Wayne Parsons – författare

An invaluable exploration of the concern that transfers of power to European Union institutions are producing a worrying new form of democratic deficit. While ongoing reforms of these institutions promise to render decision processes at European level more transparent and accountable, these expert authors examine whether there is a European public sphere for citizens and their representatives to discuss, deliberate and evaluate issues of public relevance. They show how the process of European integration has given rise to a new object of study – European society, and why key questions concerning identity, citizenship, democracy, government and institutions are being raised anew and are major political concerns at European and Member State level. With six case studies of EU policy-making and representative institutions, they analyze the intensity of participatory practices in four dimensions: mobilization of societal actors, public contestation and debate, openness of decision-making, and responsiveness of policy makers.This book will be of strong interest to students and researchers of the European Union, European politics, European studies as well as those concerned with more theoretical aspects of governance and the public sphere.

An invaluable exploration of the concern that transfers of power to European Union institutions are producing a worrying new form of democratic deficit. While ongoing reforms of these institutions promise to render decision processes at European level more transparent and accountable, these expert authors examine whether there is a European public sphere for citizens and their representatives to discuss, deliberate and evaluate issues of public relevance. They show how the process of European integration has given rise to a new object of study – European society, and why key questions concerning identity, citizenship, democracy, government and institutions are being raised anew and are major political concerns at European and Member State level. With six case studies of EU policy-making and representative institutions, they analyze the intensity of participatory practices in four dimensions: mobilization of societal actors, public contestation and debate, openness of decision-making, and responsiveness of policy makers.This book will be of strong interest to students and researchers of the European Union, European politics, European studies as well as those concerned with more theoretical aspects of governance and the public sphere.

In this innovative highly readable contribution to the study of Keynes, Wayne Parsons makes a radical departure from the conventional approaches to Keynesian economies.As a political scientist Parsons believes that, if we are to grasp the revolutionary nature of Keynes's way of thinking about policy problems, we need to place his theories in a wider intellectual and inter-disciplinary setting. Keynes, he suggests, was a social scientist, philosopher and opinion-former with one foot in the age of science and another in the age of sorcery. Like Newton, about whom Keynes wrote with considerable knowledge and insight, he was a thinker whose method was rooted in an alchemical fascination with the art of transmutation and the quest for the philosophers' stone. Parsons maintains that unless we appreciate this alchemical quality of Keynes's economics we fail to comprehend his particular genius as a philosopher of possibility. The author paints a portrait of a Bloomsbury Faust, a Mephistopheles in Whitehall: an image which is a long way removed from the modernist discourse which has largely framed our reading of his economics. Free from the mechanistic and positivistic language which has come to obscure his work Wayne Parsons concludes that Keynes can once again become a source of inspiration and illumination for the theory and practice of public policy.Keynes and the Quest for a Moral Science is an accessible, highly readable account which will appeal to scholars and students in the field of economics, history of economics, public policy and history of ideas.