This timely Research Handbook reckons with the past, present,and future of liberalism at a time when anxieties are being expressed about its viability. Duncan Ivison brings together a broad and international range of leading experts to explore the complexities of liberalism, examining the extent to which it can address rising challenges from illiberalism to inequality.

Events such as the global financial crisis have helped reveal that the drivers and contours of governance on a national and international level remain a mystery in many respects. This is so despite the ever-increasing complexity and sophistication in the management and understanding of economic, legal and political spheres of global society. Set in this context, this timely Research Handbook is the first to explicitly address the constitutive relationship between law and political economy. With scholarly contributions from diverse disciplinary and geographic backgrounds, this authoritative book provides an expansive overview of the legal architecture of the global political economy. It covers, in three parts, topics surrounding money and markets, the relations of organization, and commodities, land and resources. Scholars and policymakers as well as undergraduate and postgraduate law students interested in the intersection of socio-political, economic, and legal dynamics of governance will find this book a thought-provoking and insightful resource.

The Routledge Handbook of IIliberalism is the first authoritative reference work dedicated to illiberalism as a complex social, political, cultural, legal, and mental phenomenon. Although illiberalism is most often discussed in political and constitutional terms, its study cannot be limited to such narrow frames. This Handbook comprises sixty individual chapters authored by an internationally recognized group of experts who present perspectives and viewpoints from a wide range of academic disciplines. Chapters are devoted to different facets of illiberalism, including the history of the idea and its competitors, its implications for the economy, society, government and the international order, and its contemporary iterations in representative countries and regions. The Routledge Handbook of IIliberalism will form an important component of any library's holding; it will be of benefit as an academic reference, as well as being an indispensable resource for practitioners, among them journalists, policy makers and analysts, who wish to gain an informed understanding of this complex phenomenon.

Polls suggest up to twenty percent of Americans describe their beliefs as 'libertarian', but libertarians are often derided as heartless Social Darwinists or naïve idealists. This illuminating handbook brings together scholars from a range of fields (from law to philosophy to politics to economics) and political perspectives (right, left, and center) to consider how classical liberal principles can help us understand and potentially address a variety of pressing social problems including immigration, climate change, the growth of the prison population, and a host of others. Anyone interested in political theory or practical law and politics will find this book an essential resource for understanding this major strand of American politics.

Gerhard Wegner provides new insight into the relation between democracies and market economies. He recognizes conflict between the two, but he doesn t propose constitutional controls over political action. Such proposals are grounded in the comparative static manipulation of equilibrium models. In contrast, Wegner advances an evolutionary theory of political economy, and uses this theory to explain how processes of societal learning might be set in motion that could expand support for market arrangements through time. This thoughtful and challenging book will repay examination by all students of political economy. Richard E. Wagner, George Mason University, US In drawing particular attention to the implications of evolutionary market theory for public policy Gerhard Wegner adds a novel and instructive line of argument to the long-standing debate on the inherent tension between democratic politics and economic liberalism. His concept of learning liberalism addresses an important dimension of political failure that has been neglected in this debate. Viktor J. Vanberg, Universitaet Freiburg, Germany The purpose of this book is to reconsider economic liberalism from the viewpoint of political liberalism. The author argues that advocates of economic liberalism largely overlook empirical political preferences which, in many societies, go far beyond a limited role of the state. Recent difficulties of reforming the welfare state provide evidence that political preferences are at odds with liberal economic policy in numerous cases. This fact challenges a political conception which demands a limited state role but also claims that citizens preferences as they are should determine the content of policies. Using an evolutionary perspective on economic liberalism, the book develops new arguments about how economic liberalism can be brought into line with political liberalism. Drawing on an evolutionary theory of markets, Gerhard Wegner reinforces the claim that liberal economic policies are conducive to prosperity in society, but he argues that the liberal promise of prosperity does not translate into corresponding political preferences on the part of citizens. A tension between political and economic liberalism arises which lies at the centre of this book. Political Failure by Agreement will strongly appeal to postgraduate students and researchers of global governance, political theory, political economy and institutional economics.

A compelling history of liberalism from the nineteenth century to today Liberalism dominates today's politics just as it decisively shaped the American and European past. This engrossing history of liberalism—the first in English for many decades—traces liberalism’s ideals, successes, and failures through the lives and ideas of a rich cast of European and American thinkers and politicians, from the early nineteenth century to today. An enlightening account of a vulnerable but critically important political creed, Liberalism provides the vital historical and intellectual background for hard thinking about liberal democracy’s future.