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How the development of legal and financial institutions transformed Britain into the world's first capitalist countryModern capitalism emerged in England in the eighteenth century and ushered in the Industrial Revolution, though scholars have long debated why. Some attribute the causes to technological change while others point to the Protestant ethic, liberal ideas, and cultural change. The Wealth of a Nation reveals the crucial developments in legal and financial institutions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that help to explain this dramatic transformation.Offering new perspectives on the early history of capitalism, Geoffrey Hodgson describes how, for the emerging British economy, pressures from without were as important as evolution from within. He shows how intensive military conflicts overseas forced the state to undertake major financial, administrative, legal, and political reforms. The resulting institutional changes not only bolstered the British war machine-they fostered the Industrial Revolution. Hodgson traces how Britain's war capitalism led to an expansion of its empire and a staggering increase in the slave trade, and how the institutional innovations that radically transformed the British economy were copied and adapted by countries around the world.A landmark work of scholarship, The Wealth of a Nation sheds light on how external factors such as war gave rise to institutional arrangements that facilitated finance, banking, and investment, and offers a conceptual framework for further research into the origins and consolidation of capitalism in England

Cover -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction -- Part I. Some Prominent Explanatory Frameworks -- 1. Karl Marx's Theory of History -- 2. More Explanations: Technology, Religion, Ideas, Culture -- Part II. Explaining England's Economic Development -- 3. Land, Law and War -- 4. From the Glorious to the Industrial Revolution -- 5. Finance and Industrialization -- Part III. Legal Institutionalism and the Lessons of History -- 6. Agency, Institutions and Their Evolution -- 7. A Comparison with Japan and Concluding Remarks on Economic Development -- References -- Index.

Contents: Preface -- 1. Introduction to liberal solidarity: The political economy of social democratic liberalism -- 2. On the evolution and diversity of liberalisms -- 3. On the rights and wrongs of individualism -- 4. Liberty, autonomy and needs -- 5. The worm that is gnawing at the insides of our civilization -- 6. The evolution of human nature and moral judgment -- 7. Markets, motivations and morality -- 8. Is everything already a market? -- 9. The necessity of democracy - and its limits -- 10. Capitalism, socialism and the climate crisis -- 11. Reducing inequality - and a general conclusion references - Index.

This Element examines the historical emergence of evolutionary economics, its development into a strong research theme after 1980, and how it has hosted a diverse set of approaches. Its focus on complexity, economic dynamics and bounded rationality is underlined. Its core ideas are compared with those of mainstream economics. But while evolutionary economics has inspired research in a number of areas in business studies and social science, these have become specialized and fragmented. Evolutionary economics lacks a sufficiently-developed core theory that might promote greater conversation across these fields. A possible unifying framework is generalized Darwinism. Stronger links could also be made with other areas of evolutionary research, such as with evolutionary anthropology and evolutionary psychology. As evolutionary economics has migrated from departments of economics to business schools, institutes of innovation studies and elsewhere, it also needs to address the problem of its lack of a single disciplinary location within academia.

Contents: Preface -- Introduction -- Part I: Socialism, markets and democracy -- 1. What does socialism mean? -- 2. Small socialism requires frugality or markets -- 3. Big socialism brings stagnation and despotism -- 4. Knowledge, complexity and the limits to planning -- Part II: Towards a feasible alternative: Liberal solidarity -- 5. Social knowledge and freedom to choose -- 6. The limits and indispensability of states and markets -- 7. Varieties of capitalism: The realms of the possible -- 8. The making of liberal solidarity -- References -- Index.

Contents: Preface -- Introduction -- 1. Space exists to stop everything happening in Cambridge -- 2. What is heterodox economics? -- 3. Rumours of the death of Max U are exaggerated -- 4. The separate heterodoxy of evolutionary economics -- 5. Heterodox economics as a scientific community -- 6. Some possible ways forward -- References -- Index.

Contents -- Preface -- Introduction -- 1. Progressive Radicalism before the Left -- 2. The French Revolution and the Original Left -- 3. Thomas Paine and the Rights of Man -- 4. Socialism's Wrong Responses to the Right Problems -- 5. Marxism's Wrong Turnings: Class War and Wholesale Collectivization -- 6. Down the Slippery Slope to Totalitarianism -- 7. Keeping Left: In Defence of Democracy and Individual Rights -- 8. After Vietnam: The Left Descends into Cultural Relativism -- 9. Final Full Turn: The Left Condones Reactionary Religion -- 10. Two Open Letters to Friends -- 11. Capitalism and Beyond: Toward a New Old Left -- Postscript -- Notes -- References

A few centuries ago, capitalism set in motion an explosion of economic productivity. Markets and private property had existed for millennia, but what other key institutions fostered capitalism's relatively recent emergence? Until now, the conceptual toolkit available to answer this question has been inadequate, and economists and other social scientists have been diverted from identifying these key institutions. With Conceptualizing Capitalism, Geoffrey M. Hodgson offers readers a more precise conceptual framework. Drawing on a new theoretical approach called legal institutionalism, Hodgson establishes that the most important factor in the emergence of capitalism—but also among the most often overlooked—is the constitutive role of law and the state. While private property and markets are central to capitalism, they depend upon the development of an effective legal framework. Applying this legally grounded approach to the emergence of capitalism in eighteenth-century Europe, Hodgson identifies the key institutional developments that coincided with its rise. That analysis enables him to counter the widespread view that capitalism is a natural and inevitable outcome of human societies, showing instead that it is a relatively recent phenomenon, contingent upon a special form of state that protects private property and enforces contracts. After establishing the nature of capitalism, the book considers what this more precise conceptual framework can tell us about the possible future of capitalism in the twenty-first century, where some of the most important concerns are the effects of globalization, the continuing growth of inequality, and the challenges to America's hegemony by China and others