A Political Economy of Contemporary Capitalism and its Crisis

1The parasitic absentee owner in the Keynes–Veblen–Proudhon tradition

1 Introduction

This chapter is an introduction to the main theme of this book. It discusses how the workings of finance are treated within the non-Marxist heterodox tradition of Keynes, Veblen and Proudhon. It returns to the original sources in order to sketch the general outline of their analytical problematic.

The idea of “the absentee owner who appropriates income from the productive industrial community in the form of rent based on the legal condition of private property” summarizes the basic insight that is common to the above-mentioned interventions. This insight is also widely accepted in contemporary discussions of the nature of capitalism that do not explicitly refer ...