Springer Economics as a Social Science: Civil Society and Its Money (Springer Studies in Alternative Economics)

This book explores the separation of economics from the social sciences. Raimund Dietz attributes this development to the adoption of a too narrow, instrumentalist perspective and demonstrates how close the mainstream is to the idea of a socialist planned economy, despite all its liberal phraseology. The book attempts to comprehensively reconstruct economics as catallactics, explicitly including and assigning a central role to liberal forms of socialization, such as exchange and money – an approach that, it argues, is the only way to overcome the methodological deficits of the mainstream. It allows monetary theory to be integrated into economic theory. Further, the book shows that modern societies have no choice but to organize themselves as capitalist market economies. For good economic reasons, money has lost its physical value over the course of time and is now merely symbolic. As a result, the importance of the state has also grown. The author proposes that the power to create money should be consistently placed in the hands of the central bank. The book offers a transformative perspective that addresses the urgent need for sustainable resource management worldwide. It invites social scientists, policymakers, and especially economists to rethink economics and pursue a holistic approach to a more sustainable future.