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Volume 15
Studies in Social Analysis
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Beyond the Social Contract
An Anthropology of Tax
Edited by Nicolette Makovicky and Robin Smith
Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUB Made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Berghahn Open Anthro, in partnership with Libraria.
163 pages, bibliog., index
ISBN 978-1-80539-040-4 $145.00/£107.00 / Hb / Published (August 2023)
ISBN 978-1-80539-042-8 $19.95/£15.95 / Pb / Published (August 2023)
Description
Tax and taxation are conventionally understood as the embodiment of social contract. This ground-breaking collection of essays challenges this truism, examining what tax might tell us about the limits of social-contract thinking. The contributors shed light on contemporary fiscal structures and public debates about the moralities, practices, and imaginaries of tax systems, using tax to explore the nature of citizenship, personal freedom, and moral and economic value. Their ethnographically grounded accounts show how taxation may be influenced by spaces of fiscal sovereignty that exist outside or alongside the state, taking various forms, from alternative religious communities to economic collectives.
Nicolette Makovicky is Director of Russian and East European Studies at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, University of Oxford. She is the editor of Neoliberalism, Personhood, and Postsocialism: Enterprising Selves in Changing Economies (Routledge, 2014), and co-editor of Slogans: Subjection, Subversion, and the Politics of Neoliberalism (Routledge, 2019).
Robin Smith is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at Copenhagen Business School’s Department of Organization and Academic Guest at Utrecht University’s Department of Cultural Anthropology. Her work has benefited from the financial support of the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Independent Social Research Foundation, Clarendon Fund, and American Council of Learned Societies.
Subject: Political and Economic Anthropology
Beyond the Social Contract Edited by Nicolette Makovicky and Robin Smith is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) with support from Berghahn Open Anthro, in partnership with Libraria.
Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUB
OA ISBN: 978-1-80073-995-6
Contents
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