Books
Please click on the following links to go to the description of an individual book. Alternatively, please scroll down the page to see descriptions of all the books.
Future Money: Breakdown
or Breakthrough?
2012. Green
Books, Totnes, 192pp.
My
latest book explains how
our money system is propelling us toward the self-destruction
of our species. It also shows clearly how our money system
operates and how it could be reformed so that it acts for the
benefit of people and society rather than the opposite, and
describes the obstacles that currently prevent that reform.
More information about the book can be found
on the Future
Money page.
Click on the button below to download a pdf copy of the book.
If you find the book interesting, please support the publishers Green Books by buying a printed version. You can do this through the Green Books website.
The
History of Money: From Its Origins to Our Time
Published as Une
Histoire de l'Argent: des origines à nos jours,
Paris 2007.
This 12,000 word 'Junior Histoire' from Autrement is about how money began, how it has evolved to the present day, what it has enabled humans to achieve, why so many people in the world today suffer from the way it works, how it may develop further, and how young people today might want it to develop.
Click on the button below to download a pdf copy of the original English version of the book.
Monetary
Reform: Making it Happen
With John Bunzl. International Simultaneous
Policy Organisation, paperback, 80 pp. ISPO "Making it Happen" Briefing
Series No 1. 2004.
Click on the button below to download a pdf copy of the book.
"A
brilliant treatment of a question which has never been so
urgent" - George Monbiot.
More comments can be found here.
Click on the button below to download a pdf copy.
Creating
New Money: A Monetary Reform for the Information Age
2000 (with Joseph Huber). New
Economics Foundation, paperback, 97 pages, £7.95.
"We
look forward to monetary reform moving to the centre stage
of public and policy debate" - Ed Mayo, then Director
of NEF.
The book was launched in the first Alternative Mansion House Speech - on Financial and Monetary Policies for an Enabling State - on 15th June 2000. For the text of the speech, click here.
Foreign editions: Japan (published by
Nihon Keizai Hyoronsha, 2001) and Germany (Geldschopfung in offentlicher Hand, published by Gauke, 2008).
Click on the button below to download a pdf copy.
The New Economics of Sustainable Development: A Briefing for Policy Makers
Written for the European Commission's Cellule de
Prospective (Forward Studies Unit), and published
in paperback, by Kogan Page, London, Editions Apogée,
Paris (as Changer
d'Économie: ou la Nouvelle Économie
du Developpement Durable), and The Office for Official
Publications of the European Communities, Luxembourg. 1999.
For
further background, click here.
Click on the button below to download a pdf copy of the 2005 text.
There
are two omissions from the 1999 printed version of
(1) information about relevant organisations which
is now outdated, and (2) my biographical details available
elsewhere on this website. In addition, the page numbering
differs from the 1999 printed version.
Foreign edition: France (Changer d'Economie, published by Apogee, 2000).
Transforming
Economic Life: A Millennial Challenge
Schumacher Briefing No 1, 77pp. 1998.
Written
for the Schumacher Society (UK) and published by Green Books, £5.
Copies
are available from www.greenbooks.co.uk.
Foreign editions: Japan (published by Nihon Keizai Hyoronsha, 1999), Portugal (Transformar a Economia, 2007) and Russia (published by the Land and Public Welfare Foundation, St. Petersburg, 1999 - click here for full publication details).
(Due to a bug, the text of the book doesn't appear in the Firefox browser. To view it, please either use another browser or download the pdf onto your computer.)
Beyond
The Dependency Culture: People, Power and Responsibility
Adamantine Press, 234pp. Foreword by Ronald Higgins.
Sixteen
papers and lectures dating from 1977 to 1996 on the need for
a new path of progress based on co-operative self-reliance
and not on the further growth of dependency. Topics include;
a conserving society, work, health, welfare, money, politics,
energy (including nuclear power), a post-modern worldview,
and a post-marxist strategy for change.
The Contents can be found here.
Click on the button below to download a pdf copy of the book.
Sharing Our Common Heritage: Resource Taxes and Green Dividends
Proceedings of an International Conference, held on 14th May 1998 by the Oxford Centre for the Environment, Ethics and Society, 74pp. 1998.
Contributions by Prof. David Marquand, Prof. Philippe van Parijs, Fred Harrison, Prof. Mason Gaffney, Alanna Hartzok, Dr.Tatiana Roskoshnaya, and James Robertson, who organised the conference and edited the proceedings. For further background, click here.
Click on the button below to download a pdf copy of the book.
Future
Wealth: A New Economics for the 21st Century
Cassell, London, 179 pages.
1990.
This
is one of my more important books. It provides a framework
of understanding for the new economic order which the world
clearly needs. An agenda for transition on the lines it put
forward for the 1990s is now (December 2005) more obviously
relevant than it was fifteen years ago.
Review comments at the time included the following.
"'A
New Economics for the 21st Century' is an exact description
of this very remarkable book" - The
Good Book Guide, 1990.
"It
could well be that Future Wealth will ultimately
be required reading for economics students, alongside
The Wealth of Nations and The General Theory of Employment,
Interest and Money" - Francis Kinsman, Management
Today, May 1990.
"With
Future Wealth as our guide, we can describe the framework
of the living economy... We can show how current
initiatives can be enabled and encouraged, and we
can show how that framework can be created out of
our present, rather warped version." Perry Walker,
New Economics, Summer 1990.
The list of Contents can
be found
here.
Foreign edition: Italy (Economia Compatibile, published by
Red Edizioni,
1993).
Click on the button below to download a pdf copy of the book.
Future
Work: Jobs, self-employment and leisure after the industrial
age
Temple Smith/Gower,
220pp, paperback. 1985.
"The
best book of its kind so far, packed with ideas and one cannot
but be affected by its enthusiasm and verve" - Prof.
Ray Pahl in the Times Literary Supplement, 14th
March 1986.
This
was one of the books I most enjoyed researching and writing.
I tried, but failed, to persuade the publisher we should call
it 'The Ownwork Revolution'. He thought that title would be
too far out to appeal to a mainstream readership. However,
if and when the book is republished, I shall insist on it!
Its
theme is that a possible future for work, and the one we should
seek to create, is its liberation. In the age of slavery and
the age of employment, most people have had to work for people
and organisations richer and more powerful than themselves.
But in the age of ownwork it will be accepted as normal that
most people will work independently for themselves and one
another, and the institutions of society will enable them to
do so instead of depending on employers for jobs.
The book is in four parts:
1. What Comes After the Employment Age?
2. Changing Perceptions of Work
3. The End of the Employment Empire
4. The Practicalities of the Transition
The
list of Contents can be found here.
Foreign edition: Japan (published by
Keiso Shobo, 1988).
Click on the button below to download a pdf copy of the book.
The
Sane Alternative
James Robertson, 156pp, paperback. 1983.
The
text can now be downloaded for free, together
with a new 2008 Preface, by clicking on the button below.
This
is the revised and expanded version of the original 1978 edition
- probably my best known book. The gold medal awarded in 2003
by the Pio Manzu Research
Centre is inscribed to "Creator of a Sane Alternative".
"The
best and most persuasive handbook I know to the 'alternative
society" - Michael Shanks in The Director.
"An
essential book.... compelling reading" -
Tom Hancock in Town and Country Planning.
"The
best futures books I've ever read.....People will read it,
keep it and thank you for introducing them to it" - Prof. James E. Moore, University of Texas.
"This
book is important. It seeks to get new ideas on the move" - Harford Thomas in The Guardian.
"The
most practical book on futures that I know" - Prof. John Morris, Manchester Business School.
"Comprehensively
considerate..... a very realistic future" - R. Buckminster Fuller.
"Indispensable.
A rare combination of important new theory with practical
guidance. An important map for the future of all industrial
countries" - Hazel Henderson, author of Beyond Globalization and other books, from the Foreword to the US edition.
Foreign editions: Chile [Spanish] (La Alternativa Sensata, published by Pedro di Girolamo, 1993), Germany (Die lebenswerte Aternative, published by Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1979), Indonesia (Alternatif Yang Seha, Yayasan Obor Indonesia, 1990) and Sweden (Det sunda alternativet, published by LiberForlag, 1981).
Click on the button below to download a pdf copy of the book.
Power, Money and Sex: Towards a New Social Balance
Marion Boyars Publishers, 149pp, paperback. 1976.
"A
most searching, radical, even revolutionary book" -
Harford Thomas in the Guardian, 12th August 1976.
Click on the button below to download a pdf copy of the book.
Profit
or People? The New Social Role of Money
Marion Boyars Publishers, 95pp, paperback. 1974.
"A
powerful cocktail of novel ideas which will leave the reader
either exhilarated or queasy" - Christopher Johnson
in the Financial Times, 20th February 1975.
This
short book, in Marion Boyars' Ideas in Progress series, arose
from my reflections after my few years working for the banks.
It
has six Chapters as follows: Breakdown or Breakthrough; Socially
Responsible Enterprise; Financially Responsible Government;
Honest Money; Money Science and Money Metaphysics; and Whose
Move?.
Its
final paragraph begins as follows: "To transform the money
system into a fair and efficient mechanism of collective choice,
a value system of society... must be pioneered by those of
us who can imagine what the new social role of money could
be and how it may be achieved."
Click on the button below to download a pdf copy of the book.
Reform
of British Central Government
By J.H. Robertson. Chatto & Windus/Charles
Knight, 226pp, hardback. 1971.
"His
book is of first-rate importance" - Prof. Max Beloff
in the Daily Telegraph, 22nd July 1972.
This,
my first book, was the outcome of my experiences in Whitehall.
It suggested that, in the words of Sir Robert Morant, one of
the great administrative reformers of the early 20th century,
the efforts of those attempting to modernise our system of
government in the late 1960s and early 1970s were:
"as
though a man had been seeking to build a substantial house
by working spasmodically on odd portions of the structure
on quite isolated plans, fashioning minute details of some
upper parts, when he has not set up, nor indeed even planned
out, the substructure which is their sole possible foundation
and stay."
In this book I was trying to set out, systematically and holistically - to use words unfamiliar to me then - how I thought the functions of government might be better organised as an intelligent whole.
I had learned that our institutionalised society, fragmented and dominated by specialist professions and interest groups each with its own separate 'territory', finds it almost impossible to deal sensibly with any situation as a whole. To this day, 'joined-up government' remains an elusive goal.
Click on the button below to download a pdf copy of the book.
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