The Wealth of Nations

Misha Glenny and guests discuss cybernetics – the field of study which gave us the prefix ‘cyber’ and helped lay the foundations for the information age. After the Second World War, cybernetics emerged as the study of communication, feedback, and control in both animals and machi ...  Show more

Misha Glenny and guests discuss how, after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833, sugar planters recruited workers from India to replace or compete with their formerly enslaved labourers. Over the next 90 years, more than a million people in India travelled under ...  Show more

Speaker(s): Jesse Norman MP | At a time when economics and politics are both increasingly polarized between left and right, this book, Adam Smith: What He Thought, and Why it Matters, which Jesse Norman will discuss at this event, returns to intellectual first principles to recre ...  Show more

Marxian economics, rooted in Karl Marx’s 19th-century critique of capitalism, analyzes economies through class struggle and historical materialism. Developed in Das Kapital (1867) and The Communist Manifesto (1848, with Engels), it views economic systems as evolving through contr ...  Show more

Father of free market economics, Adam Smith was one of many great philosophers of the 18th century Enlightenment period. His philosophies helped change the economy, putting an end to the long-standing feudal system. But outside of his well-known works, such as The Wealth of Natio ...  Show more

Todd McGowan forges a new theory of capitalism as a system based on the production of more than what we need: pure excess. He argues that the promise of more—more wealth, more enjoyment, more opportunity, without requiring any sacrifice—is the essence of capitalism. Previous soci ...  Show more