Departments

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political economy

  • SOURCE: New Statesman
    5/31/2023

    Neoliberalism: Not Dead Yet

    by Brett Christophers

    The reassertion of state power over economies during the COVID pandemic shouldn't yet be taken as a sign of a turn away from the dominance of finance capital over the global economy and politics – market fundamentalism is only one part of the system. 

  • SOURCE: Boston Review
    5/19/2023

    Review: Are Basic Income Programs Captive to the Power of the Market?

    by Simon Torracinta

    Two historians argue that the basic income is an idea that is circumscribed by the assumption that society will be organized around markets. A reviewer says the programs are the starting point for politics that escape that constraint. 

  • SOURCE: New Statesman
    5/12/2023

    Quinn Slobodian: Can Democracy be Safe from the Market?

    A new history of capitalist policy initiatives focuses on the "zone," a territory of radical deregulation where capital is free from constraint by democracy. A reviewer asks whether there can be a zone where democracy is insulated against the market. 

  • SOURCE: The New Republic
    2/27/2023

    Review: The Right-Wing Abuse of Adam Smith

    by Kim Phillips-Fein

    Glory M. Liu's account of Adam Smith's reception in America explains how American politicians read selectively in Smith's capacious writings on political economy and public morality to construct a self-interested view of the market as a natural phenomenon, writes historian Kim Phillips-Fein. 

  • SOURCE: Dissent
    2/17/2023

    Clara Mattei on the History of Austerity Politics

    A decade before the Great Depression, capital responded to a serious crisis of legitimacy by adopting measures that punished a restive working class through scarcity, argues a new economic history; maintaining hierarchy, not growing the economy, is the objective.

  • SOURCE: The Nation
    12/13/2022

    How the "Third Way" Made Neoliberal Politics Seem Inevitable

    by Lily Geismer

    The Third Way never presented a coherent case for what it stood for or how it might balance the roles of the market and the state. But it led to a generational reworking of the role if government and a sidelining of mass political movements. 

  • SOURCE: The Nation
    9/3/2022

    Virtue and Vice: Looking for the Real Adam Smith

    by Glory Liu

    Smith's work on political economy has long been seen in tension with his investigation of empathy and other moral sentiments. Paul Sagar's new book argues that scholars have mistaken Smith's intentions in order to falsely reconcile the market and morality. 

  • SOURCE: New York Review of Books
    7/21/2022

    Review: Gerstle on Free Markets and Besieged Citizens

    by Robert Kuttner

    Gary Gerstle's new history aims to define the political order that began under Jimmy Carter and resulted in the overturning of New Deal liberalism for the empty promises of a market society, with the power of the state insulating capitalism from democracy.

  • SOURCE: N + 1
    6/1/2022

    Review Essay: Who Did Neoliberalism?

    by Erik Baker

    New books wrestle with the rise and collapse of the 1960s New Left and the gulf between its aspirations and achievements, and assess whether 1960s radical intellectuals are responsible for present-day neoliberalism. 

  • SOURCE: The Nation
    4/13/2022

    Gary Gerstle: Is the Neoliberal Era Over?

    "Will new political movements emerge with the strength to compel a serious redistribution of wealth away from elites and toward the masses without reproducing the tyranny that became so intrinsic to communism? This is one of the key questions of our time."

  • SOURCE: Foreign Policy
    3/11/2022

    We're Talking about Climate Change with Outdated Colonial Language

    by Priya Satia

    The dominant climate activist theme of sacrificing in the present to protect the future is rooted in the intellectual history of economics which has driven the profligate consumption and gross inequality that threatens the planet. 

  • SOURCE: Public Books
    9/22/2020

    How the Welfare State Became the Neoliberal Order (Review)

    by Pablo Pryluka

    Although the Tennessee Valley Authority was a pioneering public works project, its alumni worked in Latin America to advance redevelopment projects that elevated the authority of big business, a model now associated with the neoliberal turn in the developed world.