Mary O. Furner - Böcker

This book addresses an important but inadequately recognized dimension of the activities of the modern state - the role it plays in producing the theoretical and practical knowledge necessary for economic policy-making. The traditional assumption, which this collection of essays challenges, is that despite this profound dependence governments have generally acted as passive consumers of whatever ideas economists in the private sector and professions had to offer. This book brings together papers from an Anglo-American conference, held at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, that reveal the ways in which modern states have helped to generate new economic changes, specific political institutions, and ideological contexts. The approach is comparative, focusing on developments in modern Great Britain and the United States.

The State and Social Investigation in Britain and the United States addresses the historical development of the knowledge base upon which the public policies of the democratic state depend. This comparative study stretches from the Enlightenment origins of the impulse to base legislation on scientific knowledge to the twentieth-century development of specialised institutions and professions engaged in social investigation and public policy-making. It probes investigators' biases and omissions as well as their strengths as factors shaping social learning. It illuminates the vital link between social empiricism and the late nineteenth-century emergence of the New Liberalism in both Britain and the United States. And it ponders the impact on social investigation and social policy today of relativism, antistatism, devolution and privatisation as these currents have developed in both societies since the 1970s.

This book addresses an important but inadequately recognized dimension of the activities of the modern state - the role it plays in producing the theoretical and practical knowledge necessary for economic policy-making. The traditional assumption, which this collection of essays challenges, is that despite this profound dependence governments have generally acted as passive consumers of whatever ideas economists in the private sector and professions had to offer. This book brings together papers from an Anglo-American conference, held at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, that reveal the ways in which modern states have helped to generate new economic changes, specific political institutions, and ideological contexts. The approach is comparative, focusing on developments in modern Great Britain and the United States.

The State and Social Investigation in Britain and the United States addresses the historical development of the knowledge base upon which the public policies of the democratic state depend. This comparative study stretches from the Enlightenment origins of the impulse to base legislation on scientific knowledge to the twentieth-century development of specialised institutions and professions engaged in social investigation and public policy-making. It probes investigators' biases and omissions as well as their strengths as factors shaping social learning. It illuminates the vital link between social empiricism and the late nineteenth-century emergence of the New Liberalism in both Britain and the United States. And it ponders the impact on social investigation and social policy today of relativism, antistatism, devolution and privatisation as these currents have developed in both societies since the 1970s.

Herbert Hoover, Unemployment, and the Public Sphere examines the fulfillment of Hoover's ideas in the area of unemployment between 1919 and 1933. The economic system Herbert Hoover envisioned, one based on cooperation and individual initiative with limited government, and the language he used to promote this system defined New Era discourse. His American Individualism, printed in 1923, served as the political philosophy of the administrations of the 1920s. In his discourse from 1919-1921, Hoover expanded the criteria- the conceptual definitions of virtue and liberty. The book includes a foreword by Mary O. Furner.