Capitalism

About: Capitalism is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 27714 publications have been published within this topic receiving 858042 citations.

The cancer stage of capitalism

Abstract: 1.The Ancient Taboo 2. The Pathologisation of the Market Model 3. The Social Immune System and the Cancer Stage of Capitalism 4. The Life Code versus the Money code: The paradigm Shift 5. The Great Vehicle of the Civil Commons Notes Index

Maldevelopment: Anatomy of a Global Failure

Abstract: If the 1960s was characterised by hope of seeing real development in the Third World that transformed people's lives, the current period is increasingly one of disillusionment. Development has failed, its theory is in crisis, its ideological foundations and the failures brought about by neo-liberalism now being widely challenged. With the collapse of so-called socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and the growth of capitalism in China, there is a desperate need for establishing an alternative. In this newly updated analysis by Samir Amin, renowned economist and one of the best-known thinkers of his generation, the failure of development is examined from a political stand-point. He calls for an 'alternative development' that is neither statist nor liberalisation, but rather national, popular and based on South-South cooperation. This could lead to a genuinely polycentric world that provides Asia, Africa and Latin America with real scope for development. This book deals with the problems specific to the Third World, with particular emphasis on the crisis of the African continent. The capitalist state in the peripheries is unable to provide a basis for further development, it can only exacerbate inequalities. This means, says Amin, that the world needs to be remade on the basis of an alternative social system, one that delinks the South from the North, and builds on South-South solidarity.

Max Weber on Law and the Rise of Capitalism

Abstract: Max Weber dedicated much of his energy to explaining why industrial capitalism arose in the West. European law had unique features which made it more conducive to capitalism than were the legal systems of other civilizations. Weber’s decision to include law within a general sociological theory can be explained not only by his personal background as lawyer and legal historian, but also by the methods he employed to trace the rise of the distinctive form of economic activity and organization he called bourgeois capitalism. Weber believed that this type of capitalism required a legal order with a relatively high degree of “rationality.” Since such a system was unique to the West, the comparative study of legal systems helped answer Weber’s basic question about the causes of the rise of capitalism in Europe. Unique conditions in European history, Weber argued, led to the emergence of legalism.

The Bourgeois Virtues

Abstract: For a century and a half, the artists and intellectuals of Europe have scorned the bourgeoisie. And for a millennium and a half, the philosophers and theologians of Europe have scorned the marketplace. The bourgeois life, capitalism, Mencken’s “booboisie” and David Brooks’s “bobos”—all have been, and still are, framed as being responsible for everything from financial to moral poverty, world wars, and spiritual desuetude. Countering these centuries of assumptions and unexamined thinking is Deirdre McCloskey’s The Bourgeois Virtues , a magnum opus that offers a radical view: capitalism is good for us. McCloskey’s sweeping, charming, and even humorous survey of ethical thought and economic realities—from Plato to Barbara Ehrenreich—overturns every assumption we have about being bourgeois. Can you be virtuous and bourgeois? Do markets improve ethics? Has capitalism made us better as well as richer? Yes, yes, and yes, argues McCloskey, who takes on centuries of capitalism’s critics with her erudition and sheer scope of knowledge. Applying a new tradition of “virtue ethics” to our lives in modern economies, she affirms American capitalism without ignoring its faults and celebrates the bourgeois lives we actually live, without supposing that they must be lives without ethical foundations. High Noon , Kant, Bill Murray, the modern novel, van Gogh, and of course economics and the economy all come into play in a book that can only be described as a monumental project and a life’s work. The Bourgeois Virtues is nothing less than a dazzling reinterpretation of Western intellectual history, a dead-serious reply to the critics of capitalism—and a surprising page-turner.

The State and Coordinated Capitalism: Contributions of the Public Sector to Social Solidarity in Postindustrial Societies

Abstract: This article investigates the politics of change in coordinated market econo\mies, and explores why some countries (well known for their highly cooperative arrangements) manage to sustain coordination when adjusting to economic transformation, while others fail. the authors argue that the broad category of “coordinated market economies” subsumes different types of cooperative engagement: macrocorporatist forms of coordination are characterized by national-level institutions for fostering cooperation and feature a strong role for the state, while forms of coordination associated with enterprise cooperation more typically occur at the level of sector or regional institutions and are often privately controlled. although these diverse forms of coordination once appeared quite similar and functioned as structural equivalents, they now have radically different capacities for self-adjustment. The role of the state is at the heart of the divergence among european coordinated countries. a large public sector affects the political dynamics behind collective outcomes, through its impact both on the state’s construction of its own policy interests and on private actors’ goals. although a large public sector has typically been written off as an inevitable drag on the economy, it can provide state actors with a crucial political tool for shoring up coordination in a postindustrial economy. the authors use the cases of denmark and germany to illustrate how uncontroversially coordinated market economies have evolved along two sharply divergent paths in the past two decades and to reflect on broader questions of stability and change in coordinated market economies. the two countries diverge most acutely with respect to the balance of power between state and society; indeed, the danish state—far from being a constraint on adjustment (a central truism in neoliberal thought)—plays the role of facilitator in economic adjustment, policy change, and continued coordination.