Books by Jens Beckert

Consumers, investors, and corporations orient their activities toward a future that contains opportunities and risks. How do these actors assess uncertainty? Jens Beckert adds a new chapter to the theory of capitalism by showing how fictional expectations drive modern economies-or throw them into crisis when imagined futures fail to materialize.

A comparative study of the development of inheritance law in the United States, France, and Germany, this work investigates longstanding political and intellectual debates over inheritance laws and explains why these laws differ so greatly among these countries.