Rationale for change and reform: Britain is one of the most centralized democracies in the OECD. Resource allocation decisions are centralized in London, and instructions are handed down ‘vertically’ to the devolved nations and English regions. For over five decades differences in income and wealth between London and the South East on the one hand,...Read More

Have I seen this musical before? No, that is not a Hamilton moment, but the musical is based on Ron Chernow’s excellent biography of one of America’s founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton. We used the term several times in our Federal Central Banks. A Comparison of the US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank (2018)....Read More

We are being bombarded with statistics, wave-like attacks. The debt statistics of the great financial crash starting in 2008, then the awakening interest in inequality, and now the dreadful stats of Covid-19, which are instigating another wave of debt and expenditure statistics. If statistics could put the world to rights, allowing what Condorcet called “the sweet despotism...Read More

As different countries take measures to combat the Covid-19 pandemic, much is being revealed about the nature of different forms of society. In some it is revealed as strong, in others weak, and in others a fatalism about the lack of society. As sociologists we do not lack analyses and approaches to understanding and explaining...Read More

Professor Sam Whimster, Deputy Director of the Global Policy Institute and Editor of Max Weber Studies, has written a letter for the FT, stressing that the incoming president of the European Central Bank, Ms Christine Lagarde, should “not get drawn into narrow institutional debates”, but instead “use her overview experience to demand changes in the...Read More

In this paper (given at a GPI seminar “The Challenge of Populism to Representative and Federal Democracy”, 18 July 2019) I make three main arguments. On Populism I tend to the analysis put forward by Isaiah Berlin, among others, which refers back to ideas of agrarian fellowship and community. Most particularly to pre-revolutionary Russian peasantry...Read More

This paper draws attention to Max Weber’s commitment to federal democracy in a series of newspaper articles in 1917, which he wrote in the face of Germany’s military dictatorship.  He argued for the division of executive, administrative and political functions between the Reich and the separate German states, not unlike the constitution of today’s German...Read More

“It is as hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven as a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.” This was one of the pictorial worms inserted in our minds by an earnest and persuasive Sunday School teacher. It was a fantastical image that I turned over in my...Read More

Weber’s writings on economic history, economic policy, and schools of economics, and his teaching of economics are outlined. His engagement with, and expertise in economics, are revealed to be more extensive than is generally appreciated. The full potential of his major work Economy and Society has yet to be exploited, and this requires a clearer...Read More

Federal Central Banks is a unique study that critically examines the role and impact of central banks in federal and confederal political systems. It conducts a detailed examination of the history, design and operation of central banking in the United States and in the European Union. The contradiction between the centralizing features of banking and...Read More