Christopher Holmes

In the long-running debate about whether tobacco-smoking is a habit or an addiction, this book is surely the last word. Here, the notion that it's a drug addiction is systematically torn apart, and smoking is emphatically re-defined as a Compulsive Habit, which hypnotherapy can shut down. Cravings are proven to be unrelated to nicotine, and Nicotine Replacement is denounced as a bogus therapy. This lively and irreverent book will be a delight to readers who have issues with the pharmaceutical industry and the medical establishment. This therapist has attitude!

Nicotine: The Drug That Never Was Volume 1: The Biggest Medical Mistake of the 20th Century

Gareth Dale

Maria Markantonatou

This book offers a comprehensive introduction to Karl Polanyi's work by examining the key themes that run throughout his work. Each chapter introduces the relevant aspects of Polanyi's writings and highlights the connections that Polanyi has with contemporary issues and debates.

Exploring the Thought of Karl Polanyi

The rise of populism across Europe and the US – first in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis and then in the shape of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Brexit vote in 2016 – are indicative of a seismic shift in the terrain of economic ideas in public discourse. Settled liberal norms concerning ever-increasing international market expansion, and the political integration required to sustain it, have been decisively upset by political forces that, whilst once on the fringes, now dominate economic debate. How might we make sense of this ideological breakdown and what might we hope for next? This book turns to the work of Karl Polanyi for answers, developing the expansive, historicised approach to political economy that Polanyi pioneered. Holmes provides a wide-ranging history of economic ideas read in terms of a series of hopeful theoretical visions of order, in which political, social and ecological contradictions could be transcended in one way or another. Through this, the book demonstrates that the failing utopian visions of pre-2008 economic orthodoxy, which have formed the backdrop to the rise of populism today, are only the latest in a series that stretches across economic thought in Western modernity as a whole. This book will interest students and scholars of IPE, political science, sociology, anthropology, law and history.

Vision and contradiction in the history of economic ideas

Polanyi in times of populism

This book has everything: Ghosts, goldfish, pirates, a cat with criminal tendencies, UFOs, a burglar, an awful lot of stuff about death and the police, bats, badgers... and it’s all very, very silly. What more could you ask for in a book? But... who said YOU could read it? Eh? Hm?

Christopher Holmes

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