Human liberation requires an affluent, egalitarian, and democratic society in which man is free from domination by nature's caprice and, in all spheres of life, free from…
Abstract
Human liberation requires an affluent, egalitarian, and democratic society in which man is free from domination by nature's caprice and, in all spheres of life, free from domination by other men. The industrial revolution and technological advances of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries held great promise for human liberation. The burden of toil and drudgery and the domination of man by nature's caprice began lifting in Europe and in some of her colonies. Human safety and security came within reach because poverty was being eliminated. Liberation on the material plane was at hand. However, at the closing of the twentieth century, the liberation process has been slowed down, if not thwarted. In most of the third world, not even the burden of toil and drudgery and the domination of man by a capricious nature have been lifted. In the affluent United States, on the other hand, material security and safety is widespread, but it still does not reach the lowest stratum. Domination by nature through human poverty continues in the affluent West even though it could be eliminated. Nevertheless, in the West, domination by nature is no longer an insurmountable physical datum.
The purpose of this article is to explain why economists have neglected the corporation in their theorising. Adam Smith is the founder of mainstream economic theory. In Smith's…
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The purpose of this article is to explain why economists have neglected the corporation in their theorising. Adam Smith is the founder of mainstream economic theory. In Smith's eighteenth‐century world most things were produced by individuals or by family firms. Smith naturally took the individual entrepreneur as his theoretical unit of analysis, and Smith's theory was at least adequate for the times. But even though the economies of the English‐speaking world have evolved beyond the free enterprise of competing individual capitalists to the current system of corporate capitalism, economic theory has remained much the same. While the American economy is now composed mainly of huge corporate units of production, mainstream economic theory is still referring to “individual” producers. Other social sciences focus a great deal of attention on organisational and individual behaviour within the corporate form of organising economic activity. The work of sociologist Rosabeth Moss Kanter and of psychologist Michael Maccoby are excellent recent examples. Yet economics, at least the mainstream of the discipline, focuses upon the behaviour of individual entrepreneurs rather than corporate managers. In short, orthodox economic theory lacks a serious treatment of the corporation.
A widely accepted belief holds that social economics is logically inconsistent with the pragmatic philosophy. This view has been very clearly and forcibly expressed by Mark A…
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A widely accepted belief holds that social economics is logically inconsistent with the pragmatic philosophy. This view has been very clearly and forcibly expressed by Mark A. Lutz at the Third World Congress for Social Economics. Lutz has summarised his conclusions in the following quotation:
The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains…
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The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.
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Since the first Volume of this Bibliography there has been an explosion of literature in all the main areas of business. The researcher and librarian have to be able to uncover…
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Since the first Volume of this Bibliography there has been an explosion of literature in all the main areas of business. The researcher and librarian have to be able to uncover specific articles devoted to certain topics. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume III, in addition to the annotated list of articles as the two previous volumes, contains further features to help the reader. Each entry within has been indexed according to the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus and thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid information retrieval. Each article has its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. The first Volume of the Bibliography covered seven journals published by MCB University Press. This Volume now indexes 25 journals, indicating the greater depth, coverage and expansion of the subject areas concerned.
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It is suggested that the approach of the social economist to social problems, if followed, would lead to The Good Society, one in which the lot of our “human resources” would be…
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It is suggested that the approach of the social economist to social problems, if followed, would lead to The Good Society, one in which the lot of our “human resources” would be considerably ameliorated. For the social economist the goal of the economy is not private profit nor is it improvement in the fertility of the soil nor capital accumulation for their own sakes and that of their owners, but the material, moral and spiritual well‐being of homo sapiens. The social economist is concerned with the efficiency of the capitalist system relative to the broad goals of society, rather than the maximisation of private property.
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Like the quixotic character that never knew that he was speaking all through his life in pure and simple prose, Gandhi never realized that what he was preaching and practicing…
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Like the quixotic character that never knew that he was speaking all through his life in pure and simple prose, Gandhi never realized that what he was preaching and practicing throughout his life was in fact the basic principles and theories that could be subsumed under the contemporary discipline of political economy (PE). Gandhian political economy (GPE) is replete with many of the characteristics of classical and Marxian political economy and these are mentioned at relevant places throughout this work. It also assimilates some of the major features of contemporary heterodox political economy, in particular, the class analysis of Neo‐Marxism; gender, ethnicity and class analysis of Feminist political economy; the analysis of justice, ethics and institutional trust of social political economy; the analysis of the significance of institutions and institutional change of the institutional‐evolutionary political economy; and the importance of the interdisciplinary focus on contemporary issues like development and international political economy.
Pantaleoni used to say that there are two categories of economists—those who can, in the sense of being able to produce original work, and those who cannot. A more meaningful and…
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Pantaleoni used to say that there are two categories of economists—those who can, in the sense of being able to produce original work, and those who cannot. A more meaningful and more useful distinction can be made between those who reason about the given problems in terms of stable equilibrium (most of them classicists) and those who do their thinking in terms of unstable equilibrium (actually stable disequilibrium) and sheer disequilibrium (most of them modern and contemporary scientists).
The author′s purpose is to show by reference to Schmoller′s ownwritings that he can be classified as a social economist. Schmollerrejected the study of economics in isolation, but…
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The author′s purpose is to show by reference to Schmoller′s own writings that he can be classified as a social economist. Schmoller rejected the study of economics in isolation, but preferred a holistic approach. He eschewed laissez‐faire and thought little of self‐seeking entrepreneurs who made no contribution to the common good.
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GERALD ALONZO SMITH and STEVEN HICKERSON
When E. F. Schumacher first wrote Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, the initial reaction was mixed. For the first year or so, the book sold slowly. Then in…
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When E. F. Schumacher first wrote Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, the initial reaction was mixed. For the first year or so, the book sold slowly. Then in 1974, the sales exploded. In a very short time, E. F. Schumacher became widely acclaimed as his book sold more than a million copies. On both sides of the Atlantic, the common person, as well as the scholar, realized that this was a new voice, a fresh and wholesome breath of wind that was blowing in the stodgy halls of economics.