This book asks how a more liberating economics could be constructed and taught. It suggests that if economists today are serious about emancipation and empowerment, they will have to radically change their conception about what it means for a citizen to act rationally in a complex society.  Arnsperger emphasises that current economics neglects an important fact: Many of us ask not only ‘what’s in it for us’, within a given socio-economic context; we also care about the context itself. The author argues that if citizens keen on exercising their critical reason actually demanded economic theories that allowed them to do so, economics would have to become a constantly emerging, open-ended knowledge process. He claims that in a truly free economy, there would be no all-out war between ‘orthodox’ and ‘heterodox’ approaches, but an intricate and unpredictable ‘post-orthodox’ pluralism that would emerge from the citizens’ own complex interactions.  Offering an original and path-breaking combination of insights from Hayek, the theory of complexity, and the Frankfurt School of social criticism, Arnsperger discusses how such a free economy would generate its specific brand of economics, called ‘Critical Political Economy’

Critical Political Economy: Complexity, Rationality, and the Logic of Post-Orthodox Pluralism (Routledge Frontiers of Political Economy)

Business & Money

Christian Arnsperger

Economics

Routledge

Full-Spectrum Economics (Routledge Frontiers of Political Economy)

Economics is essential in today’s world, and yet mainstream economists are increasingly under criticism for not taking into account sufficiently many dimensions of real life, such as political and moral values, human development, spirituality, and people’s widely shared aspiration to live more liberated lives. This book offers a critical assessment of contemporary mainstream economics by showing that the discipline has become much too narrow and misses out on the full spectrum of human existence. The book presents a careful, detailed analysis of the limitations of neoclassical economics and of its post-neoclassical successors: behavioral economics, neuroeconomics, and experimental economics. It offers a deconstruction rooted in the "Integral" philosophy developed over the past three decades by the contemporary American thinker Ken Wilber. Distinguishing between exterior and interior dimensions of human existence, it suggests that economics could be made into a more inclusive and more emancipatory science if it started to truly honor the genuinely interior aspects of individuals and communities. Instead of remaining stuck in the limitations of post-neoclassical theory, we should make the move toward a new paradigm that, in the name of science, promotes objectivity as well as subjectivity, and material causality as well as existential awareness. The result is a highly expanded sense of relevance for economists, sociologists, and social scientists in general. Combining methodologies from systems science, brain science, ethno-methodology, and existentialism as well as from the great spiritual traditions of humanity, Christian Arnsperger delineates the requirements of a genuinely integral economics beyond today’s crippling reductionism.

Full-Spectrum Economics: Toward an Inclusive and Emancipatory Social Science (Routledge Frontiers of Political Economy)

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Christian Arnsperger. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Christian Arnsperger

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Christian Arnsperger. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Critical Political Economy: Complexity, Rationality, and the Logic of Post-Orthodox Pluralism (Routledge Frontiers of Political Economy)

Full-Spectrum Economics: Toward an Inclusive and Emancipatory Social Science (Routledge Frontiers of Political Economy)