"The Modern World System", Immanuel Wallerstein's influential multivolume reinterpretation of global history, traces the emergence and development of the modern world from the sixteenth century to the twentieth. -- From publisher's description.

The Myth of the Welfare Stale is a basic and sweeping explanation of the rise and fall of great powers, and of the profound impacts of these megastates on ordinary lives. Its central theme is the rise of bureaucratic collectivization in American society. It is Douglas's conviction, which he supports with a wealth of detail, that statist bureaucracies produce siagnation, often exacerbated by inflation, which in turn produces the waning of state power.Douglas has his own set of ""isms"" that require concerted attention: mass mediated rationalism, scientism, technologism, credentialism, and expertism. People who make policies have little, if any, awareness of the actual way social processes evolve: agricultural policy is set by people who know little of farming, arid manufacturing policy is set by people who have never set foot on a factory floor. In light of this ""soaring average ignorance,"" it is little wonder that policy-making has Alice-in-Wonderland characteristics and effects.Douglas sees the notion of a welfare state as a contradiction in terms; its widespread insinuation into the culture is made possible by its weak mythological form and benign-sounding characteristics. In fact, welfare states in whatever form they appear have failed in their purpose: to redistribute income or increase real wealth. The megastates are the source of social instability and economic downturn. They grow like a tidal drift. They start out to correct the historical grievances of the laissez-faire states, only to increase the problems they seek to correct. In this, the welfare state is a weakened form of the totalitarian state, producing similarly unhappy results.Professor Douglas has produced a work of ""anti-policy"" - arguing that freedom leavened by an ordinary sense of self-interest and social concern can overcome the shortfalls of the megastates and their myth-making, self-serving, propensities.

This is a new release of the original 1962 edition.

At a time when critiques of free trade policies are gaining currency, The Neomercantilists helps make sense of the protectionist turn, providing the first intellectual history of the genealogy of neomercantilism. Eric Helleiner identifies many pioneers of this ideology between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries who backed strategic protectionism and other forms of government economic activism to promote state wealth and power. They included not just the famous Friedrich List, but also numerous lesser-known thinkers, many of whom came from outside of the West. Helleiner's novel emphasis on neomercantilism's diverse origins challenges traditional Western-centric understandings of its history. It illuminates neglected local intellectual traditions and international flows of ideas that gave rise to distinctive varieties of the ideology around the globe, including in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. This rich history left enduring intellectual legacies, including in the two dominant powers of the contemporary world economy: China and the United States. The result is an exceptional study of a set of profoundly influential economic ideas. While rooted in the past, it sheds light on the present moment. The Neomercantilists shows how we might construct more global approaches to the study of international political economy and intellectual history, devoting attention to thinkers from across the world, and to the cross-border circulation of thought.

This book introduces readers to neo-mercantile planning theory in the context of spatial regional integration in Africa. It proposes a new approach that rethinks neo-liberalism as the meta-theory of planning in Africa, and pioneers an original school of thought that presents a general theory of planning for Africa in the twenty-first century. Research to substantiate the new theory was conducted over the period November 2010 to May 2015 and is presented here in four sections with more than 500 references. The book offers comprehensive coverage, from the theoretical foundations and framework, through application and empirical research, to analysis, conclusions and recommendations.

Building upon his previous books about Marx, Hayek, and Rand, Total Freedom completes what Lingua Franca has called Sciabarra&’s &"epic scholarly quest&" to reclaim dialectics, usually associated with the Marxian left, as a methodology that can revivify libertarian thought. Part One surveys the history of dialectics from the ancient Greeks through the Austrian school of economics. Part Two investigates in detail the work of Murray Rothbard as a leading modern libertarian, in whose thought Sciabarra finds both dialectical and nondialectical elements. Ultimately, Sciabarra aims for a dialectical-libertarian synthesis, highlighting the need (not sufficiently recognized in liberalism) to think of the &"totality&" of interconnections in a dynamic system as the way to ensure human freedom while avoiding &"totalitarianism&" (such as resulted from Marxism).