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In Europe, the liberation of the serfs was a project initiated in 1806 with a scheduled completion date of 1810. It was obvious to those who planned the project that the liberation of the serfs involved a complete overhaul of agriculture as it was then known as Europe moved from feudalism to capitalism. For this reason, Prussia was careful in implementing the reform, and did not rush, after seeing the Kingdom of Westphalia perishing under its crushing debt accumulated in part from Napoleon’s failed Russian campaign. The basic hypothesis of this book is that slave labor can never be efficient and will therefore disappear by itself. However, this process of disappearance can take many years....
This reader in the history of economic thought challenges the assumption that today’s prevailing economic theories are always the most appropriate ones. As Leland Yeager has pointed out, unlike the scientists of the natural sciences, economists provide their ideas largely to politicians and political appointees who have rather different incentives that might prevent them from choosing the best economic theory. In this book, the life and work of each of the founders of economics is examined by the best available expert on that founding figure. These contributors present rather novel and certainly not mainstream interpretations of the founders of modern economics. The primary theme concerns ...
Physiocracy, or the economic theory that a nation’s wealth comes from is agricultural and land development, was a popular school of thought in France in the 18th century. The contribution and significance of the Physiocrats and Antiphysiocrats are explored in detail through chapter contributions by economists, philosophers, and social historians. The book concludes that neither the Physiocrats, nor the Antiphysiocrats were pure profit maximizers and that they all had the well-being of the commonwealth in mind. It brings to light previous studies only conducted in German and is the first analysis of Pfeiffer in a century, making the book of interest to any student or scholar of political economy and the history of economic thought. The contribution and significance of the Physiocrats and Antiphysiocrats are explored in detail through chapter contributions by economists, philosophers, and social historians. It brings to light previous studies only conducted in German and is the first analysis of Pfeiffer in a century, making the book of interest to any student or scholar of political economy and the history of economic thought.
The second edition of Hegel and Marx: After the Fall of Communism surveys Hegel’s close connection with world-famed economist Friedrich List, the declared enemy of Karl Marx. Illuminating the mysterious nature of Hegel’s relationship with Marx and Friedrich List may help us to comprehend the extraordinary geopolitical transformations that have occurred in the last fifteen years since the original publication of Hegel and Marx in 1998.
Poverty still persists in today’s low-income countries despite decades of international aid, and extensive research on the determinants of growth and development. The book argues that meeting this challenge requires a holistic understanding of the context-specific factors that influence economic behavior and structures in poor countries. Contextual Development Economics approaches this task by offering a methodology that allows analysing the dynamic interrelations between economic, cultural and historical determinants of economic life in low-income countries. The book starts with an empirical inquiry into the economic characteristics of low-income countries that create the context by which...
FORTHCOMING OPEN ACCESS TITLE This collection of essays re-examines ideas of change and movements for change in early modern Europe without presuming that "progressive" change was the outcome of "reforms". "Reform" today implies rational, incremental change to public institutions and procedures. "Improvement" has a more general application, emphasising the positive outcome to which "reform" is oriented. But the language of reform is today used of historical personalities and movements that did not themselves use the term, and who in many cases were not necessarily seeking the progressive change that we would understand today. The activities of "reform" were embedded in contemporary politics,...
This volume provides a comprehensive account of Wilhelm Röpke as a liberal political economist and social philosopher. Wilhelm Röpke (1899-1966) was a key protagonist of transatlantic neoliberalism, a prominent public intellectual and a gifted international networker. As an original thinker, he always positioned himself at the interface between political economy and social philosophy, as well as between liberalism and conservatism. Röpke’s endeavors to combine these elements into a coherent whole, as well as his embeddedness in European and American intellectual networks of liberal and conservative thinkers, are a central theme throughout the book. The volume includes papers by internat...
The mid-eighteenth century witnessed what might be dubbed an economic turn that resolutely changed the trajectory of world history. The discipline of economics itself emerged amidst this turn, and it is frequently traced back to the work of François Quesnay and his school of Physiocracy. Though lionized by the subsequent historiography of economics, the theoretical postulates and policy consequences of Physiocracy were disastrous at the time, resulting in a veritable subsistence trauma in France. This galvanized relentless and diverse critiques of the doctrine not only in France but also throughout the European world that have, hitherto, been largely neglected by scholars. Though Physiocracy was an integral part of the economic turn, it was rapidly overcome, both theoretically and practically, with durable and important consequences for the history of political economy. The Economic Turn brings together some of the leading historians of that moment to fundamentally recast our understanding of the origins and diverse natures of political economy in the Enlightenment.
A rich analysis of the complex dynamic between food collection and food production in the farming societies of precolonial south central Africa Engaging new linguistic evidence and reinterpreting published archaeological evidence, this sweeping study explores the place of bushcraft and agriculture in the precolonial history of south central Africa across nearly three millennia. Contrary to popular conceptions that place farming at the heart of political and social change, political innovation in precolonial African farming societies was actually contingent on developments in hunting, fishing, and foraging, as de Luna reveals.