Progress and the Invisible Hand - Softcover

'wide-ranging and thought-provoking...of absorbing interest not only to economists and philosophers but also to the man and woman in the street who is worried about the direction in which society is moving' John Gray, author of FALSE DAWN 'It is a good, wise book. It needs to be widely read.' CONTEMPORARY REVIEWS 'Persusasively argued and thought-provoking.' EURO BUSINESS 'Bronk's solutions of interventionalism, and of the re-insertion of moral and social values into the economic debate, provide a telling tract for our times.' OXFORD TODAY

What is 'progress'? In Richard Bronk's brilliant analytical study of this concept, he separates the material progress of a nation from the more problematic progress in human happiness and welfare. He wonders how a feel-bad factor can exist in a country with a steadily increasing GDP. Bronk then looks at other times and mind-sets (the Ancient World, the Early Christian, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment) to discover why their particular economic progress eventually failed, or (in the case of the Enlightenment) was ultimately successful. Among the conditions which he believes must be met before a belief in, and drive towards progress can result include: experience of positive change in one lifetime; knowledge of, but a critical relationship with, the past and faith in the power of human reason and skills to engineer and control change. PROGRESS AND THE INVISIBLE HAND questions many of the basic assumptions behind our headlong pursuit of progress, and will provoke and disquiet in equal measure.