Bøker i Life of Ideas-serien

"A sweeping intellectual history of the welfare state's policy-in-waiting From Thomas More to Thomas Paine, Milton Friedman to Mark Zuckerberg, centuries of public figures have hailed the power of government payments as a tool for advancing social justice. For some advocates, basic income is a moral imperative, a policy with potential to upend structural inequalities; for others, it's a market-friendly version of the welfare state that doesn't constrain capitalism. By appealing differently to different political sensibilities, basic income has persisted in the political imagination for centuries. In this deeply erudite and original work, Anton Jèager and Daniel Zamora offer the first historical examination of basic income as a policy of convenience--and, critically, as an intellectual backstop for the shortcomings of capitalism. With modern origins in works of neoliberals like Friedrich Hayek, basic income was conceived as a form of market-friendly welfare state-a safety net around capitalism that wouldn't impinge on capitalism. Although neoliberals failed to make the idea a reality, they succeeded in seeding a fascination that would permeate all corners of late-century capitalism, from supply-side Democrats to neoclassical economists and barons of Silicon Valley. Basic income, Jèager and Zamora show, is no mere political sideshow. Amid societies' ongoing search for market-friendly utopianism, it may be a policy whose time has finally come"--

"A fascinating retelling of the first banking and financial collapse in eighteenth-century France. The Scottish economist John Law has been described as the architect of modern central banking. His "System," established in Regency France between 1716 and 1720, saw the founding of a bank issuing paper money and the establishment of State commercial and colonial enterprises aimed at consolidating public debt. What at first seemed like financial wizardry, however, resulted in rampant speculation and economic collapse. In The Politics of Utopia, Arnaud Orain offers a provocative rereading of this well-known episode. Starting in the seventeenth century, he reconstructs the figures and ideas, long predating Law, that anticipated and laid the groundwork for the System, which, he argues, is best understood as a failed social utopia aimed at the total transformation of society. Overturning familiar narratives of this seismic event, this book rewrites a stunning chapter in economic history by dealing with cultural, colonial, religious, and political dimensions of the (in)famous "System" till the French Revolution, revealing new lessons for today's fraught financial landscape"--