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Author: Biancamaria Fontana
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521303354
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 270
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Book Description
Explores the sources of modern political liberalism through a study of the Edinburgh Review, the most influential and controversial early nineteenth-century British periodical. Reveals how it served as the principal channel through which the Scottish Englightment and its doctrines of economic and political reform were popularized.
Author: Biancamaria Fontana
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521303354
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 270
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Book Description
Explores the sources of modern political liberalism through a study of the Edinburgh Review, the most influential and controversial early nineteenth-century British periodical. Reveals how it served as the principal channel through which the Scottish Englightment and its doctrines of economic and political reform were popularized.
Author: Michael Ignatieff
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9633862728
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
The key values of the Open Society – freedom, justice, tolerance, democracy, and respect for knowledge – are increasingly under threat in today’s world. As an effort to uphold those values, this volume brings together some of the key political, social and economic thinkers of our time to re-examine the Open Society closely in terms of its history, its achievements and failures, and its future prospects. Based on the lecture series Rethinking Open Society, which took place between 2017 and 2018 at the Central European University, the volume is deeply embedded in the history and purpose of CEU, its Open Society mission, and its belief in educating skeptical, but passionate citizens.
Author: Frank Pasquale
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674967100
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
Every day, corporations are connecting the dots about our personal behavior—silently scrutinizing clues left behind by our work habits and Internet use. The data compiled and portraits created are incredibly detailed, to the point of being invasive. But who connects the dots about what firms are doing with this information? The Black Box Society argues that we all need to be able to do so—and to set limits on how big data affects our lives. Hidden algorithms can make (or ruin) reputations, decide the destiny of entrepreneurs, or even devastate an entire economy. Shrouded in secrecy and complexity, decisions at major Silicon Valley and Wall Street firms were long assumed to be neutral and technical. But leaks, whistleblowers, and legal disputes have shed new light on automated judgment. Self-serving and reckless behavior is surprisingly common, and easy to hide in code protected by legal and real secrecy. Even after billions of dollars of fines have been levied, underfunded regulators may have only scratched the surface of this troubling behavior. Frank Pasquale exposes how powerful interests abuse secrecy for profit and explains ways to rein them in. Demanding transparency is only the first step. An intelligible society would assure that key decisions of its most important firms are fair, nondiscriminatory, and open to criticism. Silicon Valley and Wall Street need to accept as much accountability as they impose on others.
Author: Paul Sagar
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691210837
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
A radical reinterpretation of Adam Smith that challenges economists, moral philosophers, political theorists, and intellectual historians to rethink him—and why he matters Adam Smith has long been recognized as the father of modern economics. More recently, scholars have emphasized his standing as a moral philosopher—one who was prepared to critique markets as well as to praise them. But Smith’s contributions to political theory are still underappreciated and relatively neglected. In this bold, revisionary book, Paul Sagar argues that not only have the fundamentals of Smith’s political thought been widely misunderstood, but that once we understand them correctly, our estimations of Smith as economist and as moral philosopher must radically change. Rather than seeing Smith either as the prophet of the free market, or as a moralist who thought the dangers of commerce lay primarily in the corrupting effects of trade, Sagar shows why Smith is more thoroughly a political thinker who made major contributions to the history of political thought. Smith, Sagar argues, saw war, not commerce, as the engine of political change and he was centrally concerned with the political, not moral, dimensions of—and threats to—commercial societies. In this light, the true contours and power of Smith’s foundational contributions to western political thought emerge as never before. Offering major reinterpretations of Smith’s political, moral, and economic ideas, Adam Smith Reconsidered seeks to revolutionize how he is understood. In doing so, it recovers Smith’s original way of doing political theory, one rooted in the importance of history and the necessity of maintaining a realist sensibility, and from which we still have much to learn.
Author: Michel Callon
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1942130589
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 270
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Book Description
Slicing through blunt theories of supply and demand, Callon presents a rigorously researched but counterintuitive model of how everyday market activity gets produced. If you’re convinced you know what a market is, think again. In his long-awaited study, French sociologist and engineer Michel Callon takes us to the heart of markets, to the unsung processes that allow innovations to become robust products and services. Markets in the Making begins with the observation that stable commercial transactions are more enigmatic, more elusive, and more involved than previously described by economic theory. Slicing through blunt theories of supply and demand, Callon presents a rigorously researched but counterintuitive model of market activity that emphasizes what people designing products or launching startups soon discover—the inherent difficulties of connecting individuals to things. Callon’s model is founded upon the notion of “singularization,” the premise that goods and services must adapt and be adapted to the local milieu of every individual whose life they enter. Person by person, thing by thing, Callon demonstrates that for ordinary economic transactions to emerge en masse, singular connections must be made. Pushing us to see markets as more than abstract interfaces where pools of anonymous buyers and sellers meet, Callon draws our attention to the exhaustively creative practices that market professionals continuously devise to entangle people and things. Markets in the Making exemplifies how prototypes, fragile curiosities that have only just been imagined, are gradually honed into predictable objects and practices. Once these are active enough to create a desired effect, yet passive enough to be transferred from one place to another without disruption, they will have successfully achieved the status of “goods” or “services.” The output of this more ample process of innovation, as redefined by Callon, is what we recognize as “the market”—commercial activity, at scale. The capstone of an influential research career at the forefront of science and technology studies, Markets in the Making coherently integrates the empirical perspective of product engineering with the values of the social sciences. After masterfully redescribing how markets are made, Callon culminates with a strong empirical argument for why markets can and should be harnessed to enact social change. His is a theory of markets that serves social critique.
Author: Alex Schulman
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748682422
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
What were Shakespeare's politics? As this study demonstrates, contained in Shakespeare's plays is an astonishingly powerful reckoning with the tradition of Western political thought, one whose depth and scope places Shakespeare alongside Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes and others. This book is the first attempt by a political theorist to read Shakespeare within the trajectory of political thought as one of the authors of modernity. From Shakespeare's interpretation of ancient and medieval politics to his wrestling with issues of legitimacy, religious toleration, family conflict, and economic change, Alex Schulman shows how Shakespeare produces a fascinating map of modern politics at its crisis-filled birth. As a result, there are brand new readings of Troilus and Cressida, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, King Lear, Richard II and Henry IV, parts I and II , The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure.
Author: Cathleen Johnson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1786613573
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 355
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Book Description
One of the greatest and most joyful challenges of adult life is to develop skills that make the people around us better off with us than without us. Integrity is a key part of that challenge. We are social animals, aiming not simply to trade but to make a place for ourselves in a community. You don’t want to have to pretend that you feel proud of fooling your customers into believing you could be trusted. The ethical question is: how do people have to live in order to make the world a better place with them than without them? The economic question is: what kind of society makes people willing and able to use their talents in a way that is good for them and for the people around them? The entrepreneurial question is: what does it take to show up in the marketplace with something that can take your community to a different level? In this book, the authors discuss the connections between the ethical, economic, and entrepreneurial dimensions of a life well-lived.
Author: Istvan Hont
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674286197
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 161
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Book Description
Scholars normally emphasize the contrast between the two great eighteenth-century thinkers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith. Rousseau is seen as a critic of modernity, Smith as an apologist. Istvan Hont, however, finds significant commonalities in their work, arguing that both were theorists of commercial society and from surprisingly similar perspectives. In making his case, Hont begins with the concept of commercial society and explains why that concept has much in common with what the German philosopher Immanuel Kant called unsocial sociability. This is why many earlier scholars used to refer to an Adam Smith Problem and, in a somewhat different way, to a Jean-Jacques Rousseau Problem. The two problems—and the questions about the relationship between individualism and altruism that they raised—were, in fact, more similar than has usually been thought because both arose from the more fundamental problems generated by thinking about morality and politics in a commercial society. Commerce entails reciprocity, but a commercial society also entails involuntary social interdependence, relentless economic competition, and intermittent interstate rivalry. This was the world to which Rousseau and Smith belonged, and Politics in Commercial Society is an account of how they thought about it. Building his argument on the similarity between Smith’s and Rousseau’s theoretical concerns, Hont shows the relevance of commercial society to modern politics—the politics of the nation-state, global commerce, international competition, social inequality, and democratic accountability.
Author: Christopher J. Berry
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748645330
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
The most arresting aspect of the Scottish Enlightenment is its conception of commercial society as a distinct and distinctive social formation. Christopher Berry explains why Enlightenment thinkers considered commercial society to be wealthier and freer than earlier forms, and charts the contemporary debates and tensions between Enlightenment thinkers that this idea raised. The book analyses the full range of literature on the subject, from key works like Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations', David Hume's 'Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects' and Adam Ferguson's 'Essay on the History of Civil Society' to lesser-known works such as Robert Wallace's 'Dissertation on Numbers of Mankind'.
Author: Paul Dragos Aligica
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538150867
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 333
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Book Description
The chapters in this volume explore, engage and expand on the key thinkers and ideas of the Austrian, Virginia, and Bloomington schools of political economy. The book emphasizes the continuing relevance of the contributions of these schools of thought to our understanding of cultural, social, moral and historical processes for interdisciplinary research in the social sciences and humanities. An analysis of human action that deliberate divorces it from cultural, social, moral and historical processes will (at least) limit and (at worst) distort our understanding of human phenomena. The diversity in topics and approaches will make the volume of interest to readers in a variety of fields, including: anthropology, communications, East Asian languages & literature, economics, law, musicology, philosophy, and political science.
