Contesting the Global Order

Gregory P. Williams

Description

Contesting the Global Order explores what it means to be a radical intellectual as political hopes fade. Gregory P. Williams chronicles the evolution of intellectual visionaries Perry Anderson and Immanuel Wallerstein, who despite altered circumstances for radical change, continued to advance creative interpretations of the social world. Wallerstein and Anderson, whose hopes were invested in a more egalitarian future, believed their writings would contribute to socialism, which they anticipated would be a postcapitalist future of relative social, economic, and political equality. However, by the 1980s dreams of socialism had faded and they had to face the reality that socialism was neither close nor inevitable. Their sensitivity to current events, Williams argues, takes on new significance in this century, when many scholars are grappling with the issue of change in a world of declining state power.
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Radical Political Economy for an Age of Uncertainty

1. Cosmopolitan Beginnings

2. Ideational Lineages

3. The Year that Changed Everything

4. Ideas Need Institutions

Intermission I: Immanuel Wallerstein's New Pair of Glasses

5. There Is No Alternative

6. Shed a Tear for East European Communism?

Intermission II: Perry Anderson's Clear-Headed Radicalism

7. Do Not Believe What Great Powers Say

Conclusion: The Point Is to Interpret, and Then Change, the World

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• 20th century
• Political economy

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438479675
• Langue: English

Extrait

Contesting the Global Order
SUNY series in New Political Science

Bradley J. Macdonald, editor
Contesting the Global Order
The Radical Political Economy of Perry Anderson and Immanuel Wallerstein
GREGORY P. WILLIAMS
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2020 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Williams, Gregory P., author.
Title: Contesting the global order: the radical political economy of Perry Anderson and Immanuel Wallerstein / Gregory P. Williams, author.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2020] | Series: SUNY series in New Political Science | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781438479651 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438479675 (ebook)
Further information is available at the Library of Congress.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020937137
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For Colleen
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Radical Political Economy for an Age of Uncertainty
Chapter 1 Cosmopolitan Beginnings
Chapter 2 Ideational Lineages
Chapter 3 The Year that Changed Everything
Chapter 4 Ideas Need Institutions
Intermission I: Immanuel Wallerstein’s New Pair of Glasses
Chapter 5 There Is No Alternative
Chapter 6 Shed a Tear for East European Communism?
Intermission II: Perry Anderson’s Clear-Headed Radicalism
Chapter 7 Do Not Believe What Great Powers Say
Conclusion: The Point Is to Interpret, and Then Change, the World
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Writing may be solitary, but books remain collective endeavors. I now have a sense of the impact of others’ ideas and support.
It is a pleasure to see this book as part of SUNY Press’s series in New Political Science. I thank Michael Rinella at SUNY Press and Bradley J. Macdonald, the series editor, for their support. I also thank Yvonne Deligato at Binghamton University Archives for her help with the Wallerstein Papers collection. The Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University kindly supplied a digital copy of an important text. Another source supplied documents on the condition of anonymity. In addition to the reviewers, several others read manuscript chapters or entire drafts, including Robert Denemark, Georgi Derluguian, Jane Anna Gordon, Martin Jay, Mladen Medved, and Bryan D. Palmer.
I thank my protagonists, who inspired this study. Perry Anderson, preferring that scholars emphasize textual analysis, declined to be interviewed but wished me well. Immanuel Wallerstein sat for an interview. Sadly, he has since passed. Others will be contemplating his, and Anderson’s, ideas for some time.
This book began as a dissertation at the University of Connecticut. I am especially grateful for my advisor, Cyrus Ernesto Zirakzadeh, a kind soul with an original mind. At a time of change in the discipline, Ernie showed that political science research can be both academically and personally meaningful. Other committee members also contributed advice and ideas that helped the work come together. They included Shareen Hertel, David L. Richards, Mark A. Boyer, and Charles R. Venator Santiago. I also learned a great deal from the late J. Garry Clifford, an original member of the committee, whose writings and lectures were captivating.
As this study became a book project, colleagues in my department at the University of Northern Colorado offered wise advice, both intellectual and practical. I am especially indebted to Richard Bownas and Stan Luger.
My family offered words of encouragement. I thank my parents, James and Elizabeth Williams, as well as my brother, Andrew Williams. The loving support of my wife, Colleen O’Connell Williams, made this project enjoyable and worthwhile.
Introduction
Radical Political Economy for an Age of Uncertainty
On September 24, 2008, four months before the end of his presidency, George W. Bush gave his first prime-time televised address on economic affairs. It was a Wednesday. The economy was in crisis. One after another, large financial institutions were collapsing or requesting government assistance. Countrywide fell in January, followed by Bear Stearns in March. That summer, several European banks folded. Governments in North America and Europe coordinated efforts on monetary policy. Then came September. Within weeks, disaster struck Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, A.I.G., and Washington Mutual.
The president announced that he would lead a bipartisan effort to restore stability to the economy and confidence in markets. He promised that the government, during this extraordinary time, would act quickly and without partisanship. President Bush attributed the successive collapses to instability brought on by irresponsible lending and overly optimistic assessments of the housing market. Regulatory agencies, he noted, should have done more to head off this economic emergency, which, even though it had struck suddenly, should not have taken officials by surprise. 1
Over the coming months, two accounts of the crisis would emerge. For convenience, we can call these the prevailing explanation and the unconventional explanation. Although they were generally quite different, and although individual opinions clashed, these accounts were not mutually exclusive. In fact, they shared an important trait: each represented a genuine merger of economic and political modes of inquiry. They were, in other words, in the tradition of political economy.
The prevailing explanation attributed what came to be known as the “Great Recession” to a confluence of relatively recent factors. It explained that the banks had underestimated financial market risk, households had saved too little, and mortgages were too easily approved. Moreover, according to this account, some bankers were manipulating not only the price of loans between banks but also currency exchange rates. Simultaneously, many big banks were overleveraged, which meant that they had taken on large amounts of debt to buy assets (betting that an asset’s value would grow faster than interest would accumulate). In addition, foreign debt, coupled with a decline in U.S. hegemony, weakened the American economy. Then, according to the prevailing narrative, a series of events sent the system into a tailspin: a spike in oil prices, followed by a housing crash, followed by a stock market crash. This narrative was valuable because it accounted for a specific chain of events leading up to catastrophe. 2
The unconventional account attributed the events of that year to capitalism’s propensity for crisis. It highlighted longstanding global economic interconnections and patterns of faster and slower growth. It emphasized materials used for industry and the decline of natural resources in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This narrative also thought about the legacy of colonialism and an unfair relationship between laboring classes and those that owned factories, banks, and other businesses. It conceptualized the 2008 crisis from a bird’s eye view—at the level of the global capitalist system. 3 It was valuable because it accounted for long-term patterns that gave rise to the crisis. 4
This work is a journey into the second narrative. It arrives amid growing concern that the international order (economic and political), widely considered stable, has been greatly shaken. This study does not address the 2008 crisis in detail, which is merely a recent example of global capitalist instability. Instead, this book investigates the intellectual tradition that produced the unconventional narrative through an analysis of two of its pioneers, the American sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein and the British historian Perry Anderson. Wallerstein founded the Fernand Braudel Center at Binghamton University, the journal Review , and was a main force behind the development of world-systems analysis. Anderson edited the New Left Review (NLR) for decades and remains an influential force at the journal and its book publishing house, New Left Books (which publishes as Verso). With careers that stretched beyond six decades, their responses to major political events can provide insights into the study of political economy today. Each left an important mark on our scholarly understanding of political economy. Each struggled to break free from traditional historical and social scientific thinking, and then struggled against misunderstandings and criticism. By virtue of their scholarly efforts and institutional positions, each left a legacy that generations of researchers have followed.
Wallerstein, Anderson, and other scholars of political economy work in a field with a rich and diverse history. It used to be that governance and economics were regarded as a single subject of study. But since the late nineteenth century, specialization has meant that economics and politics were often studied apart from one another. In order to make sense of a complex world, specialization seemed sensible. But disciplinary divisions also made it appear as though issues of trade and currency were distinct from bureaucracy and lawmaking. In Western universities, economists turned their att