Understanding Capitalism: Critical Analysis from Karl Marx to Amartya Sen

Front Cover
Douglas Dowd
Pluto Press, Jun 20, 2002 - Business & Economics - 183 pages
Understanding Capitalism combines the essays of seven leading economists, including Robin Hahnel and John Bellamy Foster, in a critical assessment of the relationship between economic thought and the dominance of capitalism. With analyses of economists ranging from Karl Marx to Amartya Sen, the book traces the growth of the capitalist system over the past two hundred years and how economic theory has, in fact, become capitalist ideology. Relating socio-economic and analytical histories to present-day economic policy, this is a thoroughly accessible work which makes an ideal introduction to the key thinkers in economic thought past and present.Major economists and economic schools of thought are discussed in a chapter-by-chapter guide that covers Marx, Veblen, Gramsci, post-Keynesian theory, US institutionalists, Sweezy and the Monopoly Capital school, and recent Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen. Contributors include Michael Lebowitz, Carl Boggs, Michael Keaney, Frederic Lee, John Bellamy Foster and Robin Hahnel, with an introduction by the editor, Douglas Dowd.

From inside the book

Contents

INTRODUCTION
1
Human Beings
17
WHAT GRAMSCI MEANS TODAY
57
Copyright

2 other sections not shown

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2002)

Douglas Fitzgerald Dowd was born in San Francisco, California on December 7, 1919. During World War II, he was as a bomber pilot downed over the Pacific. He received a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1949 and later received a doctorate there. He taught at Cornell University from 1953 until 1970. He also taught at San Jose State University, the University of California, at Berkeley and at Santa Cruz, and the University of Modena and the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies Bologna Center in Italy. He wrote several books including U.S. Capitalist Development Since 1776: Of, by and for Which People? and Blues for America: A Critique, a Lament, and Some Memories. He died from congestive heart failure on September 8, 2017 at the age of 97.