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The paper aims to extend deliberation on legal and political aspects of debate over globalisation versus cosmopolitanism into the field of jurisprudence – philosophy of law. It gives particular attention to questions of the legitimacy of international law and emerging forms of economic governance for business enterprises, soft law, rule of law, accountability and human rights.

In terms of research method, the paper proceeds from normative, as opposed to empirical studies. The paper develops arguments connected with cosmopolitan jurisprudence, a value-based frame of reference for corporate social responsibility. In legal and moral philosophy, normative statements derive from arguments concerning what states of affairs ought to be, how they are to be valued, which things and actions are good or bad. Normative claims contrast with positive (descriptive or explanatory) claims with respect to types of theories, beliefs or propositions. Value is both independent of fact and, at the same time, of an objective nature.

A cosmopolitan jurisprudence frame of reference for economic governance treats human communities as interdependent and takes seriously the human rights obligations and ethical and legal responsibilities of international business enterprises presupposed by international rule of law. In contrast to globalisation jurisprudence, the cosmopolitan philosophy of international law seeks justificatory ground, not only exclusively for traditional forms of centralised governmental authority but also for decentralised, polycentric, private and hybrid public–private forms of authority.

The paper demonstrates the insufficiency of just describing, as political science and economics does, the emergence of new arrangements for global economic governance. As well, it is insufficient for management theory to propose instrumental strategies for managing various stakeholder interests at play in emerging forms of governance. Efforts of empirical researchers in documenting, classifying and providing empirical analysis of power shifts do not provide moral justifications or groundings of legitimacy from human rights and rule of law. The paper shows how a cosmopolitan jurisprudence standpoint is a fertile theoretical source for addressing such justificatory issues.

In the context of a rapidly globalising economy, the justification of responsible business conduct across borders and cultures is more and more becoming a pressing practical concern. Increasingly, private actors are operating in authoritative positions, fulfilling governing functions once perceived to be the exclusive domain of nation-states.

The paper suggests that more important than focusing exclusively on descriptive, coercive and instrumental features of law, and seeking some overarching sanctions system that would necessitate pledging allegiance to a global super-sovereign, is cultivating social awareness of the importance of non-instrumental internal dispositions of actors to respect the normative obligatory nature of norms. The intrinsic value of rule of law and human rights provides a vital intellectual pathway for surmounting legitimacy gaps in global economic governance.

The paper breaks new ground by developing a cosmopolitan jurisprudence as an alternative to globalisation jurisprudence. This new articulation of cosmopolitan jurisprudence serves to provide analysis of philosophical justifications for emerging soft law syndicates that purport to establish obligations for business enterprises and other participants towards soft law regimes touching upon sustainability and human rights responsibilities.

An influential strand of human rights theory explains human rights through appeal to their function. Such ‘function’ theories highlight the role human rights play in international practice and discourse as standards for appropriate state treatment of individuals. But standards in what sense? Standards to be promoted and encouraged through public critique, bilateral pressure, institutional censure or legal culpability? Or standards to be protected and defended through all necessary means? I argue that function theorists conflate (what states themselves recognize as) the important distinctions between these standards. Worse still, many function theorists argue that a major – even definitive – role of human rights involves demarcating permissibility conditions for humanitarian intervention. I argue that this claim gravely mischaracterizes international practice and discourse – in particular it fails to recognize the independent significance of other functional norms operating within the global context. The theorists correctly perceive that we have powerful reasons for wanting this role (of threshold conditions for military intervention) fulfilled, but by mistaking the norms that in fact fulfil it, they distort the actual function of human rights.

The transformations in the existing forms of governmentality and power regimes are deeply rooted within the political economy of advanced neoliberalism, having profound implications in the governance matrix. The new rationalities and instrumentalities of governance involve ‘governing without government’ (Rhodes, 1996) following the delegitimisation and deconstruction of the Keynesian Welfare State and the gradual enactment of what Jessop (2002) calls the Schumpeterian Competition State. This chapter throws open the play field for competing standpoints on governing the mega corporates. Various theorists consider that there is emptiness within the existing global regulatory armoury concerning the operational activities of TNCs. The convolution of ‘steering’ in this poly-centred, globalised societies with its innate uncertainty makes it tricky to keep an eye on the fix of ‘who actually steers whom’ and ‘with what means’. There also appears to be huge disinclination to spot systemic technical description of the evolving modern institutional structure of economic regulation in a composite and practical manner. Thus, the complexity of international issues, their overlapping nature and the turmoil within the arena in which they surface defy tidy theorizing about effective supervision.

This brings in the wider questions dealt with in the chapter – Is globalisation then a product of material conditions of fundamental technical and economic change or is it collective construct of an artifact of the means we have preferred to arrange political and economic activity? The new reflexive, self-regulatory and horizontal spaces of governance are getting modelled following the logic of competitive market relations whereby multiple formally equal actors (acting or aspiring to act as sources of authority) consult, trade and compete over the deployment of various instruments of authority both intrinsically and in their relations with each other (Shamir, 2008). The chapter also looks into these messy and fluid intersections to situate the key actors at the heart of processes of ‘rearticulation’ and ‘recalibration’ of different modes of governance which operates through a somewhat fuzzy amalgamation of the terrain by corporates, state hierarchy and networks all calibrating and competing to pull off the finest probable’s in metagovernance landscape. Unambiguously, this chapter seeks to elaborate on an institutional-discursive conceptualization of governance while stitching in and out of the complex terrain a weave of governances for modern leviathan – the global corporates.

Civilisation is not possible unless aggression can be brought under control. It is armed aggression – aggression by governments and by groups that hope to become governments – that most strongly threatens human survival. About this, Freud’s theorizing most strongly captures the imagination. Professor O’Brien begins with a persuasive account of this theory, brings out its importance, and suggests lines of exploration. There are four problems with Freudian explanation: Freud’s theories explain too much and therefore explain nothing; the logic of claims about unconscious motives poses difficulties; Freud uses tautologies as explanations; Freud stretches concepts like that of desire. This paper explores these problems and then takes up O’Brien’s other suggestive analyses.

While the economic literature mostly tackled discrimination looking at labour costs, this work focuses on its relation to labour productivity, arguing that discrimination may worsen the performance of female employees. In this view, it represents a source of allocative inefficiency, which contributes to reducing output.

Female discrimination is both a social and an economic problem. In social terms, consolidated gender stereotypes impose constraints on women’s behaviour, worsening their overall well-being. In economic terms, women face generally worse labour market conditions. Using long-run Italian data spanning from 1861 to 2009, the authors propose a novel measure of female discrimination based on the observed frequency of discriminating epithets. Following social capital theory, the authors distinguish between structural and voluntary discrimination, and use Data Envelopment Analysis for time series data to assess the extent of inefficiency that each component of discrimination induces in the production process.

The results draw the trajectory of female discrimination in Italy and provide evidence in favour of the idea that female discrimination reduces productive efficiency. In particular, the structural component of female discrimination, although less sizeable than the voluntary component, plays a major role, especially in recent years, where more stringent beauty standards fuel looks-based discrimination.

The contribution of this work is twofold. First, based on contributions from social sciences different from economics, it proposes a novel theoretical framework that explores the effect of discriminatory language on labour productivity. Second, it introduces a novel and direct measure of female discrimination at the country level, based on the bidirectional link between language and culture. The indicator is easily understood by policymakers and may be used to evaluate the effectiveness of anti-discrimination policies.

A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balance economics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary to man′s finding the good life and society enduring as a civilized instrumentality. Looks for authority to great men of the past and to today′s moral philosopher: man is an ethical animal. The 13 essays are: 1. Evolutionary Economics: The End of It All? which challenges the view that Darwinism destroyed belief in a universe of purpose and design; 2. Schmoller′s Political Economy: Its Psychic, Moral and Legal Foundations, which centres on the belief that time‐honoured ethical values prevail in an economy formed by ties of common sentiment, ideas, customs and laws; 3. Adam Smith by Gustav von Schmoller – Schmoller rejects Smith′s natural law and sees him as simply spreading the message of Calvinism; 4. Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Socialist – Karl Marx, Communist: A Comparison; 5. Marxism and the Instauration of Man, which raises the question for Marx: is the flowering of the new man in Communist society the ultimate end to the dialectical movement of history?; 6. Ethical Progress and Economic Growth in Western Civilization; 7. Ethical Principles in American Society: An Appraisal; 8. The Ugent Need for a Consensus on Moral Values, which focuses on the real dangers inherent in there being no consensus on moral values; 9. Human Resources and the Good Society – man is not to be treated as an economic resource; man′s moral and material wellbeing is the goal; 10. The Social Economist on the Modern Dilemma: Ethical Dwarfs and Nuclear Giants, which argues that it is imperative to distinguish good from evil and to act accordingly: existentialism, situation ethics and evolutionary ethics savour of nihilism; 11. Ethical Principles: The Economist′s Quandary, which is the difficulty of balancing the claims of disinterested science and of the urge to better the human condition; 12. The Role of Government in the Advancement of Cultural Values, which discusses censorship and the funding of art against the background of the US Helms Amendment; 13. Man at the Crossroads draws earlier themes together; the author makes the case for rejecting determinism and the “operant conditioning” of the Skinner school in favour of the moral progress of autonomous man through adherence to traditional ethical values.

Nobody concerned with political economy can neglect the history of economic doctrines. Structural changes in the economy and society influence economic thinking and, conversely, innovative thought structures and attitudes have almost always forced economic institutions and modes of behaviour to adjust. We learn from the history of economic doctrines how a particular theory emerged and whether, and in which environment, it could take root. We can see how a school evolves out of a common methodological perception and similar techniques of analysis, and how it has to establish itself. The interaction between unresolved problems on the one hand, and the search for better solutions or explanations on the other, leads to a change in paradigma and to the formation of new lines of reasoning. As long as the real world is subject to progress and change scientific search for explanation must out of necessity continue.

The equation of unified knowledge says that S = f (A,P) which means that the practical solution to a given problem is a function of the existing, empirical, actual realities and the future, potential, best possible conditions of general stable equilibrium which both pure and practical reason, exhaustive in the Kantian sense, show as being within the realm of potential realities beyond any doubt. The first classical revolution in economic thinking, included in factor “P” of the equation, conceived the economic and financial problems in terms of a model of ideal conditions of stable equilibrium but neglected the full consideration of the existing, actual conditions. That is the main reason why, in the end, it failed. The second modern revolution, included in factor “A” of the equation, conceived the economic and financial problems in terms of the existing, actual conditions, usually in disequilibrium or unstable equilibrium (in case of stagnation) and neglected the sense of right direction expressed in factor “P” or the realization of general, stable equilibrium. That is the main reason why the modern revolution failed in the past and is failing in front of our eyes in the present. The equation of unified knowledge, perceived as a sui generis synthesis between classical and modern thinking has been applied rigorously and systematically in writing the enclosed American‐British economic, monetary, financial and social stabilization plans. In the final analysis, a new economic philosophy, based on a synthesis between classical and modern thinking, called here the new economics of unified knowledge, is applied to solve the malaise of the twentieth century which resulted from a confusion between thinking in terms of stable equilibrium on the one hand and disequilibrium or unstable equilibrium on the other.

Attempts to prove, in this second chapter of the author’s monograph, that with a new research programme, it is possible to build a methodological bridge between economics and all other natural sciences and the scientists should address this challenge. Reviews basic principles that govern nature, including Einstein’s findings along with such luminaries as Copernicus, Newton, Galileo and Jeans. Concludes that the future is safe, as a new generation of scientists is now emerging in the East and the West, and that the new methodology should provide enough space for new roads, ideas and interpretations, which may occur in the future. Closes by saying a new spirit should be initiated in economics and transplanted into natural sciences.