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...

Three paradoxes surround the division of the costs of social reproduction:
* Women have entered the paid labour force in growing numbers, but they continue to perform most of the unpaid labour of housework and childcare.
* Birth rates have fallen but more and more mothers are supporting children on their own, with little or no assistance from fathers.
* The growth of state spending is often blamed on malfunctioning markets, or runaway bureaucracies. But a large percentage of social spending provides substitutes for income transfers that once took place within families.
Who...

Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in the philosophy of economics, with an array of different methodological stances trying to establish the primacy of their intellectual positions. Two of these in particular have undermined the hegemony once enjoyed by the positivist philosophies of Khun and Popper. The first is represented by rhetoric as expounded in the works of McCloskey, Klamer and others.

Twentieth-century philosophy has been dominated by issues concerned with language. These have left few areas of academic enquiry untouched; an awareness of language matters to a discipline because claims to knowledge can be made only by using language. However, economists have only come to recognize its importance relatively recently. Moreover whilst there has been much written on the subject of economics and language in the last decade, this has been dominated by the use of techniques borrowed from literary criticism. Whilst these have provided many valuable insights, they have tended to...

Few periods of English history have been so subject to revisionism' as the Tudors and Stuarts. This volume offers a full introduction to the complex historiographical debates currently raging about politics and religion in early modern England. It
* draws together thirteen articles culled from familiar and also less accessible sources
* embraces revisionist and counter-revisionist viewpoints
* combines controversial works on both politics and religion
* covers Tudor as well as early Stuart England
* includes helpful glossary, explanatory headnotes and suggestions for...

The idea of the "anti-sexist man" is often treated with scorn by feminists and hesitantly by men. People are suspicious and unsure about the whole idea. Based around interviews with eight men who have responded positively to feminism, this book provides the reader with the first full length discussion of anti-sexist male attitudes. THe interviewees tell their life stories, their making' and reveal their differences to male chauvinists. Timely and sincere, The Making of Anti-Sexist Men will appeal to all those interested in changing oppressive gender attitudes and social structures.

Following the failure of 'really existing socialism' in Eastern Europe and Asia, the market is now generally perceived, by Left and Right, to be supreme in any rational economic system. The current debate now focuses on the proper boundaries of markets rather than the system itself. This book examines the problems of defining these boundaries for the recent defences of the market, and shows that they highlight major weaknesses in the cases made by its proponents.
The author draws on considerable research in this area to provide an overdue critical evaluation of the limits of the market,...

Only in the past twenty years have debates surrounding modernism and postmodernism begun to have an impact on economics. This new way of thinking rejects claims that science and mathematics provide the only models for the structure of economic knowledge.
This ground-breaking volume brings together the essays of top theorists including Arjo Klamer, Deirdre McCloskey, Julie Nelson, Shaun Hargreaves-Heap and Philip Mirowski on a diverse range of topics such as gender, postcolonial theory and rationality as well as postmodernism.

The new institutional economics offers one of the most exciting research agendas in economics today. Yet can it really explain processes of economic change? Economic Evolution explores three of the main approaches within the new institutional economics:
* the new theory of the firm,
* Nelson and Winter's evolutionary economics
* game theoretic accounts of spontaneous evolution.
Close analysis reveals that the approaches differ on such fundamental issues as the meaning of terms like institution' and evolution'. However, the book also uncovers two evolutionary mechanisms...