Pure mainstream economics, based on methodological and sociological individualism usually ignores politics; development economics, on the contrary frequently integrates social and political factors in order to explain economic progress. Within this branch of economics, politics can mainly be...

It is said that economics value individual and economic freedom and from that many hastily conclude that mainstream economics value human rights. The purpose of this paper is to show that on the contrary mainstream economics is fundamentally contradictory with many human rights especially...

The general purpose of this paper is to promote a political economy whose objective is to promote the deepening of human rights. In particular my attention will be focused on the political economy of the right to work.The first part of the paper concerns the description of the historical process...

I believe that freedom of choice constitutes a pillar of rational choice in economic theory, regardless of the definition of rational choice one adopts. On the other hand, economics being socially embedded, free choice in economics seems senseless without political freedom of choice. Democracy,...

Despite some notable achievements in many parts of the planet the gap between the rich and the poor has become wider rather than tighter. On the political sphere success seems much more unequivocal, though. Indeed, beyond a handful of anachronistic exceptions, the world seems to have surrendered...

What is the scope of economics as a science, what is economics for? Real freedom or what we call substantive democracy has never been an objective of economics. In this perspective freedom, or the lack of it, would not be a purpose of a particular economic system, but at best one of its side...

The main purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that mainstream liberal economics is intrinsically contradictory to the democratic ideal. The first stage of this demonstration concerns the deconstruction of the naturalization process of economics, in other words the process through which...

In poor as much as in rich countries there is a fear that environmentally sustainable development might be contradictory to development in general and equitable development in particular. There could be indeed a contradiction between environmental and social sustainability, too much care for the...

In the middle of the twentieth century S.M. Lipset sustained that various indicators of economic development were higher in democratic countries than in authoritarian ones, suggesting that development was as a condition to democracy. More recently, though, several authors have shown that there...