Economics and Utopia: Why the Learning Economy Is Not the End of History

ISBN-13: 9780415075060 / Angielski / Twarda / 1998 / 368 str.

Geoff Hodgson

Opis

For many the East European revolutions of 1989 and the disintegration of the USSR represented not only the overdue demise of Soviet-style communism, but also the obsolescence of all utopian ways of thinking. This text argues history has reached its end-state in the form of a victorious liberal-democratic capitalism and all attempts to imagine an alternative social order were now damned as both futile and quixotic. Beyond Utopia? rejects the belief that utopian thinking is a necessary condition for the development of alternative solutions to the problems of the present and thus for historical progress. This text is emphatically not an attempt to breathe new life into existing utopian models, whether state socialist or neo-liberal, which are seen as misunderstanding the nature of learning and knowledge in a modern economy. The author's utopianism is based on an examination of the potential for an alternative future based on the growth of knowledge-intensive production, one whose feasibility would derive from its ability to respond to the needs of rapidly-changing industrial economies.

Recenzje

'Economics and Utopia is well-written, accessible and consistently engaging.....it is a must for any economic geographer wanting to keep abreast of progress in political economic thought' - Area

'This is a book that deserves to be widely read, and should be by anybody with an interest in the discipline of Economics...well-aruged, stimulating and thought-provoking.' - Capital and Class

Spis treści

1 INTRODUCTION Part I Visions and illusions 2 SOCIALISM AND THE LIMITS TO INNOVATION 3 THE ABSOLUTISM OF MARKET INDIVIDUALISM Part II The blindness of existing theory 4 THE UNIVERSALITY OF MAINSTREAM ECONOMICS 5 KARL MARX AND THE TRIUMPH OF CAPITALISM 6 INSTITUTIONALISM AND VARIETIES OF CAPITALISM Part III Back to the future 7 CONTRACT AND CAPITALISM 8 KNOWLEDGE AND EMPLOYMENT 9THE END OF CAPITALISM? 10 THE LEARNING FRONTIER 11 SOME NORMATIVE AND POLICY ISSUES

O autorze

Geoffrey M Hodgson