Andrew Bowman - The End of the Experiment? From Competition to the Foundational Economy

The Manchester Capitalism book series

General Editor

MICHAEL MORAN

Manchester Capitalism is a series of short books which reframe the big issues of economic renewal, financial reform and political mobilisation. The books do so by directly tackling such issues and the underlying conditions of the capitalist imagination in everything from university pedagogy to market bricolage. The underlying economic assumption is that a fundamental reframing of policy choices is necessary before we can reform our capitalism levered on the state, which is in turn levered on debt in all the high income countries. We write in the liberal collectivist tradition of the 1930s about new social techniques to ensure security in a resilient, responsible capitalism. But, we cannot share the faith of Berle or Macmillan in the benevolence and competence of central states, which in the present conjuncture are endlessly repeating experiments in competition and markets without confronting the limits of this framework.

The individual books in our series all combine follow the money research with readable discussion of narrative alibis. This distinctive form of analysis was pioneered, in public interest reports about mundane activities like meat supply and railways, by the multidisciplinary team of researchers working at the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (cresc.ac.uk) and now blogging at the Manchester Capitalism web site. Present day knowledges are combined with eclectic borrowing from free-thinking earlier critics of capitalism like Wright Mills and Braudel, who deserve better than the neglect of posterity. Our political assumption is that there is much distributed intelligence in our economy and society outside the metropolitan centres of elite decision making. We write to inform and empower that force which the nineteenth century recognised as agenda setting, provincial radicalism, and we promote devolved government with a social purpose for the twenty first century.

Manchester University Press

Manchester and New York

distributed in the United States exclusively
by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN