An Economics of Utopia

What is to be our new social vision following the collapse of communism and the emerging failure of the free-market dream and of the underlying mainstream economic paradigms? This book addresses this question through a wide-ranging critique of Utopian traditions and economic theory. Utopia, examined through key classical and feminist literary texts and and Karl Mannheim, is seen as a discourse on the transcendence of exploitation. Exploitation, on the other hand, is fundamental to mainstream economic theory, as traced through an analysis of the conception of human behaviour and "perpetual scarcity" in economic theory, drawing particularly on the work of Andre-Gorz, Marcel Mauss, Mark Lutz and Kenneth Lux, and Jurgen Habermas. "An Economics of Utopia" offers a "Utopian" approach to economic theory and practice that substitutes a concept of "efficiency" concerned with participatory rights ub decision-making processes, rather than the effective end use of resources. The practicality of this book is explored through the illustration of three applications to participatory research techniques, alternative economic indicators, and democratic pricing.