openDemocracy and Politics in Spires (hosted by the universities of Oxford and Cambridge) publishes an e-book on building an economy that serves the common good. The collection of essays from around the globe explores a renewed interest in the republican tradition.
Republicans are often accused of being inconsistent, or even incoherent, in embracing free market policies that are incompatible with their own ideas about civic virtue. But is this accusation fair?
People at once both despise and desire the state, and unpicking the paradoxes within attitudes to the state is essential to understanding how to move the state forward.
The left must move from sharing spoils to shared control of the economy if they are to clear a path towards the future. We publish the afterword to the free e-book Democratic Wealth: Building a Citizens' Economy, published today by openDemocracy and Politics in Spires (universities of Oxford and C
Too narrow an interpretation of republicanism can rob us off many of the tools and insights we should now be employing. This is no time for elite paternalism.
Based on her keynote lecture at the 2013 ASEN conference at the LSE, Karma Nabulsi argues that republicanism needs to be understood as the tradition of revolutionary practice rooted in a fundamental commitment to the value of popular sovereignty.
Robert Jubb and Stuart White interview John McCormick about his 2011 book, Machiavellian Democracy, and ask what lessons can be drawn today about democratising power and embedding constitutional authority for the common citizen.
As wages stall or decline new methods must be found of creating a fair and democratic economy. Key to this must be a shift from redistributing income to redistributing assets - this is the big question the left should be addressing, and there's plenty of ideas out there.
Faced with spiralling social, economic and environmental problems, many people are turning to economic democracy for solutions. But what shape should this democracy take? And how can it establish an effective process for the distribution of wealth?
The Emilia Romagna region in northern Italy gives an insight into how a republican economy might look in practice. The whole infrastructure is significantly geared towards cooperative production without any sign of lost efficiency. There is plenty the UK should learn.
