14) Roberto Mangabeira Unger: Free Trade Reimagined

O mais recente livro de Roberto Mangabeira Unger:
Free Trade Reimagined: The World Division of Labor and the Method of Economics
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007)

Apresentação do autor:
This book will be published by Princeton University Press in October 2007. It works out the economic implications, as well as the implications for economics, of the social theory developed in my Politics books and of the philosophical program advanced in "The Self Awakened." It represents the counterpart in political economy to the arguments of "What Should Legal Analysis Become?" about law. I see it as one more move in a campaign to free social thought from its embrace of superstition and its subservience to fate.

The book takes as its point of departure a discussion of the doctrine of free trade on the basis of comparative advantage -- the most characteristic teaching of economics. A substantive theme in the work is the way in which the activities we have learned how to repeat (and thus to express in formulas, embodied in machines) are best related to the activities we do not yet know how to repeat.
Here is a form of the division of labor -- in the workplace or in the world as a whole -- contrasting to Adam Smith's pin factory and to Henry Ford's assembly line. A methodological theme is the development of a practice of economics supporting a more intimate bond among analysis, explanation, and proposal than the economics inaugurated by the marginalism of the late nineteenth century allows.

Índice do livro:
FREE TRADE REIMAGINED: The World Division of Labor and the Method of Economics
Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Themes and scope of this book 2
Chapter One - Troubles: The Enigmas of Free Trade, Familiar problems, disturbing solutions, 8
The history of free trade and protection: subversive lessons, 16
The authority of free trade doctrine: reasons amounting to objections, 20

Chapter Two - Troubles: The Incompleteness of Comparative Advantage, 26
The doctrine of comparative advantage, 26
Incompleteness: indeterminacy resulting from failure to justify unique assignments of comparative advantage, 29
Incompleteness: confusion produced by uncertainty about the limits of our power to shape comparative advantage, 37
Incompleteness: embarrassment in the assumption of the division of the world into sovereign states, 45
Beyond incompleteness: the sham similarity between post-marginalist economics and physics, 52
Condemned to eternal infancy: implications of the method inaugurated by marginalism, 57
A note relating ideas in this book to the dominant tradition of thinking about comparative advantage, 65

Chapter Three - Ideas, 77
In search of a point of view, 77
Specialization and discovery: when competition inhibits self-transformation, 77
Politics over economics: when restraints on trade imply no surrender to special interests or costly dogmas, 81
Order and revision: when free trade strengthens the capacity for self-transformation, 87
Alternative free trade, alternative globalizations: the market liberated from the doctrine of the market, 90
The division of labor reimagined and remade: from the pin factory to the factory of innovation, 95
A central conception: mind against context, 101

Chapter Four - Theses, 111
Nature of these theses, 111
The thesis of relative advantage, 111
The thesis of politics over economics, 139
The thesis of self-revision, 152

Chapter Five - Proposals, 167
From an analysis to a program, 167
The world trade regime and its reconstruction, 168
Free trade reformed: the reconciliation of alternatives, 180
Free trade reformed: experimenting with the forms of the market economy, 186
Free trade reformed: free movement of things and money chastened, free movement of people and ideas enhanced, 194
Free trade reformed: from wage slavery to free labor, 199
THE TROUBLES OF FREE TRADE AND THE OPPORTUNITIES OF ECONOMICS, 214