Plato was the first of the great thinkers to integrate the economy into a wide-ranging synthesis of ethical absolutes and human interaction. In this original and stimulating book, David Reisman assesses his influential contribution to the political economy of production, consumption, distribution and exchange. Drawing on the whole of Plato's published work, this book explores Plato's insights into the core philosophical concerns of stability, hegemony, justice and balance. It situates Plato's economics in the context of fourth century Athens. It argues that the transition from oligarchy to democracy in the wake of the disastrous war with Sparta had reinforced the attraction of justice, moderation and the middle way to a political philosopher who wanted to reverse the decay in popular standards of right and wrong. Analytical but accessible, this book is crucial reading for students and scholars of economic and social thought. Researchers and practitioners interested in social and public policy will also benefit from this book's comprehensive and interdisciplinary approach.

This insightful book sheds light on three competing ideological windows on the world: conservatism, liberalism and socialism. David Reisman explores the importance of these perspectives not only to generating public policy, but also in our capacity to explain the very nature of reality. Surveying the diversity of beliefs that govern and guide contemporary society, Reisman illustrates the pre-eminence of three all-encompassing meta-ideologies that capture heterogenous philosophies. The book traces the history of these meta-ideologies through key figures and moments in their development, illuminating the paradox at the heart of political beings: the conceptual wedding of independence and integration. Refusing a partisan perspective, Reisman argues in favour of a tolerant vision of society that promotes understanding as an avenue by which to achieve the peaceable coexistence of plurality and diversity. Offering a clear, intellectual and unbiased presentation of contemporary political philosophy, this book is crucial reading for researchers and students of social and political thought, particularly those focusing on ideology and the history of philosophy.

Economics is business, and politics is power. In this insightful book, David Reisman explores the interaction between authority and exchange in a global village where individual nation states - once the pinnacle of political organisation - increasingly depend on each other for their material well-being. Taking a transnational and impartial perspective, the author builds a comprehensive and intricate narrative. He dissects the emergence of the contemporary global economy and explains its impact on the sovereignty and strength of nations. Reisman explores the ways in which liberals, socialists and nationalists can reach a viable consensus in a new social order where the national interest must be the global interest as well. Offering authoritative, integrated and critical guidance to a topic that is of ever greater importance, this book is crucial reading for students of global political economy and international politics.

In the age of globalisation, goods, services, labour and capital are crossing international borders on a scale never before known. They are creating a nationless market. Governed by both the invisible hand of business and interest and the visible hand of authority and direction, a world market can be a free-for-all, but it can also be constrained by the national interest of countries that differ greatly in their social institutions and material circumstances. This book provides a lucid and comprehensive account of contemporary international political economy. Beginning with the ideological underpinnings, it examines the globalisation of trade in goods and services and labour and capital. It relates the free economic market to social consensus and political regulation, both within sovereign countries and at the supra-national level. The book is comprehensive and interdisciplinary, incorporating philosophical, political, social and economic insights on an international scale and applying them directly to the ongoing phenomenon of globalisation. Topical and non-nation specific, it covers the WTO, EU, the transfer of technology, the multinational corporation, the exchange rate, free versus regulated trade, the status of agreements and blocs, as well as contemporary issues such as populism, xenophobia and rapid economic growth in both rich and poor nations. Accessible to specialists, students and the informed reader alike, State and Trade offers wide-ranging analysis of the politics of trade in goods and services, international investment and the migration of labour across the globe.

This lucid and comprehensive book explores the ways in which the State, the market and the citizen can collaborate to satisfy people's health care needs. It argues that health care is not a commodity like any other. It asks if its unique properties mean that there is a role for social regulation and political management. Apples and oranges can be left to the buyers and the sellers. Health care may require an input from the consensus, the experts, the insurers, the politicians and the bureaucrats as well. David Reisman makes a fresh contribution to the debate. He argues that the three policy issues that are of primary importance are choice, equality and cost. He explores the balance between the patient, the practitioner and public opinion; the disparities in outcome indicators and access to medical care; and the escalation in prices and quantities at the expense of other areas of social life. Reisman concludes that, despite its significance for the individual and the nation, there is no single definition of health or health care. The maximand is a mix. Yet decisions have to be made. This thought-provoking and insightful book will be of use to students and scholars of public policy, social policy and health economics. It will also be of interest to medical practitioners who want to situate hard choices about health and illness in a broad multidisciplinary context.

In the age of globalisation, goods, services, labour and capital are crossing international borders on a scale never before known. They are creating a nationless market. Governed by both the invisible hand of business and interest and the visible hand of authority and direction, a world market can be a free-for-all, but it can also be constrained by the national interest of countries that differ greatly in their social institutions and material circumstances. This book provides a lucid and comprehensive account of contemporary international political economy. Beginning with the ideological underpinnings, it examines the globalisation of trade in goods and services and labour and capital. It relates the free economic market to social consensus and political regulation, both within sovereign countries and at the supra-national level. The book is comprehensive and interdisciplinary, incorporating philosophical, political, social and economic insights on an international scale and applying them directly to the ongoing phenomenon of globalisation. Topical and non-nation specific, it covers the WTO, EU, the transfer of technology, the multinational corporation, the exchange rate, free versus regulated trade, the status of agreements and blocs, as well as contemporary issues such as populism, xenophobia and rapid economic growth in both rich and poor nations. Accessible to specialists, students and the informed reader alike, State and Trade offers wide-ranging analysis of the politics of trade in goods and services, international investment and the migration of labour across the globe.

Around half the world's population live in countries where the fertility rate is far below the replacement rate and where life expectancy is increasing dramatically. Using Singapore as a case study, Social Policy in an Ageing Society explores what might happen in a dynamic and prosperous society when falling births, longer life expectancy and rising expectations put disproportionate pressure on scarce resources that have alternative uses. David Reisman investigates the challenges facing Singapore, where a rapidly rising median age and the growing pressure of the elderly upon medical attention are threatening to disrupt the economic and even the political status quo. The dependency of the old upon the young is becoming a financial and an emotional burden. Health care is swelling in quantity and price. Voluntary and compulsory savings are being used up. New demands for pensions and subsidies are challenging the national ideology of family network and self-reliance. Despite a wealth of prospective problems, the author argues that viable solutions can be found. Discretionary savings can increase. Reverse mortgages can monetise owner-occupied property. A higher participation rate can give the elderly the opportunity to earn a living for themselves. This book concludes that public policy must play its part in facilitating these solutions. It must ensure that the old retain their dignity. The old should not lie where they fall. This comprehensive, intelligible and highly original cross-disciplinary study will appeal to a wide-ranging audience. Readers will include academics, researchers and students with an interest in health economics, the economics of development, social policy and administration, public policy and the socio-economic aspects of medicine.

This lucid and comprehensive book explores the ways in which the State, the market and the citizen can collaborate to satisfy people's health care needs. It argues that health care is not a commodity like any other. It asks if its unique properties mean that there is a role for social regulation and political management. Apples and oranges can be left to the buyers and the sellers. Health care may require an input from the consensus, the experts, the insurers, the politicians and the bureaucrats as well. David Reisman makes a fresh contribution to the debate. He argues that the three policy issues that are of primary importance are choice, equality and cost. He explores the balance between the patient, the practitioner and public opinion; the disparities in outcome indicators and access to medical care; and the escalation in prices and quantities at the expense of other areas of social life. Reisman concludes that, despite its significance for the individual and the nation, there is no single definition of health or health care. The maximand is a mix. Yet decisions have to be made. This thought-provoking and insightful book will be of use to students and scholars of public policy, social policy and health economics. It will also be of interest to medical practitioners who want to situate hard choices about health and illness in a broad multidisciplinary context.

In the second edition of his Global Political Economy, thoroughly revised, David Reisman reexamines the ideological and material underpinnings of the international order in the light of recent research and developments. Taking belief systems such as liberalism, socialism and nationalism as his way into current controversies and debates, he suggests ways in which the conflicting positions can be reconciled. The book ranges widely, from the role of the superpower hegemon and the international organisations to competing currencies, trade agreements, regional pacts, transnational corporations, intellectual property rights and the less developed countries. Global Political Economy is an impartial, multidisciplinary and comprehensive analysis of the lines of force that are pulling the world together even as they are drawing it apart. Offering an insightful picture of economic unions and international trade, this book will be essential reading for students and scholars of economics and finance, global political economy, international relations, and public policy and politics.

The virtues and failings of market economies are at present widely debated and the outcome of the debate is of practical importance. This book contains essays that address these issues of economic policy ranging from privatization of industry and financial markets to education and the proposal for an internal market in the health service. Apart from two general theoretical pieces, particular markets, and proposals for creating such markets, are studied.

In Being and Nothingness Sartre picks up diverging threads in the phenomenological tradition, weaves them together with ideas from Gestalt and behaviourist psychology, and asks: What is consciousness? What is its relationship to the body, to the external world, and to other minds? Sartre believes that the mind and its states are by-products of introspection, created in the act that purports to discover them. How does this happen? And how are we able to perceive ourselves as persons - physical objects with mental states? Sartre's Phenomenology reconstructs Sartre's answers to these crucial questions. On Sartre's view, consciousness originally apprehends itself in terms of what it is consciousness of, that is, as an activity of apprehending the world. David Reisman traces the path from this minimal form of self-consciousness to the perception of oneself as a full-blown person. Similar considerations apply to the perception of others. Reisman describes Sartre's account of the transition from one's original apprehension of another consciousness to the perception of other persons. An understanding of the various levels of self-apprehension and of the apprehension of others allows Reisman to penetrate the key ideas in Being and Nothingness, and to compare Sartre to analytic philosophers on fundamental questions in the philosophy of mind.

First published in 1986, The Economics of Alfred Marshall is concerned with the theories of demand, supply, market structure and income distribution which the celebrated author of the Principles of Economics developed while standing on the shoulders of giants. It is thus concerned with hidden assumptions, institutional constraints, tentative conclusions and blurred distinctions; for these are an integral part of the contribution of an economist who warned against spurious over-simplification of that which is inherently complex.

The economics of Alfred Marshall appears easy when in fact it is fraught with difficulties. The Economics of Alfred Marshall seeks to explain Marshalla (TM)s theories in detail and to evaluate them in depth. The book attempts in that way to help the reader to gain a deeper understanding of an influential thinker whose insights, however difficult, continue to shed a great deal of light on the nature and workings of the economic system.

Alfred Marshall was anxious to do good. Intended by an Evangelical father for the vocation of clergyman, the author of the mould-shaping Principles of Economics remained to the end of his days a great preacher deeply committed to raising the tone of life. First published in 1990, Alfred Marshall's Mission explains how this most moral of political economists sought to blend the downward sloping utility function of Jevons and Menger with the organic evolutionism of Darwin and Spencer, how this celebrated theorist of social alongside economic growth sought to combine the mathematical marginalism of Cournot. Thunen and Edgeworth with the ethical uplift of Green, Jowett and Toynbee. The conclusion reached is that perhaps Marshall was, after all, too anxious to do good. Far more economists, however, have been not anxious enough; and that in itself gives this study of Marshall's life and times a present day relevance which would, no doubt, have appealed strongly to the shy Cambridge professor who is its subject.

First published in 1986, 1987 and 1990, this three volume reissue covers the life and times of leading economic theorist, Alfred Marshall - one of the founders of neoclassical economics. David Reisman's incisive and comprehensive study divides Marshall's work into three key areas: economics, progress and politics, and moral principles. The author deals with everything from Marshall's magnum opus Principles of Economics through to his contribution to the progressive evolution in Victorian politics; and finally the way in which his background and upbringing influenced his highly moral approach to economic theory.

First published in 1987, Alfred Marshall: Progress and Politics provides an enlightening insight into Marshall's thoughts on social improvement, adaptive upgrading, policy and polity. He planned books on these subjects which he never subsequently wrote, but the thesis of this work is that a close study of such writings as Marshall did complete makes possible a very detailed reconstruction of the important contribution which Marshall was capable of making to Victorian evolutionary thought (much in the shadow of Darwin and Spencer). In the ongoing debate on the political element in political economy, he reveals himself to have been as much an eclectic as was Adam Smith and as much a man of commitment as was T. H. Green.

A survey of the political economy of James Buchanan seeking to explain his theories in detail and evaluate them in depth, covering topics such as the constitution and its failure, democracy, operational rules for the constitution and economics.

People live by ideas which help them to make sense of their experiences. Yet different people live by different ideas. Without an attempt to communicate and comprehend, they would at best be unable to share, at worst be obliged to fight. This book is concerned with communicating and comprehending. It takes the view that ideas matter and that a dialogue with alternative worldviews is a civilised exercise in tolerance. Economic Thought and Political Theory, concentrates on the ideas of Plato, Steuart, Mill, Schumpeter, Hayek, Buchanan, the Catholic social economists and the property-rights tradition. The focus is dual: the market and the State. As interdisciplinary as the modern mixed economy, as contemporary as the search for middle way, Economic Thought and Political Theory will be of interest to all thinkers determined to find a good balance between individuals' autonomy and governmental leadership.

This book reviews James Meade's prolific contribution to economics and its lasting impact. Few economists have written so much and on so many different topics. Meade was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1977 (jointly with Bertil Ohlin) for his contribution to international economics, but could just as easily have been awarded this for his contribution to the economics and politics of the managed economy. His commitment to the middle ground, neither free market nor command, runs through the whole of his published work, from Planning and the Price Mechanism in the shadow of post-war rationing to The Intelligent Radical's Guide to Economic Policy and Full Employment Regained? when inflation combined with stagnation reopened the debate between the monetarists and the Keynesians. Meade was active in politics, most prominently in the debates in the 1960s about the European Economic Community and in the 1980s on the formation of Britain's Social Democratic Party. As a person, he can best be described as a cultured Englishman, quiet and open, much in the mould of Coase, Mirrlees or Hicks. This book draws upon the whole of Meade's published work. It incorporates insights from unpublished papers and surviving correspondence kept at the London School of Economics and Political Science as well as interviews with family members and associates. The book will be of interest to economists but also to the students of politics and philosophy that Meade himself would have wanted to reach.

In this unique and pathbreaking book, David Reisman examines the relatively new phenomenon of health travel. He presents a multidisciplinary account of the way in which lower costs, shorter waiting times, different services, and the chance to combine recreational tourism with a check-up or an operation all come together to make medical travel a new industry with the potential to create jobs and wealth, while at the same time giving sick people high-quality care at an affordable price. The book illustrates that it is no longer the case that medical attention must be consumed at home. Patients are travelling to Mexico, India and Thailand for a heart bypass. They are going to Hungary, Poland and Malaysia for dentistry. Doctors are migrating to Britain, the USA and Canada for new challenges. Hospitals are opening subsidiaries in Dubai, the Philippines and Costa Rica to see overseas patients on the spot. Integrating academic perspectives from medicine, tourism, health economics, development studies and public policy, the author concludes that the benefits both to the importing and the exporting nations are considerable, but that there are also some costs. He suggests that the new industry should be regulated and supported in order that it can do its best both for the local population and for the sick people who travel abroad for treatment. This fascinating and highly original book will be of great interest to academics and researchers in areas such as health economics, tourism, social policy, development studies, Asian studies and public policy. It will also prove invaluable to practitioners actively involved in planning and delivering medical attention in the global economic order.

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) was a leading figure in the British classical school of economics, best-known for extending the insights of Adam Smith at a time of revolutionary improvements in agriculture and industry. This book explores the way in which he accounted for the tendency to overpopulation, the exhaustion of arable land and the deficiency of effective demand. Malthus relied on historical and empirical evidence in the spirit of Bacon and Hume, but also backed up his data with a priori hypotheses that link him to his contemporary, David Ricardo. Malthus was strongly in favour of free trade, the minimal State, the gold standard and the abolition of poverty relief. Always a pragmatist, however, he was just as much in favour of public education, contra-cyclical public works and a safety net of tariffs and bounties to encourage national self-sufficiency with regard to food. He was both an economist and a clergyman and saw the two roles as interconnected. Malthus believed that a benevolent Deity had created vice and misery in order to shake human beings out of their natural indolence that would otherwise have condemned them to still greater distress. This title provides a clear and comprehensive examination of Malthus's economic and social thought. It will be of interest to students and scholars alike.

This book examines the economic, social and political thought of two highly influential cross-disciplinary contributors to the debate in the United Kingdom about welfare economics, social welfare, nationalisation and public policy. Active between the 1880s and the 1930s, their many books, papers, lectures and speeches shaped the discourse on heterodox economics, social democracy and the managed economy. The Webbs sat on Royal Commissions, permeated local and central government, and were instrumental in the creation of the London School of Economics. This book discusses and assesses their contribution to the broad topics of inequality, poverty, unemployment, freedom, capitalism, socialism, constitutional reform, social evolution and the historical school. Issues such as these remain at the forefront of contemporary discussions not just in Britain but throughout the world.

First published in 1986, The Economics of Alfred Marshall is concerned with the theories of demand, supply, market structure and income distribution which the celebrated author of the Principles of Economics developed while standing on the shoulders of giants. It is thus concerned with hidden assumptions, institutional constraints, tentative conclusions and blurred distinctions; for these are an integral part of the contribution of an economist who warned against spurious over-simplification of that which is inherently complex. The economics of Alfred Marshall appears easy when in fact it is fraught with difficulties. The Economics of Alfred Marshall seeks to explain Marshall's theories in detail and to evaluate them in depth. The book attempts in that way to help the reader to gain a deeper understanding of an influential thinker whose insights, however difficult, continue to shed a great deal of light on the nature and workings of the economic system.

First published in 1987, Alfred Marshall: Progress and Politics provides an enlightening insight into Marshall's thoughts on social improvement, adaptive upgrading, policy and polity. He planned books on these subjects which he never subsequently wrote, but the thesis of this work is that a close study of such writings as Marshall did complete makes possible a very detailed reconstruction of the important contribution which Marshall was capable of making to Victorian evolutionary thought (much in the shadow of Darwin and Spencer). In the ongoing debate on the political element in political economy, he reveals himself to have been as much an eclectic as was Adam Smith and as much a man of commitment as was T. H. Green.

Alfred Marshall was anxious to do good. Intended by an Evangelical father for the vocation of clergyman, the author of the mould-shaping Principles of Economics remained to the end of his days a great preacher deeply committed to raising the tone of life. First published in 1990, Alfred Marshall's Mission explains how this most moral of political economists sought to blend the downward sloping utility function of Jevons and Menger with the organic evolutionism of Darwin and Spencer, how this celebrated theorist of social alongside economic growth sought to combine the mathematical marginalism of Cournot. Thunen and Edgeworth with the ethical uplift of Green, Jowett and Toynbee. The conclusion reached is that perhaps Marshall was, after all, too anxious to do good. Far more economists, however, have been not anxious enough; and that in itself gives this study of Marshall's life and times a present day relevance which would, no doubt, have appealed strongly to the shy Cambridge professor who is its subject.