This text has been automatically translated from Turkish. Show Original
This book in your hands, as its authors state, is a unique work in the field of the history of economic thought. The authors state that they are not impartial in the book they wrote, emphasizing that any book written in the field of social sciences cannot be impartial. As a matter of fact, their emphasis on the necessity for people to realize their human potential reveals their bias. For this reason, in addition to people's alienation from themselves and the products of their labor, unemployment, consumerism, individualism, an insatiable passion for purchasing and the anxieties these create in today's people can find a place in this book in all its naturalness among the pages of a history of economic thought book. Because in this book, the field called economy or the market, which is understood as the same thing today, is placed within social relations in its historical context; The human being is considered not as an abstract "maximizing individual", but as a social being who produces with his labor, strives to get the reward of his labor, and struggles to exist under his social identity. This being the case, economics ceases to be an intellectual activity that "examines the normable behavior of some abstract individuals and firms with a scientific method"; Becoming aware of history and oneself is becoming a specific form of the effort to comprehend social processes, emerging in the context of capitalist society. Moreover, economics, in a sense, appears as a field of intellectual struggle, not only with what it addresses but also with what it does not address. ADDITIONAL. This book, written by Hunt and Mark Lautzenheiser, presents all these issues from a "critical perspective" in a language that is understandable to non-professional economists (perhaps in a way that is easier for them), and focuses on economics as "political economy", which economists have long forgotten. regains its identity.