This book provides an intellectual portrait of John Kenneth Galbraith, an institutional economist who examines the configuration of power by the clusters of mores that comprise institutions. Galbraith proposes an aggressive social democratic policy to achieve social and economic reform. This policy includes explicit recognition that the state must intervene to countervail the power of entrenched political economic interests and to provide generous support of the arts and letters to achieve the affirmation of humanity.

This book depicts the need for an economics that addresses social provisioning in the context of power and culture. Such an approach is necessary to the development of an analysis that treats human wants and technology as endogenous variables, thereby avoiding the atavism inherent in conventional economics epistemology. Only in this way can the requisite re-viewing of the place of economy in society be brought to bear in an economic analysis capable of addressing the seemingly intractable problems of the democratic capitalist societies.

The democratic industrial societies face a deeply-rooted institutional crisis. The accepted ways and means of living lead to frustration and anxiety rather than creativity and joy. The roots of this crisis are political and economic. These societies contain economies that pervert and obstruct the human life process and polities that are subordinate to economic vested interests. Karl Polanyi was a Hungarian emigr�ho witnessed first hand the cataclysms to which this political economic crisis can lead. He created a powerful social economic theory to analyze this institutional impasse and...