Capitalism On Trial

This volume presents a collection of essays honoring Professor Thomas E. Weisskopf, one of the most prominent contributors to the field of radical economics. Beginning his academic career at Harvard before moving to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Professor Weisskopf has spent the past forty years exploring through highly innovative and rigorous research the questions of economic equality, social justice and environmental responsibility. The chapters in this book reflect the main subjects of Professor WeisskopfÕs work and seek to foster continued innovation in these research areas. The diverse contributions to this volume explore the impressive range of Professor WeisskopfÕs research themes. These include the economics of developing countries, US imperialism, Marxian crisis theory, contemporary economic history and institutional development, affirmative action policies, and the potential of socialism as an alternative to capitalism for developing non-exploitative societies. In addition to 26 chapters by leading economists, this book also includes a chapter by Professor Weisskopf himself, in which he reflects on his own career in economics as well as the state of the U.S. and global economies. The volume also includes a full bibliography listing Professor WeisskopfÕs publications. Students, professors and researchers working in any branch of economics will find much of interest in this set of wide-ranging studies building from the themes advanced by Thomas Weisskopf.

First published in 1990, Capitalist Democracy on Trial explores the long transatlantic debate on capitalist democracy. It examines the conflicting verdicts of writers and politicians in the USA and Europe. The first section focuses on democracy and the rise of big business. It discusses the views of Tocqueville, Mill, Carnegie, Chamberlain, Bryce, Ostrogorski, Veblen and Hobson. The second section covers capitalism and the rise of ‘big government’. The writers represented are Laski, Lasswell, Hayek, Schumpeter, Galbraith, Friedman, Miliband, Brittan, Piven, and Cloward. Using a historical and comparative framework Dennis Smith argues that the transatlantic debate on capitalist democracy has passed through three phases. By World War I the early nineteenth century ideology of ‘participation’ had been replaced by a conception of capitalist democracy as ‘manipulation’. Between the wars this was superseded by an ideology of ‘regulation’. Then the drift has been towards the need for ‘conservation’. His systematic approach demonstrate the dynamics of an unfolding debate and combines theoretical insight with clarity of exposition. This book will be an invaluable text for students of political science, sociology, social theory, and the history of political economy.

The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior. In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth. Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new "behavioral futures markets," where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification." The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a "Big Other" operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled "hive" of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit -- at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future. With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future -- if we let it.