‘Ricardo’s Gauntlet’ advances a critique of the mainstream economic case for international free trade. While the core of the case for free trade is David Ricardo’s principle of comparative advantage, the book argues that this case relies on a cluster of interconnected and mutually enforcing ‘economic fictions’ – economic theories or doctrines that pretend to be fact but which upon examination turn out to be mirages. Exposing the layers of fictions nested in the subfields of mainstream economies empties comparative advantage of its persuasiveness, bringing down the case for free trade. This book is not, however, confined to dealing with esoteric puzzles within economic theory. Rather, it takes a social theoretical perspective and grapples with comparative advantage and its associated economic fictions as ideas that ground an argument with social currency, social validity and social effects. While ‘Ricardo’s Gauntlet’ engages in economic debates, it does so with the purpose of demonstrating the fragility of mainstream economic ideology and the flaw at the heart of its justification of free trade. Proposing a novel disaggregation of the case for free trade into its component fictions – and drawing on and uniting heterodox and radical strands including social theory and political philosophy – ‘Ricardo’s Gauntlet’ reveals that the case for free trade fails precisely on its own terms. This failure unnecessarily and dangerously limits our understanding of what is right and wrong, with high sociopolitical stakes.

In this innovative book, Ilan Kapoor and Gavin Fridell rethink development politics psychoanalytically, investigating its unconscious. Whereas mainstream development politics is organized around stability and rationality, psychoanalysis points to disharmony and irrationality, helping to explain the development subject’s often self-defeating behaviour.

In International Law and World Order, B. S. Chimni articulates an integrated Marxist approach to international law (IMAIL), combining the insights of Marxism, socialist feminism, and postcolonial theory. The book uses this approach to systematically and critically examine the most influential contemporary theories of international law, including new, feminist, realist, and policy-oriented approaches. In doing so, it discusses a range of themes relating to the history, structure, and process of international law. The book also considers crucial world order issues and problems that the international legal process has to contend with, including the welfare of weak groups and nations, the ecological crisis, and the role of human rights. This extensively revised second edition provides an invaluable, in-depth and updated review of the key literature and scholarship within this field of study. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars of international law, international relations, international politics, and global studies.

Through an interdisciplinary analysis of the rulings of the Court of Justice of the European Union, this book offers 'thick' descriptions, contextual histories and critical narratives engaging with leading or minor personalities involved behind the scenes of each case. The contributions depart from the notion that EU law and its history should be narrated in a linear and incremental way to show instead that law evolves in a contingent and not determinate manner. The book shows that the effects of judge-made law remain relatively indeterminate and each case can be retold through different contextual narratives, and shows the commitment of the European legal elites to the experience of legal reasoning. The idea to cluster the stories around prominent cases is not to be fully comprehensive, but to re-focus the scholarship and teaching of EU law by moving beyond the black letter and unravel the lawyering techniques to achieve policy results.

A critical examination of economics's past and future, and how it needs to change, by one of the most eminent political economists of our time The dominant view in economics is that money and government should play only a minor role in economic life. Economic outcomes, it is claimed, are best left to the "invisible hand" of the market. Yet these claims remain staunchly unsettled. The view taken in this important new book is that the omnipresence of uncertainty makes money and government essential features of any market economy. Since Adam Smith, classical economics has espoused nonintervention in markets. The Great Depression brought Keynesian economics to the fore, but stagflation in the 1970s brought a return to small-state orthodoxy. The 2008 global financial crash should have brought a reevaluation of that stance; instead the response has been punishing austerity and anemic recovery. This book aims to reintroduce Keynes's central insights to a new generation of economists, and embolden them to return money and government to the starring roles in the economic drama that they deserve.

"Analyses the politics of production and labour control characterizing the Indian readymade garment industry since its entry into the global arena"--

In this comic parody, Ray Almaviva is minding his own business when the FBI wrongly accuses him of fomenting insurrection. Before they can nab him, he and IIsa Guilford-Schlitz, an avid researcher, are zapped back to the year 1776, when they help Ray's madcap ancestor, Don Raimondo, hijack the Spanish Treasure Fleet and supply the gold that helps America win the Revolutionary War. The grateful Founders confer upon him the title of Duke and deed him the Dutchy of Almaviva on the north bank of the Potomac River. When the three are zapped back to the twenty-first century, the FBI scoops up, IIsa and Don Raimondo swing into action and rescue Ray by proving his legal and long-forgotten rights to all the land on which the District of Columbia now sits. It's a standoff! Ray and his growing number of populist friends and foreign allies defy the mighty forces of a Federal Government gone rogue. Can the world once more be turned upside down? Can there again be a new birth of freedom? And can love still really come to two patriots in such trying times?