Reflections on Commercial Life

Patrick Murray is Chair of the Philosophy Department at Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska, and the author of Marx's Theory of Scientific Knowledge (1988).

"Patrick Murray's Reflections on Commercial Life is one of the most valuable books on my bookshelves devoted to business, business ethics, and economics. It is a densely-packed treasury of selections from the great thinkers of history on the topics of money, exchange, and commerce." -- Robert C. Solomon, University of Texas, Austin"[Patrick Murray] tells us that, although we live in a commercial society, we understand it as little as fish do water. In this remarkable book he investigates what the idea of such a society has meant to an extraordinary gathering including Plato and Aquinas, Veblen and Arendt, and of course Adam Smith and Marx." -- Robert Heilbroner, The New School for Social Research"... the carefully selected pieces from the masterworks of economic thinking, supported with concise bibliographies, make Reflections on Commercial Life a worthy addition to private libraries." -- Business Library Review"... very useful for students interested in the intersection of economic and political theory. The selections have been chosen judiciously and cover the whole Western tradition from Plato to Baudrillard." -- Telos

• Introduction; Chapter 1 Plato (c. 427–c.347 B.C); Chapter 2 Aristotle (384–322 B.C.); Chapter 3 St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274); Chapter 4 St. Thomas More (1478–1535); Chapter 5 John Locke (1632–1704); Chapter 6 Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733); Chapter 7 David Hume (1711–1776); Chapter 8 Adam Smith (1723–1790); Chapter 9 James Madison (1751–1836); Chapter 10 Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805); Chapter 11 G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831); Chapter 12 Karl Marx (1818–1883); Chapter 13 John Stuart Mill (1806–1873); Chapter 14 Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929); Chapter 15 Georg Simmel (1858–1918); Chapter 16 Max Weber (1864–1920); Chapter 17 Marcel Mauss (1872–1950); Chapter 18 Georges Bataille (1897–1962); Chapter 19 Simone Weil (1909–1943); Chapter 20 Friedrich A. Hayek (1899–1992); Chapter 21 Hannah Arendt (1906–1975); Chapter 22 Daniel Bell (1919– ); Chapter 23 Jean Baudrillard (1929– );