Luck greatly influences a person’s quality of life. Yet little of our politics looks at how institutions can amplify good or bad luck that widens social inequality. But societies can change their fortune. Too often debates about inequality focus on the accuracy of data or modelling while missing the greater point about ethics and exploitation. In the wake of growing disparity between the 1% and other classes, this book combines philosophical insights with social theory to offer a much-needed political economy of life chances. Timcke advances new thought on the role luck plays in redistributive justice in 21st century capitalism.
Malthus has prepared in this work the general rules of political economy. He calls into question some of the reasonings of Ricardo and attempts to defend Adam Smith.
Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832) was one of the first great economists to have laid down the foundations of economic science. Author of the famous Treatise on Political Economy in 1803, which was revised and re-edited on several occasions, he published numerous other works including a voluminous Complete Course in Practical Political Economy in 1828–9. He also taught political economy successively from 1815 until his death in three Parisian establishments: the Athénée, the Conservatory of Arts and Trades, and the Collège de France. The texts in which Say exposes his approach to political economy have not been available in the English language until now except for the fourth edition of the ‘Preliminary Discourse’ which serves as an introduction to the Treatise. This book presents a translation which renders his works accessible to the English speaking world. For the first time, English readers will be able to become directly immersed in Say’s principal texts, where he develops his conception of political economy. Jean-Baptiste Say and Political Economy proposes a translation of a selection of eleven of Say’s texts. The first three are versions of the ‘Preliminary Discourse’ from the Treatise’s editions of 1803, 1814 and 1826 with the variations of the editions of 1817, 1819 and 1841. The following four texts are the opening discourses pronounced at the Conservatory in 1820 and 1828 and the Collège de France in 1831 and 1832. The eighth text is the ‘General Considerations’ which open the Complete Course in Practical Political Economy of 1828, with the variations of the 1840 re-edition. The final three texts are those Say devotes to ‘the progress of political economy’ in what is akin to a history of economic thought. This volume is of great importance to economic historians and people studying Jean-Baptiste Say, as well as those who are interested in economic theory and philosophy and political economy.
"A Treatise on Political Economy"by Antonie Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836) is a foundational text of nineteenth-century, free-market economic thought and remains one of the classics of nineteenth-century French economic liberalism. Destutt de Tracy was one of the founders of the classical liberal republican group known as the Ideologues, which included Benjamin Constant, Jean-Baptiste Say, Marquis de Condorcet, and Madame de Stael.In this volume, Destutt de Tracy provides one of the clearest statements of the economic principles of the Ideologues. Breaking with the physiocratic orthodoxy of the eighteenth century, Destutt de Tracy denies that land is the source of all productive labor and focuses his attention upon manufacturing and manufacturers as the producers of utility and, therefore, of value and of wealth. Placing the entrepreneur at the center of his view of economic activty, he argues against luxurious consumption of the idle rich and recommends a market economy with low taxation and minimum state intervention.Destutt de Tracy sent the text of "A Treatise on Political Economy "to Thomas Jefferson in hopes of securing its translation in the United States. It was met with enthusiastic approval. Jefferson wrote to the publisher, "The merit of this work will, I hope, place it in the hands of every reader in our country." Jeremy Jennings isProfessor of Political Theory at Queen Mary, University of London."
This is Volume XXI of twenty-three in a collection on the History of Economic Thought. Originally published in 1933, this volume offers selected papers and reviews on economic theory as the first volume of two.
