Product Description: The book analyses intersections between gender and diversity through cross-national studies of European public spheres. The approach confronts research on European democracy and the public sphere with gender and diversity research and reflections about European equality and diversity issues are based on new research from a large-scale EU project...read more

Product Description: While globalization affects the sovereignty of every nation-state, European countries face special challenges due to the emergence of the European Union. The State of Europe explores the transformation of ideas of statehood in light of the EU’s continued development, including rapidly changing notions of democracy, representation, and citizenship alongside major shifts in economic regulation...read more

economic modelling and thought. Part three presents two case studies as examples of deceptive autonomy and shows the impact of this deception on the situation of women from the viewpoint of cultural studies and social anthropology. Part four relates methodological reflections on feminist and mainstream economics to the theme of the book. The first part of this book is devoted to a reconsideration of Adam Smith as a starting point for feminist perspectives on exchange. Drawing on Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments Caroline Gerschlager sets the stage for expanding the economic concept of exchange. She analyses and develops Smith's insight that deception is inevitable in the social setting. Smith's system of sympathy, which Gerschlager analyses as a system of exchange, i.e. exchange is conceived in terms of changing places in the imagination, is compared with exchange as conceived by the neoclassical approach. Her analysis reveals that these approaches arrive at contrasting results with regard to deception. Whereas in the former deception is vital to an understanding of exchange, the latter regards deception as an inefficiency, hindering exchange and ultimately making it impossible. Gerschlager points out that a certain degree of deception is inevitable, and that living in society therefore also amounts to "deceiving and being deceived". (view table of contents)