The Stakes of Regulation: Perspectives on Bread, Politics and Political Economy Forty Years Later

Extract

The Stakes of Regulation is conceived as a companion volume to republication of Kaplan’s Bread, Politics and Political Economy on the occasion of its fortieth anniversary. Readers who think Kaplan produced his own festschrift are quickly disabused. Kaplan wants what no adulating festschrift could give him: ‘frank vigorous exchange, not subject to the moral censure of a subterranean collective superego, proof that certain forms of regulation can be deleterious’. Furthermore, he states: ‘I consider that there is a deficit of critical debate in this age of winsome uptalk and political correctness; I think that this reluctance to engage is impoverishing’. And so Kaplan starts his own frank and vigorous debate that he sustains over a good 400 pages. The rationale behind this is his deep conviction of the contemporary relevance of his chosen subject: ‘the bristling tension between liberty and equality, and the debate over the necessity, legitimacy and character of regulation’. The Stakes is a political book with a political agenda: the work is published as part of the Anthem Other Canon Economics or ‘reality economics’ series which conceives of itself in explicit opposition to a neoclassical economic ‘science’ based on axiomatic and universal models. Kaplan’s work is meant as a contribution to the very struggle it studies, the ‘long battle over social and political legitimacy and justice that continues today’.