Introduction: the counter-revolution of neoliberalism -- Foucault and beyond -- The building of economics as a science -- The building of individuals as rational agents -- Turning the world into a firm -- Postscript: a new ethics for a new liberalism? -- Index

In contemporary non-mainstream economic debate, it is widely thought that the functioning of a market economy needs a set of rules (i.e. institutions) which bind agents in their behaviour, allowing efficient outcomes. This idea is contrary to the General Equilibrium Model (GEM) where markets are...

Preface and acknowledgments -- Ethics and economics -- Introduction -- Eudaimonia : the ancients and the good life -- The impact of the ancients -- Conceptions of rationality: thin, thick, and ancient -- Ethics and public policy -- The problem of pathological consumption -- Economics, ethics and...

John Locke, utilitarian ethics and the moral sense -- Lord Shaftesbury, utilitarian ethics and the moral sense -- Two Shaftesbury critics: Bernard Mandeville and John Brown -- Francis Hutcheson and the Hutcheson-Locke relation -- David Hume, utilitarian ethics, the moral sense and distributive...