The Romantic Economist

Richard Bronk spent the first seventeen years of his career working in the City of London, where he gained a wide expertise in international economics, business, and politics. He is now a writer and part-time academic, and a Visiting Senior Fellow in the European Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science. For longer list of reviews for The Romantic Economist and recent articles by Richard Bronk on the role of imagination in economics, see: https://imaginationineconomics.com.

• Preface; Acknowledgements; 1. Preface to The Romantic Economist; Part I. The Prelude: The Romantic Economist and the History of Ideas: 2. The great divide; 3. Debates within political economy; 4. Lessons from Romanticism; Part II. Fragments of Unity: Romantic Economics in Practice: 5. Using organic metaphors in economics; 6. Economics and the nation state; 7. Incommensurable values; 8. Imagination and creativity in markets; 9. Homo romanticus and other homines; 10. Imagination and perspective in economics; 11. The Romantic economist: conclusion.

'The Romantic Economist is a miracle, combining sophisticated economics with, of all things, sophisticated literary criticism - in aid of the economics. An economics that recognized our Wordsworthian selves, Richard Bronk argues in a lucid and learned style, would do much better at the analysis of getting and spending. The world is too much with us if we do not have a humanistic science of economics. Bronk is among the handful of modern students of the economy who sees this clear. Literary folk can learn from Bronk about the dismal science. But it is the tribe of the Econ who need him most. Fortunately they will find the needful assignment here a delight.' Deirdre McCloskey, author of The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (2006)