A Note on Laurence Seidman’s Article

Mihail Manoilescu was among the foremost intellectual figures of the interwar period in Romania. He was known as a politician and central banker, as well as an economist. From the very beginning of his theoretical and practical career, or at least from the late 1920s onward, Manoilescu’s ideas and theories (especially his corporatist theory) were marked by clear continuity and consistency based on the theory of protectionism grounded on productivity differences. By developing his model — an alternative to the theory of comparative advantage — Manoilescu endeavored to show the need for protectionist measures to promote the development of peripheral countries. His defense of protectionism is usually presented as clumsy and founded on an incorrect method, even if he is often recognized as the forerunner of the theory of unequal exchange and the dependency theory. Few scholars note the similarity of Manoilescu’s theory with Karl Marx’s labor theory. This paper contributes to validating Manoilescu’s conclusions, the soundness of which we test here by reconstructing the theory from a Marxian perspective. A reconstruction of this type offers new possibilities of evaluating his theory and a better understanding of its contributions and limitations.     

Degrees of Connection: A Critique of Rawls’s Theory of Mutual Disinterest

John Rawls's solution to the problem of justice between generations is premised on the idea that “a generation cares for its immediate descendants, as fathers say care for their sons” (John Rawls 1971: 288, emphasis added). This paper brings mothers into the Rawlsian social contract. I argue that, when children have more than one parent, there is a contradiction between the assumption of concern for descendants, which underpins Rawls's account of justice between generations, and the mutual disinterest assumption, which characterizes parties negotiating in the “original position.” Concern for descendants creates connections within generations as well as across generations. The critique is internal and nonradical, but its implications are subversive. It demonstrates that an “add women and stir” liberal feminist reworking of Rawls's theory cannot be successful; bringing sexual reproduction out of the realm of nature and into the social contract necessitates a radical reconstruction of Rawls's theory.     

Clarence Ayres’s Critique of Orthodox Economic Theory

Mainstream economists and liberal politicians are criticizing the Third Way as it is being applied in the Netherlands. They argue that mutual consultation precludes an efficient adaptation to disturbances. The present study analyzes changes in wage and income policy in the Netherlands until 2005. It finds that wage and income policy has proven to be flexible enough to address “new” challenges in the Netherlands. The flexibility is rooted in a culture of tolerance that allows for some breaking of working rules. The latter arises from bounded socialization, that is, the imperfect transmission of information with respect to social working rules that result in similar but not identical copies of institutions.     

Schumpeter’s Theory of Economic Development: 100 years of development

This article sheds light on the impact of Schumpeter’s Theory of Economic Development over the last 100?years, and identifies insights from that work that are less well-known, but that have the potential for informing current developments in evolutionary economics. We identify these insights by tracing the development of Schumpeter’s ideas in Theory of Economic Development, which he revised heavily between the first and second German and the English editions. We not only report material lost in the process and developments in Schumpeter’s thinking that can be read off of the revisions, but also indicate how the newfound material can inform and inspire evolutionary economics today.     

Karl Marx’s Theory of Socio-Institutional Transformation in Late-Stage Capitalism

This article is in the tradition of Thorstein Veblen’s organized-intelligence-in-action definition of technology¹. It intends to identify the social technology necessary for organizing knowledge in order to get a grip on social change. Social change is seldom directed by discretionary policy; its rate is too fast for most to comprehend, and it has consequences that too often are neither desirable nor just. Since the last century scholars have “accepted the idea that the circumstances of existence were continually changing, that society was necessarily in the process of making adaptions to the changing circumstances, and that intelligent adaptation would result in human progress.“² Yet most of our social science models have yet to incorporate these dynamics. To further our understanding, scientific modeling must be developed to reflect social change as the norm, not as the exception to equilibrium.