Jonathan Levy – författare

Although children's plays of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are rarely anthologized or even mentioned in reference books or histories of theatre, theatre historian and playwright Jonathan Levy found an embarrassment of riches when he set about developing this collection. Applying several criteria, which are noted in his preface, he found himself especially captivated by plays presenting scenes of real life and in which the dialogue sounds like the real talk of boys and girls of the period. Most of the plays remain interesting as plays to be read and perhaps produced, not just as historical curiosities. Included are plays representative of five major genres, which Levy identifies in his analytical introduction: Dramatic Proverbs and other moral tales; History Plays, including sacred and secular history; Sentimental Comedies; Fairy Tales and Eastern Tales; and Familiar Dialogues.Included among the playwrights are Charles Stearns (1753-1826), a Harvard graduate and tutor and prominent minister, and Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849), an English writer known also for her Irish novels for adults and her writings on education. Each of the ten plays is prefaced by a biographical sketch on the playwright and critical notes on the play. Illustrations from some of the original publications are reprinted.

Until the early nineteenth century, “risk” was a specialized term: it was the commodity exchanged in a marine insurance contract. Freaks of Fortune tells the story of how the modern concept of risk emerged in the United States. Born on the high seas, risk migrated inland and became essential to the financial management of an inherently uncertain capitalist future.Focusing on the hopes and anxieties of ordinary people, Jonathan Levy shows how risk developed through the extraordinary growth of new financial institutions—insurance corporations, savings banks, mortgage-backed securities markets, commodities futures markets, and securities markets—while posing inescapable moral questions. For at the heart of risk’s rise was a new vision of freedom. To be a free individual, whether an emancipated slave, a plains farmer, or a Wall Street financier, was to take, assume, and manage one’s own personal risk. Yet this often meant offloading that same risk onto a series of new financial institutions, which together have only recently acquired the name “financial services industry.” Levy traces the fate of a new vision of personal freedom, as it unfolded in the new economic reality created by the American financial system.Amid the nineteenth-century’s waning faith in God’s providence, Americans increasingly confronted unanticipated challenges to their independence and security in the boom and bust chance-world of capitalism. Freaks of Fortune is one of the first books to excavate the historical origins of our own financialized times and risk-defined lives.

A provocative new theory of “the economy,” its history, and its politics that better unites history and economics What is the economy, really? Is it a “market sector,” a “general equilibrium,” or the “gross domestic product”? Economics today has become so preoccupied with methods that economists risk losing sight of the economy itself. Meanwhile, other disciplines, although often intent on criticizing the methods of economics, have failed to articulate an alternative vision of the economy. Before the ascent of postwar neoclassical economics, fierce debates raged, as many different visions of the economy circulated and competed with one another. In The Real Economy, Jonathan Levy returns to the spirit of this earlier era, which, in all its contentiousness, gave birth to the discipline of economics.Drawing inspiration particularly from Thorstein Veblen and John Maynard Keynes, Levy proposes a theory of the economy that is open to rich empirical and historical scrutiny, covering topics that include the emergence of capitalism, the notion of radical uncertainty, the meaning of demand, the primal desire for money, the history of corporations, and contemporary globalization. Writing for anyone interested in the study of the economy, Levy provides an invaluable provocation for a broader debate in the social sciences and humanities concerning what “the economy” is.

A provocative new theory of “the economy,” its history, and its politics that better unites history and economics What is the economy, really? Is it a “market sector,” a “general equilibrium,” or the “gross domestic product”? Economics today has become so preoccupied with methods that economists risk losing sight of the economy itself. Meanwhile, other disciplines, although often intent on criticizing the methods of economics, have failed to articulate an alternative vision of the economy. Before the ascent of postwar neoclassical economics, fierce debates raged, as many different visions of the economy circulated and competed with one another. In The Real Economy, Jonathan Levy returns to the spirit of this earlier era, which, in all its contentiousness, gave birth to the discipline of economics.Drawing inspiration particularly from Thorstein Veblen and John Maynard Keynes, Levy proposes a theory of the economy that is open to rich empirical and historical scrutiny, covering topics that include the emergence of capitalism, the notion of radical uncertainty, the meaning of demand, the primal desire for money, the history of corporations, and contemporary globalization. Writing for anyone interested in the study of the economy, Levy provides an invaluable provocation for a broader debate in the social sciences and humanities concerning what “the economy” is.