With its many and wide-ranging implications for modern economic life, associative economics places human beings at the centre of all economic processes. Our capacity to be both free and responsible means we can make conscious what is otherwise left to the unseen working of market forces. Likewise, we can regulate our own behaviour without recourse to the state.

Owing much to the observations of Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian 'renaissance man' whose seminal work was concerned with the advent of global economics, associative economics takes full account of wide-ranging views from Aristotle to Adam Smith, Karl Marx to Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman, as well as the 'sustainability critique' and the sophistications of modern finance.