A Philosopher's Economist

A Philosopher's Economist PDF

Author: Margaret Schabas

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2020-07-15

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 022669125X

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Reconsiders the centrality and legacy of Hume’s economic thought and serves as an important springboard for reflections on the philosophical underpinnings of economics. Although David Hume’s contributions to philosophy are firmly established, his economics has been largely overlooked. A Philosopher’s Economist offers the definitive account of Hume’s “worldly philosophy” and argues that economics was a central preoccupation of his life and work. Margaret Schabas and Carl Wennerlind show that Hume made important contributions to the science of economics, notably on money, trade, and public finance. Hume’s astute understanding of human behavior provided an important foundation for his economics and proved essential to his analysis of the ethical and political dimensions of capitalism. Hume also linked his economic theory with policy recommendations and sought to influence people in power. While in favor of the modern commercial world, believing that it had and would continue to raise standards of living, promote peaceful relations, and foster moral refinement, Hume was not an unqualified enthusiast. He recognized many of the underlying injustices of capitalism, its tendencies to promote avarice and inequality, as well as its potential for political instability and absolutism. Hume’s imprint on modern economics is profound and far-reaching, whether through his close friend Adam Smith or later admirers such as John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek. Schabas and Wennerlind’s book compels us to reconsider the centrality and legacy of Hume’s economic thought—for both his time and ours—and thus serves as an important springboard for reflections on the philosophical underpinnings of economics.

Philosophers of Capitalism

Philosophers of Capitalism PDF

Author: Edward Wayne Younkins

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 9780739110775

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Philosophers of Capitalism provides an interdisciplinary approach, attempting to discover the feasibility of an integration of Austrian Economics and Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism. In the first section of the book, Edward W. Younkins supplies essays presenting the essential ideas of Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, and Ayn Rand. Building upon these essential ideas, the second portion of the book brings together scholarly perspectives from top academics, analyzing Menger, von Mises, and Rand. The third and final section of the book looks toward the future and the possibility of combining and extending the insights of these champions of a free society, emphasizing how the errors, omissions, and oversights made by one theorist can effectively be negated or compensated for by integrating insights from one or more of the others. Featuring a list of recommended reading for the major ideas and theorists discussed, Philosophers of Capitalism is an essential book for both philosophers and economists.

Philosophers of Capitalism

Philosophers of Capitalism PDF

Author: Edward W. Younkins

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2005-11-10

Total Pages: 389

ISBN-13: 0739158821

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Philosophers of Capitalism provides an interdisciplinary approach, attempting to discover the feasibility of an integration of Austrian Economics and Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism. In the first section of the book, Edward W. Younkins supplies essays presenting the essential ideas of Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, and Ayn Rand. Building upon these essential ideas, the second portion of the book brings together scholarly perspectives from top academics, analyzing Menger, von Mises, and Rand. The third and final section of the book looks toward the future and the possibility of combining and extending the insights of these champions of a free society, emphasizing how the errors, omissions, and oversights made by one theorist can effectively be negated or compensated for by integrating insights from one or more of the others. Featuring a list of recommended reading for the major ideas and theorists discussed, Philosophers of Capitalism is an essential book for both philosophers and economists.

Public Capitalism

Public Capitalism PDF

Author: Christopher McMahon

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2012-09-05

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 0812207262

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In modern capitalist societies, the executives of large, profit-seeking corporations have the power to shape the collective life of the communities, local and global, in which they operate. Corporate executives issue directives to employees, who are normally prepared to comply with them, and impose penalties such as termination on those who fail to comply. The decisions made by corporate executives also affect people outside the corporation: investors, customers, suppliers, the general public. What can justify authority with such a broad reach? Political philosopher Christopher McMahon argues that the social authority of corporate executives is best understood as a form of political authority. Although corporations are privately owned, they must be managed in a way that promotes the public good. Public Capitalism begins with this claim and explores its implications for issues including corporate property rights, the moral status of corporations, the permissibility of layoffs and plant closings, and the legislative role played by corporate executives. Corporate executives acquire the status of public officials of a certain kind, who can be asked to work toward social goods in addition to prosperity. Public Capitalism sketches a new framework for discussion of the moral and political issues faced by corporate executives.

Philosophy of Prediction and Capitalism

Philosophy of Prediction and Capitalism PDF

Author: M.S. Frings

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 156

ISBN-13: 9400936370

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There is little more than a decade left before the bells allover the world will be ringing in the first hour of the twenty-first century, which will surely be an era of highly advanced technology. Looking back on the century that we live in, one can realize that generations of people who have already lived in it for the better parts of their lives have begun to ask the same question that also every individual person thinks about when he is faced with the first signs of the end of his life. It is the question: "Why did everything in my life happen the way it did?" Or, "It would have been so easy to have channelled events into directions other than the way they went. " Or, "Why, in all the world, is my life coming to an end as it does, or, why must all of us face this kind of end of our century?" Whenever human beings take retrospective views of their lives and times - when they are faced with their own personal "fin du siecle" - there appears to be an increasing anxiety throughout the masses asso ciated with a somber feeling of pessimism, which may even be mixed with a slight degree of fatalism. There is quite another feeling with those persons who were born late in this century and who did not share all the events the older generation experi enced.

A Philosopher's Economist

A Philosopher's Economist PDF

Author: Margaret Schabas

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2023-01-19

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 0226824020

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Reconsiders the centrality and legacy of Hume’s economic thought and serves as an important springboard for reflections on the philosophical underpinnings of economics. Although David Hume’s contributions to philosophy are firmly established, his economics has been largely overlooked. A Philosopher’s Economist offers the definitive account of Hume’s “worldly philosophy” and argues that economics was a central preoccupation of his life and work. Margaret Schabas and Carl Wennerlind show that Hume made important contributions to the science of economics, notably on money, trade, and public finance. Hume’s astute understanding of human behavior provided an important foundation for his economics and proved essential to his analysis of the ethical and political dimensions of capitalism. Hume also linked his economic theory with policy recommendations and sought to influence people in power. While in favor of the modern commercial world, believing that it had and would continue to raise standards of living, promote peaceful relations, and foster moral refinement, Hume was not an unqualified enthusiast. He recognized many of the underlying injustices of capitalism, its tendencies to promote avarice and inequality, as well as its potential for political instability and absolutism. Hume’s imprint on modern economics is profound and far-reaching, whether through his close friend Adam Smith or later admirers such as John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek. Schabas and Wennerlind’s book compels us to reconsider the centrality and legacy of Hume’s economic thought—for both his time and ours—and thus serves as an important springboard for reflections on the philosophical underpinnings of economics.

Capitalism

Capitalism PDF

Author: Arundhati Roy

Publisher: Haymarket Books

Published: 2014-04-14

Total Pages: 121

ISBN-13: 1608464296

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The “courageous and clarion” Booker Prize–winner “continues her analysis and documentation of the disastrous consequences of unchecked global capitalism” (Booklist). From the poisoned rivers, barren wells, and clear-cut forests, to the hundreds of thousands of farmers who have committed suicide to escape punishing debt, to the hundreds of millions of people who live on less than two dollars a day, there are ghosts nearly everywhere you look in India. India is a nation of 1.2 billion, but the country’s one hundred richest people own assets equivalent to one-fourth of India’s gross domestic product. Capitalism: A Ghost Story examines the dark side of democracy in contemporary India and shows how the demands of globalized capitalism have subjugated billions of people to the highest and most intense forms of racism and exploitation. “A highly readable and characteristically trenchant mapping of early-twenty-first-century India’s impassioned love affair with money, technology, weaponry and the ‘privatization of everything,’ and—because these must not be impeded no matter what—generous doses of state violence.” —The Nation “A vehement broadside against capitalism in general and American cultural imperialism in particular . . . an impassioned manifesto.” —Kirkus Reviews “Roy’s central concern is the effect on her own country, and she shows how Indian politics have taken on the same model, leading to the ghosts of her book’s title: 250,000 farmers have committed suicide, 800 million impoverished and dispossessed Indians, environmental destruction, colonial-like rule in Kashmir, and brutal treatment of activists and journalists. In this dark tale, Roy gives rays of hope that illuminate cracks in the nightmare she evokes.” —Publishers Weekly

The Metaphysics of Capitalism

The Metaphysics of Capitalism PDF

Author: Andrea Micocci

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2009-01-16

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 0739132709

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The objective of this book is to construct an individually emancipatory economic and political philosophy. This means a concrete-based, man-centered, non-hypostatizing, anti-dialectical approach to the apprehension of the material, i.e. nature in general. This constitutes an emancipation from culture-based understandings of reality, and in particular from the metaphysically biased type of culture represented by capitalism. The proposed philosophical emancipation means individual liberation from the logically flawed, massifying character of the dominant mode of thought of capitalist times. From these bases, the social sciences can also be reformulated. Micocci argues that capitalism can be conceptualized as a limited and limiting socialized mode of thought, an intellectuality whose dialectical features are effectively identified by using the proxy of political economy, both marxist and mainstream. Political economy in fact, being a most representative instance of dialectical thinking, mirrors the dialectical nature of capitalist economic and political relationships. According to Micocci, non-dialectical occurrences in capitalism are simply excluded from normal social, economic, and intellectual activities, which are performed in a metaphysical, intellectually isolated environment. In capitalism, therefore, the materials, the concrete, i.e. nature itself, is not considered as a whole but only as occasional instances. Micocci describes capitalism, in sum, as an intellectually constructed culture (a metaphysics) which preserves itself, and props itself up, by means of its iterative (market-like) functioning.