David P. Levine

Normative Political Economy explores the criteria we use for judging economic institutions and economic policy. It argues that prevailing criteria lack sufficient depth in their understanding of subjective experience. David Levine's arguments cover topics which include: * basic needs, equality and justice * freedom, self-integration and creative living * the role of the state * capitalism and the good society

This book explores the way political economy understands human motivation. In it, the author argues that the assumptions typically made by economists regarding want and choice cannot adequately lay a foundation for answering important questions about the design of economic institutions and the appropriate use of markets. This volume offers an exciting and unusual contribution to political economy, offering a novel integration of the insights of political economy, philosophy, and psychology, applying them to vital foundational issues in political economy.

Modern life places a special emphasis on private affairs. Social institutions, and especially our economies, have been organized to facilitate the pursuit of private interests. At the center of this private world is a system of private property which, more than anything, satisfies our wants. Political economy studies the properties of this private world: How does it work, and how well does it satisfy our wants? What are the limits of the world of private affairs? Wealth and Freedom provides an introduction to political economy for the student or other interested nonspecialist. The book explores such key issues as the place of our economy in the larger social system, the importance of market institutions for individual autonomy, private enterprise as a system of economic development, poverty and inequality in market economies, global inequality, and the limits of the market and the role of government. Wealth and Freedom is distinctive in employing a rights-based approach to understanding and evaluating economic institutions. The author emphasizes the distinction between needs and wants as the basis for establishing the limits of the market, and concludes the book with a discussion of the relation between private wants and public ends.

‘Political economy’ has been the term used for the past 300 years to express the interrelationship between the political and economic affairs of the state. In Theories of Political Economy, James A. Caporaso and David P. Levine explore some of the more important frameworks for understanding the relationship between politics and economics, including the classical, Marxian, Keynesian, neoclassical, state-centred, power-centred, and justice-centred approaches. The book emphasises both the differences between these frameworks and the issues common to them.

Reviewing the course of English population history from 1066 to the eighties, this book challenges orthodoxies about the evolution of English family forms, and offers a bold interpretation of the inter-connections between social, economic, demographic and family history. Taking as the point of departure the well-known observations that England was the first industrial society, that it was the first society to have its peasantry replaced by proletarians and that it was a society that was always dominated by nuclear family households, the main question David Levine asks is how these elements were connected in time and space. In answering this, he looks to contemporaneous changes in the labour process, and, in particular, to the disposition of labour within the family. His central theme is the impact of proletarianisation on family formation. He argues that the explosive transformations of family and demography that occurred between 1780 and 1815 were the culmination of a protracted transition from a feudal to a capitalist social structure; and that the post-1870 decline in marital fertility took place within a context of demographic, familial, social and political adjustments which were themselves a response to the earlier population explosion.

Reviewing the course of English population history from 1066 to the eighties, this book challenges orthodoxies about the evolution of English family forms, and offers a bold interpretation of the inter-connections between social, economic, demographic and family history. Taking as the point of departure the well-known observations that England was the first industrial society, that it was the first society to have its peasantry replaced by proletarians and that it was a society that was always dominated by nuclear family households, the main question David Levine asks is how these elements were connected in time and space. In answering this, he looks to contemporaneous changes in the labour process, and, in particular, to the disposition of labour within the family. His central theme is the impact of proletarianisation on family formation. He argues that the explosive transformations of family and demography that occurred between 1780 and 1815 were the culmination of a protracted transition from a feudal to a capitalist social structure; and that the post-1870 decline in marital fertility took place within a context of demographic, familial, social and political adjustments which were themselves a response to the earlier population explosion.