Fiscal Sociology At The Centenary

This book discusses the socio-legal tax state and its relationship to development, inequality and the transnational. 'Fiscal Sociology' commenced in 1918 when Joseph A. Schumpeter examined the links between capitalism and taxation, arguing that fiscal pressures on governments led directly to the development of tax collection, and the burgeoning growth of capitalist economies. ​The identification of taxation as an important component of capitalism has continued to change the way that theoretical sociologists conceptualise tax. This book documents the history of this literature to provide a summary of the topic for scholars seeking a bridge between taxation law and contextual, historical, and anthropological analyses of the development of the state, more generally. Whilst Schumpeter’s insights have been celebrated over the past one hundred years, taxation has slipped from the agenda of many scholarly disciplines, in relation to analyses of poverty, globalisation, and equality. Fiscal Sociology at the Centenary fills this gap. The implications of this literature for taxation law in the United Kingdom, in particular, are considered.

This volume presents sixteen essays by comparative historical scholars who offer a survey of the new fiscal sociology.

Rejecting conventional approaches, the author offers a view of public finance as one element of a broader scheme of social theorizing. The book assumes a working knowledge of the standard conceptual framework within which the theory of public finance is commonly presented.

This book investigates the relationship between taxation, the State and society in democracy. Fiscal sociology is a broad social science in terms of its disciplines: law, economics, sociology, political science, management, economics, psychology etc. are mobilized. Fiscal sociology is general because it tackles a wide range of problems: genesis, development and crisis of the State, policy factors (ideas, institutions, division of left and right, lobbying etc.), vote-catching of the ruling elite, resilience of the welfare State, neo-liberal ideology of market efficiency, impact of capitalist globalization, democratic political choices and constraints on the functions of the interventionist State etc. It is empirical in terms of understanding the financing of public action: social division of society by the tax policy, growth of public expenditure, bureaucratic labelling of the tax deviance, budget performance, rationality of taxpayers, complex rules etc. It analyses the incoherence of a societal regulation of globalization: redistribution and inequalities of incomes, tax competition between the States, tax havens, tax planning and relocations of the multinational groups, action of the European Union, the OECD etc. It studies the conditions for a tax citizenbased conception of a democratic social contract.

From the point of view of public finance research, this book is a little quaint. A typical court of audit judges only what is put before it. In these essays it is argued that the judge should search for alternative actions that could have been taken and change thereby the records presented. This is different in that traditional public finance talks about some unknown entity whose well being a benign president should implement. We are not particularly impressed with this model. Our way of reasoning is that we want to talk about alternatives.

The issue whether fiscal sociology is ripe for an encyclopedia is the hidden agenda of this project. The authors are international experts from the old and the new world, from Italy to Estonia, the Netherlands to Russia, and of course, the United States. The essays cover both, the history of fiscal sociology and recent and future issues, such as the making of the Estonian constitution, which emphasizes fiscal austerity, and the emerging European constitution.

A broad, accessible, evidence-based analysis of tax law and how democratic tax states are confronting today's global digital challenges.