John Maynard Keynes wrote to his grandchildren more than fifty years ago about their economic possibilities, and thus about our own: "I see us free, there- fore, to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue - that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misde- meanour. . . . We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful" ("Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren," pp. 371-72). In the year 1930 Keynes regarded these prospects as realizable only after a time span ofone hundred years, ofwhich we have...

All religions make statements about God or the Absolute and about "the beginning": about the beginning of the world and the beginning and nature of the human person. Propositions about God, the human person, and the world, statements about God's eternity or process of becoming, about the status and nature of the human person as the "image of God," and about the beginning of the world are woven into "religious speculations about the beginning." The theology, anthropology, and cosmology of the world religions determine the image of the human person and the image of the world in the world...

All religions face the challenge of explaining, in view of God's goodness, the existence of evil and suffering in the world. They must develop theories of the origin and the overcoming of evil and suffering. The explanations in Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism of evil and suffering and their origin, as well as these world religions' theories of how to overcome evil and suffering, differ from one another, but are also similar in many respects. The human person is always considered to be the origin of evil, and also to be the focus of aspirations to be able to overcome it....

Technology and the control of nature have arisen from the endeavor to reduce the neediness of human life. Since this reduction is also the goal of religions, there is a necessary proximity between religion and technology. The relationship of humans to nature and technology is an object of religious doctrine and ethics in all of the world's religions. The interpretations and the norms of the treatment of nature in economy and technology, but also the veneration of nature in nature-mysticism and its elevation in cult and sacrament, are forms of expression of the relationship to nature in...

The soul is so closely connected to life that one cannot think that it could ever be separated from life and, consequently, be mortal. Therefore, it can only be immortal. This argument from Plato's Phaedo for the immortality of the soul exhibits both a great strength and a great weakness. Its strength is that it is dif- ficult for anyone to think that the soul could ever exist without life. Its weakness is, first, that not all religions accept a soul that remains the same as the center of the person - thus one speaks, for instance, in Buddhism of a "soulless theory of the human being" - and,...

The internet and the electronic economy are a technological revolution whose secular importance is apparent. The internet eliminates the temporal and spatial constraints on the exchange of information. It changes deeply the world of production and of labour. It transforms the exchange relationships between producers and consumers as well as between the suppliers within the supply-chain. The electronic economy is able to generate more accurate con- sumer profiles and, therefore, a more powerful and effective marketing di- rected to the individual consumer. There is no industry that is not...

The Historical School of Economics develops a historical theory of the economy and of business ethics. It investigates the ethical and cultural determinants of economic behaviour and economic institutions and forms an ethical and cultural theory of economics and business and the origin what, in the present, is called "institutional economics." Being one of the first comprehensive studies in the English language of the German "Historical and Ethical School of Economics," the book presents the theory from Wilhelm Roscher to Gustav Schmoller, the foundations of historism and the humanities of...

The book has two subjects, first the ethical theory of the economic order, and secondly the critique of sociobiology and its theory of evolution. The first part, the ethics of capitalism, analyzes the rise of capitalism and the business ethics and moral theory of a capitalist economic order in a perspective from philosophy and economics. The second part, a critique of sociobiology, gives a philosophical assessment of sociobiology's contribution to the theory of the economy and society and of its impact for metaphysics and a general world view. James M. Buchanan, Nobel prize winner in...

The theory of capitalism and of the economic order is the central topic of the German economic tradition in the 20th century. Capitalism has not only been the topic for Marxist economics and for the Frankfurt School but also for the Historical School and for the postmarxist theory of capitalism in Ordo- and Neo-Liberalism as well as in Solidarism. The question of the foundations of the economic order of the market economy and of capitalism as well as the problem whether a third path between capitalism and social- ism is possible occupied this tradition from the Historical School to Ordo-...