The Modern nations in historical perspective
Description
Adam Smith's Moral Philosophy: A Historical and Contemporary Perspective on Markets, Law, Ethics, and Culture is a book by American economist Jerry Evensky. The book was published in 2005 by Cambridge University Press as part of the Historical Perspectives on Modern Economics series. The book presents Adam Smith not as an economist but as a moral philosopher, treating his major works, including The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations, as elements of a single, integrated intellectual vision rather than separate or conflicting projects. Evensky reconstructs what he identifies as Smith's central concern: how a liberal society can hold together and progress toward an ideal of "equality, liberty and justice" through the co-evolution of individuals and their social, political, and economic institutions. The final chapters bring Smith's framework into dialogue with modern economics, engaging the work of Gary Becker, Amartya Sen, Douglass North, and James Buchanan to argue that contemporary economic analysis would benefit from recovering the broader moral philosophical context in which Smith originally wrote.
How the series evolves
Books in this Series
Turkey
The modern history of Turkey has been marked by momentous political transformations and the rapid evolution of all aspects of cultural, social and economic life. The first comprehensive history to appear in twenty years, Erik J. Zurcher's book takes as its twin themes Turkey's continuing incorporation into the capitalist world and the modernization of the state and society in the face of this challenge. Beginning by exploring the closer links with Europe forged in the period following the French Revolution, the book looks at the changing face of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. Zurcher charts its progressive decline in the face of emerging nationalisms and European imperialism, and the fruitless attempts by the ruling elite to reverse the process through modernizing reforms. Arguing that Turkey's history between 1908 and 1950 should be seen as one continuous period, dominated as it was by the efforts of a coalition of Young Turk bureaucrats and officers to construct a sense of Turkish national identity and to introduce a programme of radical modernization and secularization, Zurcher goes on to offer a substantial and strongly revisionist interpretation of the influence of Turkey's 'founding father', Kemal Ataturk. In its account of the period since 1950, the book focuses on the growth of mass politics; the three military coups; rapid industrialization and migration; the thorny issue of Turkey's human rights record; integration into the international global economy; the alliance with the West (including membership of NATO and efforts to join the EC) and Turkey's ambivalent relations with the Middle East; the increasingly explosive Kurdish question, and the role of Islam in an avowedly secular state. Offering a new and original reading of Turkish history and drawing on all the most recent studies, this is an important book that will be of great interest to students as well as to readers with a general interest in Turkey.