scholarly journals Two Propositions of Heilbroner (1919-2005)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lall Ramrattam ◽  
Michael Szenberg
Keyword(s):  
Adam Smith ◽  
Neoclassical Economics ◽  
Modern Time ◽  
Economic Relationships ◽  
Underlying Reality

<p>We present a contribution of Robert Heilbroner to classical stationary results that runs from Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Marx through neoclassical economics to the modern time. The analyses pivot on socioeconomic and historical forces. It is culled from several of his works scattered over half a century. They describe the path that capitalism took, based on underlying reality of economic relationships. Although Heilbroner does not express his thoughts mathematically, we cast some of his ideas in that terminology, because he does not avoid propositional statements, and the math we use is for heuristic purposes only.</p>

scholarly journals Two Propositions of Heilbroner (1919-2005)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lall Ramrattam ◽  
Michael Szenberg
Keyword(s):  
Adam Smith ◽  
Neoclassical Economics ◽  
Modern Time ◽  
Economic Relationships ◽  
Underlying Reality

<p>We present a contribution of Robert Heilbroner to classical stationary results that runs from Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Marx through neoclassical economics to the modern time. The analyses pivot on socioeconomic and historical forces. It is culled from several of his works scattered over half a century. They describe the path that capitalism took, based on underlying reality of economic relationships. Although Heilbroner does not express his thoughts mathematically, we cast some of his ideas in that terminology, because he does not avoid propositional statements, and the math we use is for heuristic purposes only.</p>

Evolutionary Theorising in Economics

2002 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard R. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Evolutionary Economics ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Neoclassical Economics ◽  
Economic Discourse ◽  
Evolutionary Theories ◽  
Evolutionary Thought ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wealth Of Nations

This chapter deals with evolutionary theorising in economics, first by considering two quite different ways in which evolutionary arguments have entered economic discourse. In particular, it discusses the link between economic dynamics and evolutionary theory in biology, citing the views espoused by Adam Smith in his book The Wealth of Nations. It then examines the argument put forward by a number of economists that modern neoclassical economics and evolutionary theory in biology are basically the same thing. It also outlines the similarities and differences between several contemporary strands of evolutionary economic theorising. The chapter proposes an alternative kind of economic evolutionary theorising and how it fits with other bodies of evolutionary thought in the social sciences, and especially in terms of evolutionary epistemology. Finally, it outlines the way scholars outside of economics are embracing evolutionary economics by developing evolutionary theories of processes of economic, social, and cultural change in their own fields.

Efficiency Wages and Classical Wage Theory

2007 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael E. Bradley
Keyword(s):  
Adam Smith ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Efficiency Wages ◽  
Neoclassical Economics ◽  
Marginal Product ◽  
John Maynard Keynes ◽  
Classical Economics ◽  
Wage Theory ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
David Ricardo

In The General Theory, John Maynard Keynes lumped together the marginalist and neoclassical economics of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the more narrowly defined “classical” economics of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, J. R. McCulloch, James and John Stuart Mill and other mainstream economists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth into what he called the “classical theory of employment,” which he reduced to two “fundamental postulates”:(a) The wage is equal to the marginal product of labour…(b) The utility of the wage when a given volume of labour is employed is equal to the marginal disutility ofthat amount of employment…(Keynes 1936, p. 5).

Culture and Legitimacy

2019 ◽  
pp. 48-66
Author(s):  
Huw Macartney
Keyword(s):  
Adam Smith ◽  
Market Competition ◽  
Banking Crisis ◽  
Neoclassical Economics ◽  
Jürgen Habermas ◽  
Reform Agenda ◽  
Market Participants ◽  
Reform Culture ◽  
Political Weapon ◽  
Legitimacy Crisis

This chapter draws on the writings of liberal theorists, from Adam Smith to the German ordo-liberals, to explain how state managers arrived at their focus on reforming conduct and ethics. The liberal economics tradition, before the turn towards neoclassical economics, recognized the ethical struggle at work in market participants, and the tendency towards market-distorting conduct. This helps to explain why state managers sought to strengthen market competition to reform culture, and why they also turned to an ethical reform agenda. The second half of the chapter turns to the work of Jürgen Habermas to explain the concept of a legitimacy crisis that state managers were also fighting. Here the chapter also introduces the concept of populist statecraft, as an ideologically thin, anti-establishment strategy. This also helps to explain how state managers used the culture of banking crisis as a political weapon.

Adam Smith in Context

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonidas Montes
Keyword(s):  
Adam Smith

Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie im 21. Jahrhundert.

2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (188) ◽  
pp. 453-470 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans-Peter Büttner
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
Scientific Community ◽  
New World ◽  
Neoclassical Economics ◽  
Price Theory ◽  
Transformation Problem ◽  
Iron Cage ◽  
Analytical Tools

While the majority of the scientific community holds Marxian Value and Price Theory to be internally inconsistent because of the so-called “transformation problem”, these claims can be sufficiently refuted. The key to the solution of the “transformation problem” is quite simple, so this contribution, because it requires the rejection of simultanism and physicalism, which represent the genuine method of neoclassical economics, a method that is completely incompatible with Marxian Critique of Political Economy. Outside of the iron cage of neoclassical equilibrium economics, Marxian ‘Capital’ can be reconstructed without neoclassical “pathologies” and offers us a whole new world of analytical tools for a critical theory of capitalist societies and its dynamics.

The Time of Indifference: Mandelstam's Age, Badiou's Event, and Agamben's Contemporary

CounterText ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-99
Author(s):  
William Watkin
Keyword(s):  
Modern Time ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Alain Badiou

There has been little direct discussion between perhaps the two leading philosophers of our age: Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben. Yet both men have written about the same poem by Osip Mandelstam, ‘The Age’, around the topic of time. Significantly, Agamben's response, written after Badiou's, is a subtle and damning critique of Badiou's conceptualisation of time, in particular extended across the categories of the modern, the contemporary, and the now or the event – although it never actually mentions Badiou by name. In this paper the lens of the central role of indifference in the work of both is used to present alternating and competing views as to the nature of modern, contemporary, and ‘now’ time. Specifically, a contrast is drawn between Badiou's use of indifference as both quality-neutral and absolutely non-relational, and Agamben's application of the indifferent suspension of the temporal signature as such. The paper concludes that while Badiou uses temporal indifference to question and problematise the idea of modern time as ‘now’, through a theory of the event, Agamben appears to go further. Rather than analyse the nature of modern time, the contemporary and the now through his reading of Mandelstam, Agamben uses Mandelstam's poem to suspend the Western conception of time as a line composed of points in its entirety.

Adam Ferguson and the Idea of Civil Society

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Smith
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
University Of Edinburgh ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
The University

Adam Ferguson was a Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and a leading member of the Scottish Enlightenment. A friend of David Hume and Adam Smith, Ferguson was among the leading exponents of the Scottish Enlightenment’s attempts to develop a science of man and was among the first in the English speaking world to make use of the terms civilization, civil society, and political science. This book challenges many of the prevailing assumptions about Ferguson’s thinking. It explores how Ferguson sought to create a methodology for moral science that combined empirically based social theory with normative moralising with a view to supporting the virtuous education of the British elite. The Ferguson that emerges is far from the stereotyped image of a nostalgic republican sceptical about modernity, and instead is one much closer to the mainstream Scottish Enlightenment’s defence of eighteenth century British commercial society.

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