Abstract
Twenty years ago Francis Fukuyama announced that history had ended in the triumph of liberal democratic capitalism. In May 2009, a major retail brokerage firm ran an ad on CNBC lamenting the “economic tsunami” that had unnerved its middle- and even upper-class investors. The ad’s choice of the tsunami metaphor is especially apt. Tsunamis represent not only extraordinary destruction but their occurrence is also all the more terrifying because they are notoriously unpredictable. The collapse of the immense housing bubble represents the loss of great wealth. It has also challenged the once widespread faith that markets would deliver steady and predictable progress.
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Notes
Robert Kuttner, Everything for Sale: The Virtues and limits of Markets (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 84.
See Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 36.
A concise, excellent summary of the dynamic leading to the bubble collapse is Dean Baker, Blunder and Plunder (Sausalito: Polipoint Press, 2009).
Robert Skidelski, Keynes: The Return of the Master (New York City: Public Affairs, 2009), 40–42.
Rawi Abdelal, Mark Blyth, and Craig Parsons, eds., Constructing the International Economy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 12.
I draw here extensively on William Connolly, Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), chapters 3 and 4.
For discussion of these issues, see Wesley W. Widmaier, “Trade-Offs and Trinities,” in Abdellal, Blyth, and Parsons, Constructing the International Economy.
Connolly, Capitalism and Christianity, American Style (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 76.
Dean Baker, “Was the Bank Bailout Necessary,” Guardian May 16, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/may/18/us-economy-bank-bailout.
Joanne Barkan, “Symposium on Affirmative Action,” Dissent, Fall 1995, 463.
Martin J. Sklar’s The Corporate Reconstruction of US Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) remains one of the seminal works on this theme.
See Baker, The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer (New York: Lulu, 2006), for discussion of this theme
Thomas Dumm, A Politics of the Ordinary (New York: NYU Press, 1999), 5.
Romand Coles, Christianity, Democracy and the Radical Ordinary (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2008), 46.
See discussion of Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009) in chapter three.
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© 2011 John Buell
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Buell, J. (2011). Us Capitalism’s Bumpy Ride: Where to From Here?. In: Politics, Religion, and Culture in an Anxious Age. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339231_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339231_6
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