D. Reisman – författare

This book is an authoritative and comprehensive guide to the essential relationship between markets and morals. Smith, Burke and Marx, Durkheim, Polyani and Hayek - all sought to situate market exchange and property-based acquisitiveness in the broader context of human interaction and social values. This framework of interdependence and ethics embeds the capitalist market economy in an ongoing whole of which the calculative present-day is but a part. The book argues that the stability of conservatism anchors the dynamism of entrepreneurship in a matrix of patterns and habits without which orderly free enterprise would be at risk of degenerating into the Hobbesian war of each against all.

Individuals make decisions but they do not do so in a social vacuum. The goods they buy are frequently status-symbols in a zero-sum game which some will win and some must lose. Their consumption of commodities is subject to the constraint that what one can do, all cannot. The pressure of coalitions and interest groups, the self- interest of politicians and bureaucrats may all work against a solution being found for some of the most urgent social and economic problems of our times. These problems form the centrepiece of the economic approach to social interaction that has been pioneered by Anthony Downs, Mancur Olson and Fred Hirsch. This book seeks to examine and evaluate their important theories of collective action.

Society wants care to be allocated equitably; it wants the financial burden to be kept within bounds; it wants treatments to be both medically effective and economically efficient. These shared concerns lead to a demand for State intervention which this book seeks impartially to appraise and evaluate.

A comprehensive guide to the essential relationship between markets and morals. Smith, Burke and Marx, Durkheim, Polyani and Hayek all sought to situate market exchange and property-based acquisitiveness in the broader context of human interaction and social values. This framework of interdependence and ethics embeds the capitalist market economy in an ongoing whole of which the calculative present day is but a part. The author of this work argues that the stability of conservatism anchors the dynamism of entrepreneurship in a matrix of patterns and habits without which orderly free enterprise would be at risk of degenerating into the Hobbesian war of each against all.

Richard Titmuss, Professor at the London School of Economics, adviser to governments, and prolific author, was instrumental in shaping the new disciplines of social policy and administration. He made a valuable contribution to social philosophy through his attempt to integrate welfare into its broad social context. In this revised edition of his book, Professor Reisman relies on the whole of Titmuss's work, unpublished as well as published, to explain and evaluate the theories of this provocative but often difficult author.

James Buchanan (1919-2013), economist and philosopher, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1986 for his original theory of political democracy as market exchange. Buchanan believed economics should be concerned with liberty, individualism and equity.

Richard Titmuss, Professor at the London School of Economics, adviser to governments, prolific author, was instrumental in shaping the new disciplines of Social Policy and Administration.