The Economic Role of the State

The Economic Role of the State explores and explicates the fundamental principles of a government in liberal society that are deeper than demand and supply or any other theories of economics. These principles are philosophical and anthropological in nature, concerning what humans are and what human lives are about, both individually and socially. Much of economics has lost vital connections with important realities of economic life; namely, that economics are but a portion of the life of man, that man is more than the sum of his production and consumption, and that the affairs of the human family are subject to forces more elemental than those of supply and demand. As J. Daniel Hammond, Ph.D., succinctly states in his Introduction to this new edition: “What is needed today for all of us, economists, students of economics, and educated adults, is a return to a former understanding of man and the role of the state. It is this return that William Aylott Orton provides.”