Economics and Utopia: Why the Learning Economy is Not the End of History(Economics as Social Theory)

For many, the East European revolutions of 1989 and the disintergration of the USSR represented not only the overdue demise of Soviet-style communism, but also the obsolescence of all utopian ways of thinking. History has reached its end-state in the form of a victorious liberal-democratic capitalism amd all attempts to imagine an alternative social order were now damned as both futile and quixotic. Economics and Utopia rejects this stifling dogma in the belief that utopian thinking is a necessary condition for the development of alterntive solutions to the problems of the present and thus for historical progress. Beyond Utopia? is emphatically not an attempt to breathe new life into existing utopian models, whether state socialist or neo-liberal, which are seen as misunderstanding the nature of learning and knowledge in a modern economy. The author's utopianism is based on an examination of the potential for an alternative future based on the growth of knowledge-intensive production, one whose feasibility world derive from its ability to respond to the needs of rapidly-changing industrial economies. More than just a consideration of economic alternatives, Beyond Utopia? is also an important contribution to the critique of mainstream economics which is considered to be unable to understand the market system except in the most formal and abstract terms. Thus in order to imagine new worlds a change in our economic thinking is necessary, one that focuses on the relationship between learning and knowledge in economic systems, as well as on the institutional and cultural context of different economic models.

Table of Contents:
1 INTRODUCTION Part I Visions and illusions 2 SOCIALISM AND THE LIMITS TO INNOVATION 3 THE ABSOLUTISM OF MARKET INDIVIDUALISM Part II The blindness of existing theory 4 THE UNIVERSALITY OF MAINSTREAM ECONOMICS 5 KARL MARX AND THE TRIUMPH OF CAPITALISM 6 INSTITUTIONALISM AND VARIETIES OF CAPITALISM Part III Back to the future 7 CONTRACT AND CAPITALISM 8 KNOWLEDGE AND EMPLOYMENT 9THE END OF CAPITALISM? 10 THE LEARNING FRONTIER 11 SOME NORMATIVE AND POLICY ISSUES

Review :
'Economics and Utopia is well-written, accessible and consistently engaging.....it is a must for any economic geographer wanting to keep abreast of progress in political economic thought' - Area 'This is a book that deserves to be widely read, and should be by anybody with an interest in the discipline of Economics...well-aruged, stimulating and thought-provoking.' - Capital and Class