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The capitalism and slavery debate is among the most significant in world historiography. This essay suggests that its main perspectives still use nation-based approaches and employ analytical categories of classical and neoclassical economics that obscure the very notion of capital. As a result, the material relations of slavery are reduced to the problem of profitability within national or colonial contexts, an approach that depicts the nineteenth-century nexus between slavery and capitalism as a transhistorical one. Against this backdrop, this essay proposes that the rise and fall of slavery can be better understood by examining the changing material composition of capital as well as its equally changing cluster of global circuits. Based on critical value theory, it argues that industrialization consistently reshaped spatial and material relations between town and country, capital and labor, and production and consumption, engendering world geographies of accumulation that both fueled and challenged the reproduction of slave labor in the Americas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The alliance of pure market economies with democratic polities has traditionally been a problematic one. It is argued that orthodox theoretical conceptualizations of market behaviour and the application of such theory to our communal lives have entrenched an incoherent alliance. In particular, the reductive mechanism characteristic of both neo-classical economic theory and its deployment in our socio-economic order has severely undermined the telic agency required for the autonomy or self-rule definitive of an authentic democratic order. Such reduction is observed to function through the disabling of the cognitive capacity of consumers and by disempowering the agency of workers such that coercion is misconceived as freely agreed contract. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an essay that discussed capitalism, democracy and rational individual behavior. Key behavioral assumption of neoclassical economics; Formation of habits and economic behavior; Dilemma of democracy; Viability of market and democratic institutions.

Explores the history of the theory of agricultural self-sufficiency. Evolution of bourgeois capitalist development in third world countries; Discussion on the theory of dependency; Explanation of the neoclassical economic principle of scale.

Consequentialist reasoning and neoclassical assumptions about perfectly competitive markets encourage business school faculty and students to overlook the role of ethics in a market system. In a perfectly competitive economy, self-interest suffices to bring about a desirable outcome. However, discrepancies between an economist's assumptions and the realities of a market economy establish a need for business ethics. This essay, written as a lecture for MBA students, first reviews Pareto optimality as an argument in favor of market allocations. It then uses the discrepancies between actual and hypothetical markets to derive a Rawlsian duty of civility. This neoclassical case for business ethics requires individuals to avoid exploiting the defects that are inevitable in any social structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the neoclassic economics maximization hypothesis. It is generally assumed by methodologists of economics that a fundamental idea of neoclassical economics is that utility and profit maximization form the basis for the formulation of its theories. Neoclassical economics has traditionally sought methodological guidance and justification from the theory of logical positivism but the criticisms leveled against the latter in the last decades have prompted the supporters of the former to seek methodological support from the instrumentalist and descriptive methodologies. Neoclassical economics and its posture as science serve a function similar to that of medieval theology and its pretense at truth. The contemporary market economies and their skewed sociological structures, in terms of property and capital ownership, seek intellectual justification. The most basic statement of the neoclassical theory is the postulate of rationality, which is expressible as a set of behavioral axioms. The most important of these axioms are those of reflexivity, completeness and transitivity.