the most remarkable works in the history of economic thought. First published in 1893, its principal significance rests in its argument that economic theory, however technical or pragmatic, is necessarily formed by and derives its meaning from larger moral and philosophical systems and assumptions. Bonar traces the inexorable presence of this moral and philosophical element in a vast, though highly nuanced, survey of the economic aspect of major thinkers from Plato to Darwin and demonstrates how modern economic thought, in turn, grew out of one or another branch of philosophy. Bonar begins with a consideration of Plato and Aristotle, examining their conceptions of wealth, production and distribution, and civil society. Discussions of the Stoics, Epicurians, and early Christianity explore complications introduced by these bodies of thought. His analysis of the classical and medieval world is followed by an extensive treatment of the concept of natural law, from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment, describing its influence and its relation to ideas of natural rights. The book's later sections concentrate on the dominant modes of ninteenth-cen-tury thought: utilitarianism, idealism, and materialism. Bonar identifies and explores the philosophical topics on which the conduct of technical economic analysis makes assumptions: human nature and human wants, the nature and role of the state, the relation of the individual to society, the nature and origin of property, and the role of ideals in socioeconomic life. He concludes by examining the implications for economics of the theory of evolution arising from the work of Darwin and others. The continuing interest of this volume for economists, philosophers, and sociologists lies in Bonar's contention that at the heart of the relationship of philosophy to economics is the problem of order: the ongoing need to reconcile conflicts between freedom and control, continuity and change, hierarchy and equality. In his reading, the fundamental question to which philosophy and economics are both brought to bear is that of changing the structure of power and opportunity in the social economy. This is, in short, a classic in the history of economics as well as the economic element in intellectual history.