Samuel Hollander’s work has been provoking debate for over four decades. This book brings together key contributions of recent years, in addition to some brand new pieces. The essays are introduced by a Preface in which Hollander reflects on his past work and reactions to it. Highlights include two issues of particular current relevance. Conspicuous is an extensive chapter regarding Adam Smith’s often neglected arguments for government intervention in the economy to correct market failures, and his critical view of the business class as an anti-social force. Important economists considered in relation to Adam Smith’s position on the role of the state include Jeremy Bentham and the Scottish-Canadian John Rae. Similarly of high present-day interest is a re-examination of Karl Marx’s theory of exploitation, or the notion of profits as "embezzlement," demonstrating Marx’s effective abandonment of this perspective in the case of the small active businessman as distinct from the major joint-stock corporation. Other papers demonstrate the close intellectual relationship between David Ricardo and Thomas Robert Malthus; the extensive common ground between the British school and the French under the leadership of Jean-Baptiste Say; the failure of a so-called anti-Ricardian opposition in Britain represented by Samuel Bailey; and the denial of a sharp discontinuity between "classical" and later "neo-classical" economics. Finally, several biographical essays are included as well as an extension of the autobiographical account appearing in Collected Essays II.

This text deals with the distinctive method of Marx's political economy, with an emphasis on it's origins. It applies this method to key contemporary issues such as unemployment, globalization and the crisis of the welfare state.

This exploration of some of the more important frameworks used for understanding the relationship between politics and economics includes the classical, Marxian, Keynesian, neoclassical, state-centered, power-centered, and justice-centered.

Marx’s Capital has of course been widely read; this revival of a systematic study by Geoffrey Pilling, originally published in 1980, argues powerfully that, in order to understand Capital fully, it is necessary to have read and understood Hegel’s Logic. This argument leads to a detailed examination of the opening chapters of Capital, and a re-examination of their significance for the work as a whole. Pilling emphasizes the fundamental nature of the break between Marx’s Capital and all forms of classical political economy, and stresses the revolutionary nature of Marx’s critique of political economy as one of the foundations of Capital. He also lays particular emphasis on the philosophical aspects of the work, so often neglected by British commentators, and puts forward the view that Marx’s notion of fetishism, often looked upon as incidental to his work, is in fact central to his entire critique of political economy.

This book promotes an in-depth understanding of the key mechanisms that govern the functioning of capitalist economies, pursuing a Classical Political Economics approach to do so. It explores central theoretical issues addressed by the classical economists Smith and Ricardo, as well as Marx, while also operationalizing more recent theoretical developments inspired by the works of Sraffa and other modern classical economists, using actual data from major economies. On the basis of this approach, the book subsequently provides alternative explanations for various microeconomic issues such as the determination of equilibrium prices and their movement induced by changes in income distribution; the dynamics of competition of firms within and between industries; the law of tendential equalization of interindustry profit rates; and international exchanges and transfers of value; as well as macroeconomic issues concerning capital accumulation and cyclical economic growth. Given its scope, the book will benefit all researchers, students, and policymakers seeking new explanations for observed phenomena and interested in the mechanisms that give rise to surface economic categories, such as prices, profits, the unemployment rate, interest rates, and long economic cycles.

This collection includes texts by Henryk Grossman that are primarily concerned with economic theory: monographs, articles, essays, letters and manuscript material. Many have never been published in English before, some in any language. The first in four volumes of Grossman’s works, it provides the basis for a deeper understanding of Grossman’s contributions to Marxist economic theory and critique of bourgeois economics. Rick Kuhn’s introduction explains the contexts in which the texts were written and establishes their contemporary relevance.