What does it mean to be a man? While this is a key question for at least half the population of the world, Ole Bjerg argues that it has been largely forgotten by philosophy. In his groundbreaking new book, he mobilizes ideas from Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt to coin the notion of Being-Man as an alternative to the conventional talk about gender and identity. This leads into an exploration of love, sex, work, art, truth, fatherhood, women, and other existential issues confronting men ...

Poker is an extraordinary worldwide phenomenon with major social, cultural, and political implications, and Poker: The Parody of Capitalism investigates the game of poker as a cultural expression of significance not unlike art, literature, film, or music. Tracing the history of poker and comparing the evolution of the game to the development of capitalism, Ole Bjerg complicates prevalent notions of “casino capitalism” and correspondingly facile and simplistic comparisons of late c...

Over the course of the last ten years the issue of debt has become a serious problem that threatens to destroy the global socio-economic system and ruin the everyday lives of millions of people. This collection brings together a range of perspectives of key thinkers on debt to provide a sociological analysis focused upon the social, political, economic, and cultural meanings of indebtedness.The contributors to the book consider both the lived experience of debt and the more abstrac...

What is money? Where does it come from? Who makes our money today? And how can we understand the current state of our economy as a crisis of money itself?In Making Money, Ole Bjerg turns these questions into a matter of philosophical rather than economic analysis. Using the thinking of Slavoj iek, while still engaging with mainstream economic literature, the book provides a genuinely philosophical theory of money. This theory is unfolded in reflections on the nature of m...

Parallax of Growth explores the ideas of economy and ecology and the factors that have put them on a collision course. Bjerg argues that our current mode of economic organization is characterized by an inherent �debt drive�, whereby the creation of money through the issuance of commercial bank credit has locked our economy into a vicious circle of forced growth and increasing debt.Parallax of Growth is not a catalogue of solutions to the ecological or the economic...

Political Theory has been transformed in the last thirty years by the introduction of methods of analysis imported from mathematics and economics. Modern students of the subject need to know something about Rational Choice Theory, Game Theory, and Collective Choice Theory if they are to be able to master contemporary discussions. This little book, by well-known philosopher Robert Paul Wolff, lays out the elements of these technical subjects in a precise fashion that achieves a sprightly a...

This book is an examination of the nature of economic explanation. The opening chapters introduce current thinking in the philosophy of science and review the literature on methodology. Professor Blaug then turns to the troublesome question of the logical status of welfare economics, giving the reader an understanding of the outstanding issues in the methodology of economics. This is followed by a series of case studies of leading economic controversies, which shows how controversies in ec...

The new economy, under the impetus of the ever-widening outreach of the Internet, is undergoing a transition. In the meantime, theres also been a shift to the information paradigm, with its emphasis on lack of foresight. These processes have almost completely supplanted the concept of market that was once one of the most cardinal features of conventional economic theory.In Toward a General Theory of Exchange: Strategic Decisions and Complexity, author Dr. Javaid R. Khwaja ...

"What I am seeking here is a better understanding of the contradictions of capital, not of capitalism. I want to know how the economic engine of capitalism works the way it does, and why it might stutter and stall and sometimes appear to be on the verge of collapse. I also want to show why this economic engine should be replaced, and with what." --from the Introduction To modern Western society, capitalism is the air we breathe, and most people rarely think to question it, for goo...

“A hugely valuable contribution. . . . In setting out a defence of the best in economics, Rodrik has also provided a goal for the discipline as a whole.” —Martin Sandbu, Financial TimesIn the wake of the financial crisis and the Great Recession, economics seems anything but a science. In this sharp, masterfully argued book, Dani Rodrik, a leading critic from within, takes a close look at economics to examine when it falls short and when it works, to give a...

Fooled by Randomness is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand. The other books in the series are The Black Swan, Antifragile, Skin in the Game, and The Bed of Procrustes.Fooled by Randomness is the word-of-mouth sensation that will change the way you think about busines...

Five lectures George Soros recently delivered at the Central European University in Budapest - which he founded in 1991 - distill a lifetime of thinking on finance, capitalism and open society In a series of lectures delivered at the Central European University in October 2009, George Soros provided a broad overview of his thoughts on economics and politics. The lectures are the culmination of a lifetime of practical and philosophical reflection. In the first and second lecture, Soros disc...