The background thesis is that an implicit ontology of the people and the relation between the people and the state often shapes how we think in normative terms about politics. This article attempts to defend that thesis in relation to Rawls. The argument is that the rejection of an image of the...

The market is traditionally hailed as the very exemplar of a system under which people enjoy freedom, in particular the negative sort of freedom associated with liberal and libertarian thought: freedom as noninterference. But how does the market appear from the perspective of a rival conception...

Hobbes made a distinctive contribution to the discussion of freedom on two fronts. He persuaded later, if not immediate, successors that it is only the exercise of a power of interference that reduces people’s freedom, not its (unexercised) existence - not even its existence in an...

Beyond Conventional Economics presents new original work from leading scholars on the interface between the individual and political and social institutions. The book offers a critique of the inadequacies of the conventional economic approach to politics and a state-of-the-art view of new...

This paper investigates the effects of increased power associated with higher office on the quality of agent performance, within the context of a model in which agents care about what others think of them. They care that is about the esteem they enjoy. The object is to conduct a simple...

In order to vindicate rational-choice theory as a mode of explaining social patterns in general - social patterns beyond the narrow range of economic behaviour - we have to recognize the legitimacy of explaining the resilience of certain patterns of behaviour: that is, explaining, not...

However much people want esteem, it is an untradable commodity: there is no way that I can buy the good opinion of another or sell to others my good opinion of them. But though it is a non-tradable good, esteem is allocated in society according to systematic determinants; people's performance,...