This review essay rethinks “neoliberalism” in U.S. history. Rather than treating neoliberalism as a rupture, it proposes analyzing successive “sorts”, or recompositions, of liberal rule – formulas that stabilize the governance of capitalism by relocating authority among public and private institutions, redefining property, and reorganizing coalitions and justificatory languages. Set within the longer history of the liberalism of fear, the essay isolates a recomposition that consolidated in the immediate post–World War II period and made possible a later neoliberal sort in the late 1990s. In both instances, liberal rule incorporated technocratic insulation, marketcraft, and policy tools that secured private capital’s investment discretion while limiting democratic contestation. The essay traces how this neoliberal configuration began to strain in the twenty-first century, after the Iraq War and the global financial crisis of 2008. The conclusion interprets the Biden administration’s attempt to renew liberal repertoires under the threat to liberalism posed by Donald Trump.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsForetelling the End of Capitalism: Intellectual Misadventures since Karl Marx. By Francesco Boldizzoni. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. Pp. x+326. $35.00.Jonathan LevyJonathan LevyUniversity of Chicago Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 95, Number 1March 2023 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/723289 Views: 28Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Journal Article Kaveh Yazdani and Dilip M. Menon, eds. Capitalisms: Towards a Global History. Get access Kaveh Yazdani and Dilip M. Menon, eds. Capitalisms: Towards a Global History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 400. Cloth $75.00. Jonathan Levy Jonathan Levy University of Chicago, US Email: jlevy@uchicago.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 128, Issue 2, June 2023, Pages 993–995, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad019 Published: 22 June 2023

“The 1970s and 1980s were a disaster for America’s labor movement,” as Jacoby begins his chronicle of that movement’s efforts to recover in the decades afterward, by bending the “financialization” of the U.S. economy toward labor’s interests. The results, in his telling, may not have been disastrous, but they were, at best, mixed. One foundation for Jacoby’s account is historical—the “postwar system” of industrial relations. In it, American “corporations balanced the interests of diverse stakeholders—executives, employees, and shareholders—without privileging any one of them.” Another foundation is disciplinary. Jacoby views corporations not as networks of contracts, or as “principal-agent” problems, as many scholars did in the era under study, especially those influenced by financial economics. Rather, drawing from a more interdisciplinary “industrial relations” orientation, Jacoby sees corporations as fields of power, “riven by conflict,” in which three blocs—managers, shareholders, and workers—always contest for primacy.Undoubtedly, in the United States, the era since 1980 has been one of shareholder primacy. Maximizing “shareholder value” became the great single metric of corporate success. Under the “postwar system,” organized labor rarely viewed shareholders as their primary foe. The target was managers. After managers failed to the solve a profitability crisis during the 1970s, activist shareholders during the 1980s, ranging from colorful figures like Carl Icahn to institutional investors like CalPERS, took advantage of increasingly deregulated financial markets to wrest control over corporations. They aligned managerial interests with their own, often short-term goal of shareholder value (namely, stock price). Maximizing shareholder value often meant shedding labor costs. Whether in employment or wage rates, the results for industrial workers, and their unions, were indeed disastrous.How, then, did labor respond? Among the new tactics was an attempt to leverage the financial power of union pension funds, legacies of the postwar system. As shareholders themselves, unions could attempt to exercise voice in corporate governance—not as they had in the past, through organizing or the collective bargaining process (including strikes) but through voting their shares. This tactic, Jacoby demonstrates, often joined with another new one, the “corporate campaign,” by which unions attempted to pressure corporations outside the workplace through the channels of publicity.In the chapters, which are roughly chronological, Jacoby’s method is to recount a dizzying number of shareholder campaigns by leading U.S. labor unions, including the largest umbrella organization, the afl-cio. At times, readers may feel overwhelmed by the sheer details of the great number of campaigns, but labor’s chief preoccupations emerge across the pages. They include support for shareholder “say on pay” for corporate officers, “proxy access” (meaning the ability of shareholders to nominate board candidates directly), and majoritarian rather than pluralist voting in corporate board elections.Jacoby does not underscore the point much, but apparently unions, while tactically adapting to the new world of shareholder primacy, kept their eyes set on their old foes, the managers. That strategy makes sense, since managers still directly employed workers, determining their wages and working conditions. But Jacoby does note that, as unions attempted to wield power as shareholders, they did nothing to push back against the trend toward shareholder primacy itself. Through pensions, labor might have owned some finance capital, but relatively not so much. In the end, corporate payouts to shareholders increased returns to property owners but did not—almost by definition—involve increasing wages for labor. Wealth transferred from labor to capital, suppressing wages and fueling inequality.In their shareholder campaigns, labor often sat with some strange bedfellows, including many state pensions plans that sought only to maximize their financial yields, regardless of what it meant for workers on the ground. In the age of finance capital, a truly labor-friendly, mass- shareholder movement never came close to fruition. In principle, it was possible, but Jacoby notes that in 2019, “6 percent of corporate employees belonged to a union, fewer than in 1929.”The point is not that labor had no success with shareholder advocacy, especially during the 2000s in the wake of the Enron scandal. Jacoby concludes that it made “a pretty good showing for an alleged dinosaur.” Indeed, most U.S. corporations today use majoritarian voting and offer proxy access (however diluted). This provision and others bolstering shareholder voice in corporate governance have recently been promoted by laws, including the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, which labor influenced, and which ends Jacoby’s history. At this point, little evidence suggests that any of these changes have much benefited workers, although time will tell.

Global capital mobility is a crucial determinant of economic, political, and social life. While much has been written about the ethics of human movement, political theory has remained nearly silent on the ethics of capital movement. In this article, we intend to develop a general account of the ethics of global capital mobility—identifying both the forms of mobility that merit protection and those that merit restriction. By integrating normative theorizing with an economic analysis of global investment, we argue that the movement of capital, with important exceptions, should be much more restricted than it is today. We make the case, on both grounds of global justice and international assistance, for imposing coercive limits on cross-border inflows and outflows of capital. To enable them, we also propose a radical reform of the international monetary system—a new global currency—that would simultaneously facilitate beneficial capital movements.

en plus assimilables à des revenus de prédation issus d’opérations spéculatives, de la réalisation de plus-values immobilières ou financières, de rentes diverses, en particulier de rentes demonopole » (p. 1082). Nous pouvons remarquer que, par rapport aux travaux qu’il a précédemment consacrés aux crises, P. Dockès introduit l’idée d’un risque écologique. La question du protectionnisme, largement considérée, des années 1980 jusqu’à une période très récente, comme un archaïsme de néophytes ignorant les acquis de la science économique, apparaît de nouveau essentielle. L’auteur aborde également la notion de communs et accorde surtout une attention beaucoup plus grande que par le passé aux dimensions monétaires et financières, dans des synthèses tout à fait appropriées.

Like in all industrial societies, in the United States economic planning was a prominent political-economic ideal in the wake of World War II. Paying attention to the postwar decades, this article focuses on how and why private American industrial corporations appropriated the practice and rhetoric of planning, in the context of the outbreak of the Cold War. This corporate appropriation displaced debates about planning into a social and cultural register in the United States. Paradoxically, the outward-looking U.S. state accepted robust state planning regimes abroad even as the Cold War hampered the legitimacy of state-centered economic planning at home. The paradox helped set the stage for the global crisis of industrial societies after 1968 that brought the postwar era to a close and would ultimately undermine economic planning everywhere.

Although the dynamics of capital are various, one dynamic is inescapably psychical. In this article, I argue in favor of a concept of what I call “primal capital,” in which capital is not only a “factor of production” but also consists of psychical processes. I proceed by way of reconstructing John Maynard Keynes’s account in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936) of the owner of capital’s “propensity to hoard.” Keynes presents a model of psychical conflict under epistemic conditions of uncertainty, in which the owners of capital are perpetually torn between hoarding capital in the money form and long-term investment in wealth-generating economic production. To develop the psychical content of capital, I explore resonances between Keynes’s account of hoarding and Freud’s account of obsessional neurosis.

Reviewed by: The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean by Daniel B. Rood Jonathan Levy The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean. By Daniel B. Rood. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xvi, 272. $74.00, ISBN 978-0-19-065526-6.) Among the many monographs published over the last decade on the topic of what Daniel B. Rood calls “slaveholders’ capitalism,” The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean ranks among the most accomplished and significant (p. 2). This is not a study of the rise of King Cotton in the U.S. South, which, as many historians have been at pains to demonstrate lately, contributed to the British Industrial Revolution. Yet The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery is a study of the Industrial Revolution. Numerous scholars have emphasized that plantation-based sugar cultivation was a “modern” industrial enterprise (p. 8). Rood has developed this insight with a new level of care. This book must be read by anyone with even a passing interest in its subject. Rood’s interpretive framework is the “Second Slavery,” a term for the reinvention of racialized chattel slavery in the Atlantic world in the wake of the successful Haitian Revolution and the British empire’s gradual turn toward abolitionism (p. 2). Rood argues for the rise of a coherent “Greater Caribbean” during the 1840s and 1850s, centered primarily on Cuba, which, in the period after the revolution in Haiti, became the site of the most innovative sugar plantation complex in the world (p. 4). Linked to Cuba by circuits of exchange were two locations: the coffee-growing regions of Brazil and the wheat-growing and flour-milling areas of Virginia. In the opening chapters, Rood demonstrates that the extension and intensification of sugar cultivation in Cuba in the 1840s and 1850s was dependent on creole planters’ capital-intensive technological innovations in sugar manufacturing, which allowed them to produce the white sugar in demand in Great Britain. Black slaves, some skilled, made crucial contributions. Rood is excellent in detailing the relationship between technological change and slave labor. He also shows that Cuba’s planters followed a familiar industrial script. They plowed earnings back into fixed capital investments in slaves and machines, increasing the scale of enterprise, driving out smaller competitors, and appropriating fresh lands for commodity production. A [End Page 907] chapter also details how planters invested in railroads to get their products to market. Among the leading producers of Cuban railroad parts was the famed Virginia Tredegar Ironworks. Similar themes appear in the chapters on the “Richmond-Rio Circuit” (p. 121). To pay for coffee imports, American merchants sold finely processed white flour to Brazil. Processing was concentrated in innovative, capital-intensive, Richmond-based flour mills, where black slave labor was again important. Virginia slaveholders consolidated larger holdings in the Shenandoah Valley to grow wheat. One planter, Cyrus McCormick, developed the mechanized reaper during the 1830s, an important implement of the Industrial Revolution. By tracing unappreciated trade circuits and common developmental patterns, Rood’s construction of a Greater Caribbean is convincing. He is too careful a historian to suggest that this complex was more significant than the U.S.–Great Britain cotton textile nexus. But he is right that historians of slave-based economic development must take the measure of the Greater Caribbean. One takeaway from The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery is that the antebellum U.S. South was somewhat economically disarticulated. The Shenandoah Valley was linked more to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, than to Mobile, Alabama. The growth of iron manufacturing in Virginia was, perhaps, more dependent on demand in Cuba than Mississippi. This insight helps explain some of the future economic struggles of the Confederacy to cohere as a nation. Second, if there are varieties of capitalism, including “slaveholders’ capitalism,” Rood reveals there were many possible varieties of the Industrial Revolution, including a variety invested in racialized slavery (p. 3). Rood suggestively argues that an industrial conception of slaves as laborers lasted in racial discourse long after emancipation. Important contrasts can still be drawn between slave and non-slave-based industrializations...

The Economic History ReviewVolume 71, Issue 1 p. 367-369 BOOK REVIEW Steven G. Marks, The information nexus: global capitalism from the Renaissance to the present ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. xvi+250. ISBN 9781107108684 Hbk. £54.99/$74.99) Jonathan Levy, Jonathan Levy University of ChicagoSearch for more papers by this author Jonathan Levy, Jonathan Levy University of ChicagoSearch for more papers by this author First published: 18 January 2018 https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.12691Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume71, Issue1February 2018Pages 367-369 RelatedInformation

In the wake of the Great Recession, a new cycle of scholarship opened on the history of American capitalism. This occurred, however, without much specification of the subject at hand. In this essay, I offer a conceptualization of capitalism, by focusing on its root-capital. Much historical writing has treated capital as a physical factor of production. Against such a "materialist" capital concept, I define capital as a pecuniary process of forward-looking valuation, associated with investment. Engaging recent work across literatures, I try to show how this conceptualization of capital and capitalism helps illuminate many core dynamics of modern economic life.