Domenico Losurdo: Liberalism: A Counter-History (2006/2011)

One of Europe’s leading intellectual historians deconstructs liberalism’s dark side.

In this definitive historical investigation, Italian author and philosopher Domenico Losurdo argues that from the outset liberalism, as a philosophical position and ideology, has been bound up with the most illiberal of policies: slavery, colonialism, genocide, racism and snobbery.

Narrating an intellectual history running from the eighteenth through to the twentieth centuries, Losurdo examines the thought of preeminent liberal writers such as Locke, Burke, Tocqueville, Constant, Bentham, and Sieyès, revealing the inner contradictions of an intellectual position that has exercised a formative influence on today’s politics. Among the dominant strains of liberalism, he discerns the counter-currents of more radical positions, lost in the constitution of the modern world order.

First published in Italian as Controstoria del Liberalismo, Gius. Laterza & Figli, 2006
Translated by Gregory Elliott
Publisher Verso Books, 2011
ISBN 1844676935, 9781844676934
375 pages

interview with the author, video (Pam Nogales and Ross Wolfe, The Platypus Review)

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-29)

Philip Mirowski, Dieter Plehwe (eds.): The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (2009)

“What exactly is neoliberalism, and where did it come from? This volume attempts to answer these questions by exploring neoliberalism’s origins and growth as a political and economic movement.

Although modern neoliberalism was born at the “Colloque Walter Lippmann” in 1938, it only came into its own with the founding of the Mont Pèlerin Society, a partisan “thought collective,” in Vevey, Switzerland, in 1947. Its original membership was made up of transnational economists and intellectuals, including Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Karl Popper, Michael Polanyi, and Luigi Einaudi. From this small beginning, their ideas spread throughout the world, fostering, among other things, the political platforms of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and the Washington Consensus.

The Road from Mont Pèlerin presents the key debates and conflicts that occurred among neoliberal scholars and their political and corporate allies regarding trade unions, development economics, antitrust policies, and the influence of philanthropy. The book captures the depth and complexity of the neoliberal “thought collective” while examining the numerous ways that neoliberal discourse has come to shape the global economy.”

Publisher Harvard University Press, 2009
ISBN 0674033183, 9780674033184
469 pages

Publisher

PDF, PDF (updated on 2018-4-30)

Jonathan Nitzan, Shimshon Bichler: Capital as Power. A Study of Order and Creorder (2009)

Conventional theories of capitalism are mired in a deep crisis: after centuries of debate, they are still unable to tell us what capital is. Liberals and Marxists both think of capital as an ‘economic’ entity that they count in universal units of ‘utils’ or ‘abstract labour’, respectively. But these units are totally fictitious. Nobody has ever been able to observe or measure them, and for a good reason: they don’t exist. Since liberalism and Marxism depend on these non-existing units, their theories hang in suspension. They cannot explain the process that matters most – the accumulation of capital.

This book offers a radical alternative. According to the authors, capital is not a narrow economic entity, but a symbolic quantification of power. It has little to do with utility or abstract labour, and it extends far beyond machines and production lines. Capital, the authors claim, represents the organized power of dominant capital groups to reshape – or creorder – their society.

Written in simple language, accessible to lay readers and experts alike, the book develops a novel political economy. It takes the reader through the history, assumptions and limitations of mainstream economics and its associated theories of politics. It examines the evolution of Marxist thinking on accumulation and the state. And it articulates an innovative theory of ‘capital as power’ and a new history of the ‘capitalist mode of power’.

Publisher Routledge, London and New York, 2009
RIPE Series in Global Political Economy
ISBN 0203876326, 9780203876329
463 pages
The electronic version of this work is protected by CreativeCommons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 2.5 Canada

reviews (Jordan Brennan; D.T. Cochrane; Ulf Martin, Nestor D’Alessio and Harald Wolf; Mark Fisher; Vineeth Mathoor)

authors
publisher
google books

PDF