Parson (policy analysis, U. of London) clears away the mechanistic and positivistic language and ideology that has surrounded the work of the British economist to find a social scientist and philosopher rooted in an alchemical fascination with the art of transmutation and the quest for the philosopher's stone. He places Keynes (1883-1946) in a long history of scientific and intellectual tradition with the intention of retrieving him as a source of inspiration and illumination for the theory and practice of public policy. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Parson (policy analysis, U. of London) clears away the mechanistic and positivistic language and ideology that has surrounded the work of the British economist to find a social scientist and philosopher rooted in an alchemical fascination with the art of transmutation and the quest for the philosopher's stone. He places Keynes (1883-1946) in a long history of scientific and intellectual tradition with the intention of retrieving him as a source of inspiration and illumination for the theory and practice of public policy. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This study explores how two economists, who both placed "uncertainty" at the heart of their economic theories, came to drastically different and opposing policy recommendations. The volume illustrates the important lesson to be learned from Keynes and Knight.

This fascinating book is the first to bring together and examine all aspects of the life and work of one of the most influential thinkers of the last century, John Maynard Keynes, whose theses are still hotly debated. It combines, in an accessible, unique and cohesive manner, analytical, biographical and contextual elements from a variety of perspectives. Gilles Dostaler studies in detail the battles that Keynes led on various fronts - politics, philosophy, art, and of course economics - in the pursuit of a single and lifelong goal: to radically transform society to create a better world, a world pacified and freed from the neurotic pursuit of financial wealth and economic rentability, with art at its pinnacle. Containing detailed presentations of the Bloomsbury group and the political history of Great Britain, Keynes and his Battles is an essential reference to this most important of 20th century figures whose central message remains as topical today as it ever was. The study also contains a unique chronology of Keynes¿s life and historical events, portraits of Keynes by his friends and contemporaries, as well as a full bibliography of all his books, chapters contributed to books, journal articles and reviews. Scholars, students and researchers of economics - the history of economic thought in particular - political science, sociology, history, philosophy and the history of arts will find this an absorbing and revealing work. The book should also interest journalists, decision makers in society and all those who are preoccupied by the problems of our time.

Tomas Sedlacek has shaken the study of economics as few ever have. Named one of the "Young Guns" and one of the "five hot minds in economics" by the Yale Economic Review, he serves on the National Economic Council in Prague, where his provocative writing has achieved bestseller status. How has he done it? By arguing a simple, almost heretical proposition: economics is ultimately about good and evil. In The Economics of Good and Evil, Sedlacek radically rethinks his field, challenging our assumptions about the world. Economics is touted as a science, a value-free mathematical inquiry, he writes, but it's actually a cultural phenomenon, a product of our civilization. It began within philosophy--Adam Smith himself not only wrote The Wealth of Nations, but also The Theory of Moral Sentiments--and economics, as Sedlacek shows, is woven out of history, myth, religion, and ethics. "Even the most sophisticated mathematical model," Sedlacek writes, "is, de facto, a story, a parable, our effort to (rationally) grasp the world around us." Economics not only describes the world, but establishes normative standards, identifying ideal conditions. Science, he claims, is a system of beliefs to which we are committed. To grasp the beliefs underlying economics, he breaks out of the field's confines with a tour de force exploration of economic thinking, broadly defined, over the millennia. He ranges from the epic of Gilgamesh and the Old Testament to the emergence of Christianity, from Descartes and Adam Smith to the consumerism in Fight Club. Throughout, he asks searching meta-economic questions: What is the meaning and the point of economics? Can we do ethically all that we can do technically? Does it pay to be good? Placing the wisdom of philosophers and poets over strict mathematical models of human behavior, Sedlacek's groundbreaking work promises to change the way we calculate economic value.

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.