The Commercial Society

Author : Samuel Gregg
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 195 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2007-03-29
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9780739153208

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The Commercial Society by Samuel Gregg Pdf

Once relatively confined to parts of Europe and North America, commercial societies are now found in many other cultures and continents. Yet despite the international spread and growth of commercial order, the moral, economic, and legal foundations of commercial society remain poorly understood, especially in those countries where it first took root. Guided by the thoughts of Alexis de Tocqueville, Samuel Gregg's The Commercial Society identifies and explores the key foundational elements that must exist within a society for commercial order to take root and flourish. Gregg studies the challenges that have consistently impeded and occasionally undermined commercial order, including the persistence of 'corporatist' values and political movements seeking to equalize social conditions. This book offers a historically-grounded analysis for modern audiences interested in philosophy or the history of economics.

Author : Samuel Gregg
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 200 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2007
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 073911994X

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The Commercial Society by Samuel Gregg Pdf

Preface -- Toward commercial order -- Foundations -- Neither angel nor beast -- The system of natural liberty -- The liberty of law -- Challenges -- The temptation of politics -- The dilemma of democracy -- Culture and the possibility of "non-spontaneous" commercial society.

Author : Dennis C. Rasmussen
Publisher : Penn State Press
Page : 188 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2015-11-04
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780271076041

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The Problems and Promise of Commercial Society by Dennis C. Rasmussen Pdf

Adam Smith is popularly regarded as the ideological forefather of laissez-faire capitalism, while Rousseau is seen as the passionate advocate of the life of virtue in small, harmonious communities and as a sharp critic of the ills of commercial society. But, in fact, Smith had many of the same worries about commercial society that Rousseau did and was strongly influenced by his critique. In this first book-length comparative study of these leading eighteenth-century thinkers, Dennis Rasmussen highlights Smith’s sympathy with Rousseau’s concerns and analyzes in depth the ways in which Smith crafted his arguments to defend commercial society against these charges. These arguments, Rasmussen emphasizes, were pragmatic in nature, not ideological: it was Smith’s view that, all things considered, commercial society offered more benefits than the alternatives. Just because of this pragmatic orientation, Smith’s approach can be useful to us in assessing the pros and cons of commercial society today and thus contributes to a debate that is too much dominated by both dogmatic critics and doctrinaire champions of our modern commercial society.

Author : Cathleen Johnson,Robert Lusch,David Schmidtz
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 355 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2019-10-04
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781786613578

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Commercial Society by Cathleen Johnson,Robert Lusch,David Schmidtz Pdf

One of the greatest and most joyful challenges of adult life is to develop skills that make the people around us better off with us than without us. Integrity is a key part of that challenge. We are social animals, aiming not simply to trade but to make a place for ourselves in a community. You don’t want to have to pretend that you feel proud of fooling your customers into believing you could be trusted. The ethical question is: how do people have to live in order to make the world a better place with them than without them? The economic question is: what kind of society makes people willing and able to use their talents in a way that is good for them and for the people around them? The entrepreneurial question is: what does it take to show up in the marketplace with something that can take your community to a different level? In this book, the authors discuss the connections between the ethical, economic, and entrepreneurial dimensions of a life well-lived.

Author : Istvan Hont
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 145 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2015-06-09
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780674286191

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Politics in Commercial Society by Istvan Hont Pdf

Scholars normally emphasize the contrast between the two great eighteenth-century thinkers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith. Rousseau is seen as a critic of modernity; Smith as an apologist. However, Istvan Hont finds significant commonalities in their work, arguing that both were theorists of commercial society but from different perspectives.

Author : Cathleen Johnson,Robert Lusch,David Schmidtz
Publisher : Economy, Polity, and Society
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2019-10-04
Category : Economics
ISBN : 1786613565

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Commercial Society by Cathleen Johnson,Robert Lusch,David Schmidtz Pdf

One of the greatest and most joyful challenges of adult life is to develop skills that make the people around us better off with us than without us. Integrity is a key part of that challenge. We are social animals, aiming not simply to trade but to make a place for ourselves in a community. You don't want to have to pretend that you feel proud of fooling your customers into believing you could be trusted. The ethical question is: how do people have to live in order to make the world a better place with them than without them? The economic question is: what kind of society makes people willing and able to use their talents in a way that is good for them and for the people around them? The entrepreneurial question is: what does it take to show up in the marketplace with something that can take your community to a different level? In this book, the authors discuss the connections between the ethical, economic, and entrepreneurial dimensions of a life well-lived.

Author : Dennis C. Rasmussen
Publisher : Penn State Press
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2015-11-04
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780271035093

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The Problems and Promise of Commercial Society by Dennis C. Rasmussen Pdf

Adam Smith is popularly regarded as the ideological forefather of laissez-faire capitalism, while Rousseau is seen as the passionate advocate of the life of virtue in small, harmonious communities and as a sharp critic of the ills of commercial society. But, in fact, Smith had many of the same worries about commercial society that Rousseau did and was strongly influenced by his critique. In this first book-length comparative study of these leading eighteenth-century thinkers, Dennis Rasmussen highlights Smith’s sympathy with Rousseau’s concerns and analyzes in depth the ways in which Smith crafted his arguments to defend commercial society against these charges. These arguments, Rasmussen emphasizes, were pragmatic in nature, not ideological: it was Smith’s view that, all things considered, commercial society offered more benefits than the alternatives. Just because of this pragmatic orientation, Smith’s approach can be useful to us in assessing the pros and cons of commercial society today and thus contributes to a debate that is too much dominated by both dogmatic critics and doctrinaire champions of our modern commercial society.

Author : Christopher J. Berry
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2013-07-09
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780748645336

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Idea of Commercial Society in the Scottish Enlightenment by Christopher J. Berry Pdf

The most arresting aspect of the Scottish Enlightenment is its conception of commercial society as a distinct and distinctive social formation. Christopher Berry explains why Enlightenment thinkers considered commercial society to be wealthier and freer than earlier forms, and charts the contemporary debates and tensions between Enlightenment thinkers that this idea raised. The book analyses the full range of literature on the subject, from key works like Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations', David Hume's 'Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects' and Adam Ferguson's 'Essay on the History of Civil Society' to lesser-known works such as Robert Wallace's 'Dissertation on Numbers of Mankind'.

Author : Isaac Nakhimovsky
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 216 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 2011-07-05
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781400838752

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The Closed Commercial State by Isaac Nakhimovsky Pdf

This book presents an important new account of Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Closed Commercial State, a major early nineteenth-century development of Rousseau and Kant's political thought. Isaac Nakhimovsky shows how Fichte reformulated Rousseau's constitutional politics and radicalized the economic implications of Kant's social contract theory with his defense of the right to work. Nakhimovsky argues that Fichte's sequel to Rousseau and Kant's writings on perpetual peace represents a pivotal moment in the intellectual history of the pacification of the West. Fichte claimed that Europe could not transform itself into a peaceful federation of constitutional republics unless economic life could be disentangled from the competitive dynamics of relations between states, and he asserted that this disentanglement required transitioning to a planned and largely self-sufficient national economy, made possible by a radical monetary policy. Fichte's ideas have resurfaced with nearly every crisis of globalization from the Napoleonic wars to the present, and his book remains a uniquely systematic and complete discussion of what John Maynard Keynes later termed "national self-sufficiency." Fichte's provocative contribution to the social contract tradition reminds us, Nakhimovsky concludes, that the combination of a liberal theory of the state with an open economy and international system is a much more contingent and precarious outcome than many recent theorists have tended to assume.

Author : Sophus A. Reinert
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 689 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 2018-08-09
Category : Enlightenment
ISBN : 9780674976641

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The Academy of Fisticuffs by Sophus A. Reinert Pdf

The Italian Enlightenment, no less than the Scottish, was central to the emergence of political economy and creation of market societies. Sophus Reinert turns to Milan in the late 1700s to recover early socialists' preoccupations with the often lethal tension among states, markets, and human welfare, and the policies these ideas informed.

Author : Edward J. Balleisen
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
Page : 344 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2003-01-14
Category : History
ISBN : 9780807875506

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Navigating Failure by Edward J. Balleisen Pdf

The "self-made" man is a familiar figure in nineteenth-century American history. But the relentless expansion of market relations that facilitated such stories of commercial success also ensured that individual bankruptcy would become a prominent feature in the nation's economic landscape. In this ambitious foray into the shifting character of American capitalism, Edward Balleisen explores the economic roots and social meanings of bankruptcy, assessing the impact of widespread insolvency on the evolution of American law, business culture, and commercial society. Balleisen makes innovative use of the rich and previously overlooked court records generated by the 1841 Federal Bankruptcy Act, building his arguments on the commercial biographies of hundreds of failed business owners. He crafts a nuanced account of how responses to bankruptcy shaped two opposing elements of capitalist society in mid-nineteenth-century America--an entrepreneurial ethos grounded in risk taking and the ceaseless search for new markets, new products, and new ways of organizing economic activity, and an urban, middle-class sensibility increasingly averse to the dangers associated with independent proprietorship and increasingly predicated on salaried, white-collar employment.

Author : Amalia D. Kessler
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 401 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2007-01-01
Category : Law
ISBN : 9780300113976

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A Revolution in Commerce by Amalia D. Kessler Pdf

"Kessler shows how the merchants who were associated with the court - and not just elite thinkers and royal reformers - played a key role in reconceptualizing commerce as the credit-fueled private exchange necessary to sustain the social order. Deploying this modern conception of commerce in a variety of contexts, ranging from litigation over negotiable instruments to corporatist battles for status and jurisdiction, these merchants contributed (largely inadvertently and to their ultimate regret) to the demise of corporatism as both conceptual framework and institutional practice. In so doing, they helped bring about the social and political revolution of 1789." "A Revolution in Commerce provides new insights into the rise of commercial modernity by demonstrating the remarkable role played by the law in ideological and institutional transformation."--BOOK JACKET.

Author : Om Prakash
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 318 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 1994-01-01
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 8185873062

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The Commercial Society by Om Prakash Pdf

Author : David Wootton
Publisher : Stanford University Press
Page : 518 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 1994
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0804723567

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Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 1649-1776 by David Wootton Pdf

This examination of republicanism in an Anglo-American and European context gives weight not only to the thought of the theorists of republicanism but also to the practical experience of republican governments in England, Geneva, the Netherlands, and Venice.

Author : James R. Otteson
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 2019-01-30
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9780190914233

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Honorable Business by James R. Otteson Pdf

Business has a bad name for many people. It is easy to point to unethical and damaging behavior by companies. And it may seem straightforward to blame either indivuduals or, more generally, ruthless markets and amoral commercial society. In Honorable Business, James R. Otteson argues that business activity can be valuable in itself. The primary purpose of honorable businesses is to create value-for all parties. They look for mutually voluntary and mutually beneficial transactions, so that all sides of any exchange benefit, leading to increasing prosperity not just for one person or for one group at the expense of others but simultaneously for everyone involved. Done correctly, honorable business is a positive-sum activity that can enable flourishing for individuals and prosperity for society. Otteson connects honorable business with the political, economic, and cultural institutions that contribute to a just and humane society. He builds on Aristotle's conception of human beings as purposive creatures who are capable of constructing a plan for their lives that gives them a chance of achieving the highest good for humanity, focusing on autonomy and accountability, as well as good moral judgment. This good judgment can enable us to answer the why of what we do, not just the how. He also draws on Adam Smith's moral philosophy and political economy, and argues that Smithian institutions have played a significant role in the remarkable increase in worldwide prosperity we have seen over the last two hundred years. Otteson offers a pragmatic Code of Business Ethics, linked to a specific conception of professionalism, and defends this Code on the basis of a moral mandate to use one's limited resources of time, talent, and treasure to provide value for oneself only by simultaneously providing value to others. The result is well-articulated parameters within which business can be an acceptable-perhaps even praiseworthy-activity.