Democracy and Exchange

Schumpeter, Galbraith, T.H. Marshall, Titmuss and Adam Smith

David Reisman, Professor Emeritus of Economics, University of Surrey, UK and Senior Associate, Centre for Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Democracy is the rule of the people. Exchange is supply and demand. Individualism, agreement, tolerance and choice are the underlying values that make possible the productive collaboration of the market and the state. This book assesses the theories of democracy and exchange of five interdisciplinary thinkers who tried to unite political and economic reasoning into a single theory of moderation and pragmatic management.

‘This is a remarkable book. The chapters on Schumpeter and Marshall alone are worth the price and effort.’
– Journal of the History of Economic Thought

‘This is a remarkable book. The chapters on Schumpeter and Marshall alone are worth the price and effort.’
– Charles R. McCann, Jr., Journal of the History of Economic Thought

‘David Reisman has taken the impressive task to examine the relationship between democracy and exchange. He assesses the theories of the two pillars of political economy of five main figures in the history of economic thought (Schumpeter, Smith, Titmuss, T.H. Marshall and Galbraith). He does so in a very profound way providing a novel interpretation of the concepts of democracy and exchange.’
– European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy

‘David Reisman has written over a dozen books on important figures in political economy and has brought his subjects and their ideas to life as have few other authors. Now Reisman the historian of economic thought has become Reisman the political economic theorist. He puts to good use the insights of the important figures and of their critics to produce nothing less than the identification of the elements, problems, explanatory chains of reasoning, solutions, and critiques of solutions that issue forth from the transcendent problem of modern political economy: the achievement of democracy, somehow defined, in a world of unequal achievement and power, governance as encompassing more than government, and the manufacture of belief and manipulation of sentiment, with perceptivity and subtlety. It is a book I wish I had written.’
——沃伦·j·塞缪尔,密歇根州University, US