This novel book looks at the relationship between the economics of John Maynard Keynes and the tradition of British Humanism, which dominated public life in the early years of the twentieth century.

Well-connected in academia, business and government, John Maynard Keynes was one of the most influential economic theorists of the twentieth century. It appears that his theories will be just as important for the twenty-first. As Keynes himself explained, his ideas throughout his life were influenced by the moral philosophy he learned as an undergraduate. Nevertheless, the meaning and significance for Keynes of this early philosophy have remained largely unexplored. Keynes and the British Humanist Tradition offers an interpretation of Keynes’s early philosophy and its implications for his later thought. It approaches that philosophy from the perspective of the nineteenth century intellectual context out of which it emerged. The book argues that roots of Keynes’s early beliefs are to be found in the traditions of the Apostles, the very famous secret society to which he and most of his teachers belonged. The principles of Keynes’s philosophy can be seen in such writers as John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick, but the underlying ideas have been obscured by changing fashions in philosophy and thus require excavation and reconstruction. This book will be of interest to students and researchers in the history of economics, in particular the thought of John Maynard Keynes, especially his ethics, politics and economics.

This study seeks to demonstrate the subtle ways in which changes in the language associated with economic issues are reflective of a gradual but quantifiable conservative ideological shift. In this rigorous analysis, David George uses as his data a century of word usage within The New York Times, starting in 1900. It is not always obvious how the changes identified necessarily reflect a stronger prejudice toward laissez-faire free market capitalism, and so much of the book seeks to demonstrate the subtle ways in which the changing language indeed carries with it a political message. This analysis is made through exploration of five major areas of focus: "economics rhetoric" scholarship and the growing "behavioral economics" school of thought; the discourse of government and taxation; the changing meaning of "competition," and "competitive"; changing attitudes toward lab∨ and the celebration of growth relative to the decline in attention to economic justice and social equality.

Analyzing Sraffa, one of the key figures in the history of economics, this book explores his legacy and the relevance of his thought for modern economics. Written by an array of internationally respected contributors, including Schefold, Aspromourgos, Nell and Kurz it is an invaluable tool for all those studying the history of economic thought.

A key issue in economic discourse today is the relation (or lack of it) between economic behaviour and morality. Few (presumably) would want to deny that human beings are in some sense moral or ethical creatures, but the devil is in the detail. Should we think of economic behaviour as an essentially amoral process – a process adequately characterised by a means-ends rationality – into which any number of subjective ethical concerns or orientations may be intruded to give a particular action its determinate moral content? Or is it rather the case that our moral being runs deeper than this, in the sense that all of our behaviour – ‘economic’ or otherwise – is enabled or capacitated by a competence that is fundamentally ethical in character? With new analyses of the work of Hobbes and Smith, Dixon and Wilson offer a fresh approach to the debate surrounding economics and morality with a novel discussion of the self in economic theory. This book calls for a change in the way that the relation between economic behaviour and morality is understood – from an understanding of morality as a kind of preference that informs certain types of other-regarding behaviour (the way that modern economics understands the relationship), to an idea of morality as a competence that enables or, rather, conditions the possibility of all forms of human behaviour, other-regarding or not. Offering a new insight on homo economicus, this book will be of great interest to all those interested in the history of economics and of economic thought.

Geoff Pilling’s work shows that Marxist theory is relevant to those struggling to understand the problems of capitalist society today, and that the work not only of Marx and Engels but that of later Marxist theorists, including Lenin is worth studying. It also shows that to understand the problems of today’s society needs more than narrow specialist economic analysis, but a deep awareness of current developments in society.

This book provides a cogent summary of the economic history of the Irish Free State/Republic of Ireland. It takes the Irish story from the 1920s right through to the present, providing an excellent case study of one of many European states which obtained independence during and after the First World War. The book covers the transition to protectionism and import substitution between the 1930s and the 1950s and the second major transition to trade liberalisation from the 1960s. In a wider European context, the Irish experience since EEC entry in 1973 was the most extreme European example of the achievement of industrialisation through foreign direct investment. The eager adoption of successive governments in recent decades of a neo-liberal economic model, more particularly de-regulation in banking and construction, has recently led the Republic of Ireland to the most extreme economic crash of any western society since the Great Depression.