RadicalxChange: An Academic Agenda

Radical Markets was, for me, less an academic or even popular book than attempt to launch a social movement. Its success in doing so makes the most fruitful academic response likely somewhat different than for other books. In this piece I discuss some of the most productive avenues I see for general academic development around the growing RadicalxChange movement and highlight several specific problems to which I think economic, legal and other academics could fruitfully contribute. Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society is an unusual book in many senses. An academic conference on such an unusual book will itself be a bit odd, even awkward. To embrace rather than shy away from this, I am offering an unusual response to the excellent contributions to the symposium. Rather than respond directly to the pieces, I am instead taking the opportunity to layout some of the ways in which the book and the response to it have been unusual and use this to highlight what I see as some of the most productive channels for academics interested in engaging with and building on the material to do so. My hope is that these thoughts can be useful in helping to build the growing Ideas and Research track of the RadicalxChange movement that has emerged in response to the book. I have every reason to believe that Eric’s perspective on and goals for the book where quite different from mine, so in what I write I speak for myself (and perhaps, to some extent, for the RadicalxChange movement) alone