Offering a diverse set of contributions to current social contracting research, this text illustrates how social contracts necessarily underlie and facilitate all forms of capitalist production and exchange.

Money is usually understood as a valuable object, the value of which is attributed to it by its users and which other users recognize. It serves to link disparate institutions, providing a disguised whole and prime tool for the “invisible hand” of the market. This book offers an interpretation of money as a social institution. Money provides the link between the household and the firm, the worker and his product, making that very division seem natural and money as imminently practical. Money as a Social Institution begins in the medieval period and traces the evolution of money alongside consequent implications for the changing models of the corporation and the state. This is then followed with double-entry accounting as a tool of long-distance merchants and bankers, then the monitoring of the process of production by professional corporate managers. Davis provides a framework of analysis for examining money historically, beyond the operation of those particular institutions, which includes the possibility of conceptualizing and organizing the world differently. This volume is of great importance to academics and students who are interested in economic history and history of economic thought, as well as international political economics and critique of political economy.

Proceeding from the insight that markets and rational economic action perform best if embedded in culturally and politically generated opportunities and constraints, Streeck offers a rationale for positive political intervention in post-socialist capitalist market economies.

In this forthright challenge to relativist economic recipes for growth and culturalist-incrementalist views in institutional economics, Heller draws on Weber, Schumpeter, and Hayek to present a new universalistic vision of capitalism's depersonalized institutions as well as the ideological policies needed during constructed capitalist transitions.

This book presents a radical institutional approach to the analysis of capitalism. The author discusses a wide range of topics and puts forward a number of arguments that expose common ground in both neoclassical and Marxist orthodoxies.

Applying the new economics of organisation and relational theories of the firm to the problem of understanding cross-national variation in the political economy, this volume elaborates a new understanding of the institutional differences that characterise the 'varieties of capitalism' worldwide.

The Fundamental Institutions of Capitalism presents a radical institutional approach to the analysis of capitalism. Ernesto Screpanti puts forward a number of provocative arguments that expose common ground in both neoclassical and Marxist orthodoxies. It will appeal to a broad audience of social scientists including advanced students and professio

For the first time in history, the globe is dominated by one economic system. Capitalism prevails because it delivers prosperity and meets desires for autonomy. But it also is unstable and morally defective. Surveying the varieties and futures of capitalism, Branko Milanovic offers creative solutions to improve a system that isn’t going anywhere.