Routledge Reflections on Commercial Life: An Anthology of Classic Texts from Plato to the Present

Reflections on Commercial Life, an anthology of writings, from the ancient Greeks to contemporary thinkers, provides students, scholars, and general readers an opportunity to develop a more self-conscious and critical relationship to commercial life. Selections are drawn from seminal works of high intellectual and literary quality. Through an inquiry into history, nature, and outcomes, this volume offers the opportunity to explore, as never before, alternatives to modern commercial life. Review "Patrick Murray's Reflections on Commercial Life is one of the most valuable books on my bookshelves devoted to business, business ethics, and economics. It is a densely-packed treasury of selections from the great thinkers of history on the topics of money, exchange, and commerce." -- Robert C. Solomon, University of Texas, Austin "[Patrick Murray] tells us that, although we live in a commercial society, we understand it as little as fish do water. In this remarkable book he investigates what the idea of such a society has meant to an extraordinary gathering including Plato and Aquinas, Veblen and Arendt, and of course Adam Smith and Marx." -- Robert Heilbroner, The New School for Social Research "... the carefully selected pieces from the masterworks of economic thinking, supported with concise bibliographies, make Reflections on Commercial Life a worthy addition to private libraries." -- Business Library Review "... very useful for students interested in the intersection of economic and political theory. The selections have been chosen judiciously and cover the whole Western tradition from Plato to Baudrillard." -- Telos About the Author Patrick Murray is Chair of the Philosophy Department at Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska, and the author of Marx's Theory of Scientific Knowledge (1988).