Excerpt from The Guild State: Its Principles and Possibilities The facts on which this book is based are drawn from the standard [historical and economic sources, too numerous to name. Their interpreta tion owes more to the teaching of everyday life than to the professors; though the essay would probably, not have been attempted but for the advantage of many conversations with Mrs'. Emily Townshend and Mr. Arthur J. Fenty. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

An analysis of the autonomy and leverage of modern professional groups - medicine, law, university teaching, engineering - in the US and Europe. Finding that each group has experienced a decline in its power, it considers the implications for professionals and those they serve.

Guild and State examines the values of social solidarity and fraternity that emerged from medieval guilds and city-communes, and the effect of traditional corporate organization of labor on socioeconomic attitudes and theories of the state. What ordinary guildsmen and townsmen thought about these issues can be gleaned from chronicles, charters, and reported slogans. But in tracing attitudes toward the guilds of early Germanic times to todays equivalent-trade unions-a distinction must be made between popular "ethos" and learned "philosophy." In Europe, from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries, the corporate organization of labor and of town-market communities developed side-by-side with the ideals of personal liberty, market freedom, and legal equality. Self-governing labor organizations and civil freedom developed together as coherent practices. The values of mutual aid and craft honor on the one hand, and of personal freedom and legal equality on the other, formed the moral infrastructure of our civilization. Alternate ideals balanced, harmonized, and even cross-fertilized one another-as in the principle of freedom of association. Contrary to preconceptions, however, corporate values were seldom expressed philosophically in the Middle Ages. Political theory and the world of learning from the start emphasized liberal values. It was only after the Reformation that guild and communal values found expression in political theory. Even then only a few philosophers acknowledged that solidarity and exchange-the poles around which the values of guild and civil society, respectively, rotate-are not opposites but complementary, and attempted to weave these together into a texture as tough and complex as that of urban society itself. By showing that the ideals of social solidarity and workers rights have often been intertwined with liberty and equality rather than in opposition to them, this book provides an unexpected explanation and rationale for the "Third Way." The Enlightenment and industrialization led to an apotheosis of liberal values. Guilds disappeared and were only in part replaced by labor unions; the values of market exchange have since been in the ascendant-though Hegel, Durkheim, and more recently, advocates of liberal corporatism maintain the possibility of a symbiosis between corporate and liberal values. In Guild and State there emerges an alternative history of political thought, which will be fascinating to the general as well as the specialist reader.

"A hybrid memoir-in-essays with photographs that confronts the realities of growing up as an adoptee born before Roe v. Wade, searching for birth records, examining the Domecon baby experiments, and interrogating the idea of traumatic memory itself"--