Prelude to Political Economy: A Study of the Social and Political Foundations of Economics

This book is a critique of economics as social science, unusual because it uses many of the same techniques that contemporary economics and positive political economy use. It relies on game theory, and more importantly, on game-theoretic reasoning; but the technical demands are small. The book cautions that perhaps we are trying to move too fast; that we are, mistakenly, dismissive of ideas that cannot be fully formalized, and too glib with our elegant tools of analysis. It must be recognized that markets and the economy are embedded in society, politics, and the law; and an immense amount of research has to go into understanding the nature of this embedding before we can come out with reliable answers. Prelude to Political Economy suggests a new approach to law and economics and to the state, and addresses important questions such as whether the state should guarantee freedom of speech and whether the free market can lead to coercion.