Tocqueville pessimistically predicted that liberty and equality would be incompatible ideas. Robert Dahl, author of the classic _A Preface to Democratic Theory,_ explores this alleged conflict, particularly in modern American society where differences in ownership and control of corporate enterprises create inequalities in resources among Americans that in turn generate inequality among them as citizens. Arguing that Americans have misconceived the relation between democracy, private property, and the economic order, the author contends that we can achieve a society of real (...) democracy and political equality without sacrificing liberty by extending democratic principles into the economic order. Although enterprise control by workers violates many conventional political and ideological assumptions of corporate capitalism as well as of state socialism. Dahl presents an empirically informed and philosophically acute defense of "workplace democracy." He argues, in the light of experiences here and abroad, that an economic system of worker-owned and worker-controlled enterprises could provide a much better foundation for democracy, political equality, and liberty than does our present system of corporate capitalism. (shrink)

Attempts to shed light on the development of economic thought and in particular on elements of continuity and divergence. The text provides insights into Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and Victorian evolutionary social theory, and axiomatic general equilibrium theory.

Christopher Pierson assesses the evidence of terminal decline, but finds rather a whole series of deep-seated challenges to traditional forms of socialist and social democratic thinking. Above all, these problems are to be found in the political economy of social democracy and its commitment to incremental change in the context of an increasingly globalized market economy. The latter chapters of the book are devoted to an assessment of market socialism, one of the most vigorous and innovative attempts to seek to (...) recast socialist aspirations under these quite changed circumstances. In essence, market socialism represents an attempt to reconcile new forms of social ownership with the seeming ubiquity of the market. Having outlined this position, Pierson carefully and systematically critiques it and, in the process, develops a set of distinctive arguments about the nature of social ownership, the potential of the labor-managed economy, and the appropriate forms for an extension of economic democracy. (shrink)

First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Many methodologists are firmly convinced that Popper's arguments concerning the status of the rationality principle (RP) are incoherent or incompatible with the essentials of falsificationism. The present essay first shows that the accusation of incompatibility of situational logic with falsificationism does not hold up to scrutiny but then shows that Popper's arguments are nonetheless flimsy if not indefensible. For it seems that one can distinguish between two different versions of the RP in Popper's writings. If the first version is plainly (...) "objectivist" and can be characterized with Popper as empirically false, the second one is rather "subjectivist" and is not falsifiable as such. The essay shows that this second reading of the RP is the one that Popper finally adopts but that, unfortunately enough, this formulation of the RP looks more like a metaphysical statement than like an empirical law. It could then be held to be a priori valid as such, by analogy with Popper's line of argument concerning the principle of causality. If this is correct, then Popper's thesis on the empirical status of the RP is confuted. (shrink)

" William Herbert Page, Harvard Law Review 36:115-117 cited in Marke, A Catalogue of the Law Collection at New York University (1953) 922.