LAUSR

late-industrial life. On the theoretical side, Vatn (chapter 2), who focuses on institutions and value, Jennings (chapter 3) who focuses on the construction and consequences of time perspectives, and Frigato and Santos-Arteaga (chapter 4) who highlight the importance of the purpose of economic processes for determining their cost-shifting potential, all give substantial attention to the question of how the organizational complexity of today’s globalized political economy shapes and is shaped by contemporary, and earlier, political economies of industrial capitalism. However, here too, the authors fall short of clearly stipulating how this might be addressed in practice, focusing instead mainly on describing in great detail how it is leading presently to ruin. In general, two themes appear consistently across the text: the importance of humane specification of economic purpose for avoiding the production of inhumane social costs, and the need to replace individual rationality with “cooperative rationalities,” as Vatn puts it, to specify economic purpose humanely in today’s globalized, liquid political economy. In light of these shortcomings and propositions, the conspicuous absence of all but one fleeting reference to the purpose-delimited analytical economics of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1971), whose flow-fund theory does indeed offer a way to conceptualize economic production without reference to capital, is both a disappointment and an opportunity. Bringing that work, also drafted in trenches, together with the positions elaborated here, would seem both a logical and potentially enormously fruitful way to advance the aim, so beautifully put by Ramazzotti at the start of the collection, “to establish a more humane society.”