Suchergebnisse

Political Economy seminar
The Problem of History in IPE: An Intellectual History
Speaker: Randall Germain, Carleton University
When: 3-4pm, Wednesday, 24 April, 2024
Where: A02 Social Sciences Building, Room 341, The University of Sydney
About the talk: The idea of history, although present throughout much of the traditional canon of political economy and its internationalized off-shoot – international political economy (IPE) – is today largely erased as a key theoretical feature of IPE research. Where it is included as a part of the research enterprise, it is most often formulated as either context for the problem under investigation, or as a linear unit of account such as t + 1. This represents a theoretical loss for the discipline of IPE, and my effort here is to recenter the idea of history as a core feature of IPE's broad research agenda. To do this, I first revisit how the idea of history is framed in the work of Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Max Weber, to demonstrate that the idea of history was a critical element of the inspiration to political economy (and IPE). I then pick up how the idea of history informs what might be described as 'modern' IPE, most importantly in the work of foundational IPE scholars (Antonio Gramsci, Karl Polanyi, David Mitrany, E.H. Carr, Susan Strange and Robert Cox). This intellectual history reveals the important way in which the idea of history can frame the research enterprise of IPE as an examination of transformative change within the global political economy. In period marked by what appear to be deep and disruptive change, the idea of history is a necessary addition to the IPE conceptual and analytical toolkit.

About the speaker: Randall Germain is Professor of Political Science at Carleton University, Canada. His teaching and research examine the political economy of global finance, issues and themes associated with economic and financial governance, and theoretical debates within the field of international political economy. His scholarship has been published in journals such as the European Journal of International Relations, Global Governance, International Studies Quarterly, New Political Economy, Review of International Political Economy, and Review of International Studies. He is also the author of The International Organization of Credit (CUP, 1997) and Global Politics and Financial Governance (Palgrave, 2010). Most recently he edited Susan Strange and the Future of Global Political Economy (Routledge 2016). His current research explores how the idea of history has informed disciplinary debates in IPE.
The post Seminar: Randall Germain, ‘The Problem of History in IPE: An Intellectual History’ appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

In April, the School of Social and Political Sciences, in collaboration with the Justice and Inequality research priority of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, will be hosting Mike Savage, Martin White Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics. He has a longstanding interest in the social and historical sources of inequality, within and across nations. From 2015 to 2020 Mike was Director of the LSE's International Inequalities Institute, and his most recent book is The Return of Inequality: Social Change and the Weight of the Past (Harvard University Press, 2021), praised by Thomas Piketty as a "major sociological contribution to the ongoing global debate on inequality and the return of social class".

During Mike's visit, we will be holding two public events: a forum on ‘The Eternal Return of the Rentier? How Our Past Weighs on Our Future’ and a public lecture on ‘The Racial Wealth Divide’ (details below). In addition, we will be holding two closed workshops: one on the hold of finance on public policy (and how to loosen or break it) (April 4-5) and another on the methodological and theoretical challenges facing inequality researchers at a time of escalating inequality (April 16). These events are invitation-only, but spaces are available – please contact martijn.konings@sydney.edu.au for further information.
Public lecture: The Racial Wealth Divide
10 April, 5:30-7 pmLecture Theatre 208, Veterinary Science Conference Centre, The University of SydneyPlease register to attendOver the past decade, escalating wealth inequalities have become apparent across the globe. It is increasingly evident that this is driven not by anonymous forces like "globalization" or "capital", but by elites who enjoy disproportionate power and influence. This lecture addresses the intellectual and political challenges posed by this trend. Most fundamentally, how should we define, measure, and track this wealth, given that its growth stems at least in part from elites' ability to stay under public, scholarly, and regulatory radars? How does wealth inequality reinforce racial, gender and other divides, and how does it shape social mobility and life chances across numerous domains? And what strategies could effectively advance the growing public interest in taxing wealth as a means to address entrenched wealth inequalities? This lecture discusses how wealth accumulation is underwritten by legal devices such as the 'non-domicile' tax regime; shows the roots of this in British imperial history, and considers the prospects for tax justice.
 
The post Mike Savage Public Lecture: ‘The Racial Wealth Divide’ appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

In April, the School of Social and Political Sciences, in collaboration with the Justice and Inequality research priority of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, will be hosting Mike Savage, Martin White Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics. He has a longstanding interest in the social and historical sources of inequality, within and across nations. From 2015 to 2020 Mike was Director of the LSE's International Inequalities Institute, and his most recent book is The Return of Inequality: Social Change and the Weight of the Past (Harvard University Press, 2021), praised by Thomas Piketty as a "major sociological contribution to the ongoing global debate on inequality and the return of social class".

During Mike's visit, we will be holding two public events: a public lecture on ‘The Racial Wealth Divide’ and a forum on ‘The Eternal Return of the Rentier? How Our Past Weighs on Our Future’ (details below). In addition, we will be holding two closed workshops: one on the hold of finance on public policy (and how to loosen or break it) (April 4-5) and another on the methodological and theoretical challenges facing inequality researchers at a time of escalating inequality (April 16). These events are invitation-only, but spaces are available – please contact martijn.konings@sydney.edu.au for further information.
Forum: The Eternal Return of the Rentier? How Our Past Weighs on Our Future
Wednesday 3 April, 3:30-5 pm
A02 Social Sciences Building, Room 650, The University of Sydney
Please register to attend
Over the past decade, a certain strain of intellectual pessimism has migrated from social theory to popular culture. Our ability to make better futures, it advises, is hamstrung by the sheer weight of the past, resulting in economic stagnation, escalating inequality, generational rifts, and political instability. In political economy, that weight of the past has often been identified with the figure of the rentier, and Piketty's work has documented the return of this morally questionable character, living off the return on property. But today's rentiers are no longer top-hatted financiers, and whether owning a second home represents moral turpitude or a middle-class survival strategy is actively debated in the op-ed pages of Australian newspapers. Nor is it clear that we can account for the full extent of inequity in contemporary society by continuing to rely on existing definitions of wealth. As suggested by the current popularity of concepts such as "technofeudalism", the production of speculative claims on imagined futures shape what appear to be anachronistically exploitative forms of work.
The disorienting ways in which old and new combine to produce unfamiliar forms of inequality demands that we open up our concepts and reconsider our methods. One of the most ambitious and compelling attempts to do so has been advanced by Mike Savage in his recent book The Return of Inequality: Social Change and the Weight of the Past (Harvard University Press, 2021). Professor Savage will be visiting the University of Sydney in April, and, taking its cue from the subtitle of his book, this panel invites leading scholars to reflect on how the past weighs on [...]
The post Forum: The Eternal Return of the Rentier? How Our Past Weighs on Our Future appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

In June 2023 Political Economy at the University of Sydney hosted a discussion on Jamie Martin's new book, The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire and the Birth of Global Economic Governance (Harvard University Press). Jamie gave a presentation on the book, and Martijn Konings was the discussant. Today we are publishing a recording of the event, along with an edited transcript of Martijn's contribution and Jamie's response.
The post Discussion: Martijn Konings and Jamie Martin on 'The Meddlers’ appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

"Since the 1960s, scholars and other commentators have frequently announced the imminent decline of American financial power : excessive speculation and debt are believed to have undermined the long-term basis of a stable U.S.-led financial order. But the American financial system has repeatedly shown itself to be more resilient than such assessments suggest. This book argues that there is considerable coherence to American finance : far from being a house of cards, it is a proper edifice, built on institutional foundations with points of both strength and weakness. The book examines these foundations through a historical account of their construction : it shows how institutional transformations in the late nineteenth century created a distinctive infrastructure of financial relations and proceeds to trace the contradiction-ridden expansion of this system during the twentieth century as well as its institutional consolidation during the neoliberal era. It concludes with a discussion of the forces of instability that hit at the start of the twenty-first century"--

The interface of political economy with arts and literature has become dominated by a particular image: capital's Grinch-like theft of the future. Fredric Jameson (2004: 36) called it "the waning of the utopian idea" and Franco Berardi (2011: 18) referred to it as the "slow cancellation of the future". The image rests on the tendency to interpret neoliberalism through the specific lens of 'financialization' as a post-1970s phenomenon. According to this perspective, as the Fordist manufacturing economy went into decline during the 1970s, the liberalization of finance and the growth of debt created new sources of profits, albeit 'fictitious' rather than real ones (Arrighi, 1994). Such perspectives portray neoliberalism as a capitalism on steroids. As those drugs are losing their effectiveness, what initially appeared as an accelerating movement of unchecked market expansion is now increasingly exposed to the weight of its own contradictions. By such reasoning, neoliberal policies are now just trying to keep an economic system going that has fundamentally run out of steam. The constant creation of new asset bubbles to this end is fueling the ongoing concentration of wealth, and with each round of stimulus, more asset inflation is needed to produce a given increase in growth and employment. Neoliberalism, for all its claims to dynamism and innovation, has become a bailout society.

This rejoinder takes up some of the points that have been raised by the reviews of Capital and Time in this forum. It engages the question of how political economy should position itself vis-à-vis concerns about the dangers of essentialism and teleological explanation. It argues that a proper theorization of the logic of 'leverage' is key to the development of a political economy that appropriates the insights of post-foundational theory but is still able to account for the reality of power and inequality.

This rejoinder takes up some of the points that have been raised by the reviews
of Capital and Time in this forum. It engages the question of how political
economy should position itself vis-à-vis concerns about the dangers of
essentialism and teleological explanation. It argues that a proper theorization
of the logic of 'leverage' is key to the development of a political economy that
appropriates the insights of post-foundational theory but is still able to
account for the reality of power and inequality.