With this short squib on the forthcoming workshop ‘Questioning the Utopian Springs of Market Economy’ (15-16 August 2014), to be held at the University of Sydney on Karl Polanyi and Friedrich Hayek, I am happy to announce the final programme for the event. Registrations are also still open for anybody wanting to attend and for those that may still need to register but have left it late! Registrations can be processed HERE. At that link you will find further details on the workshop theme; conference registration; the draft programme; dinner arrangements; and a section ‘around the workshop’ covering accommodation, visa information for international travellers to Australia, local travel, and child care facilities.
Posts tagged: Karl Polanyi
Piketty Digest #2: Income and Output
With all the furore surrounding Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century my aim here is to carry a weekly focus on the book via For the Desk Drawer. The purpose is modest. There is already in existence some rather excellent coverage and detailed engagement with the book both in the general media and on specific blog sites. I am thinking here of the analyses by Michael Roberts on his blog site; the competing viewpoint or ‘afterthoughts’ of David Harvey; Benjamin Kunkel’s assessment in ‘Paupers and Richlings’ for London Review of Books matched by Knox Peden’s great essay on ‘The Abstractions of History’; or Paul Krugman’s rather different tone in ‘Why We’re in a New Guilded Age’ for The New York Review of Books. My own endeavour is much less ambitious than any of these engagements. It seeks to offer a weekly equivalent to the ‘Pocket Piketty’ provided by Duncan Green. Each week my intention is to carry a blog post on FtDD that summarises my notes on each chapter in just a few hundred words that can be read quickly. The purpose of these summaries is to produce an interpretative synopsis of each chapter drawn from my more detailed notes.
Rethinking Latin America and Hegemony
With the legitimacy crisis of neoliberal development in Latin America as a key contemporary feature and ‘postneoliberalism’ gaining traction in the region, this eleventh contribution to the Thesis Pieces series, by Philip Roberts, turns attention to one of the latest and most prominent attempts to theorise the continental history of Latin America. How can we place Latin America within the history of capitalist modernity, struggles for hegemony, and social counter-movements within the twenty-first century?
It was once common to assert that poorer countries could read their futures in the development of early-industrialising nations. Growth, wealth and prosperity were a continuum on which all states rested. Adoption of responsible national-level policies would bring Latin America, for instance, into line with forms of state and economy seen in Europe and the USA. However, since the global financial crisis of 2007-2008, developing zones increasingly define the future of the global economy, whilst the West appears backward-looking and insular. Lacking a viable alternative, Europe and the United States seem condemned to a continuation of neoliberalism, according to the insights of figures such as Philip Mirowski or Colin Crouch, whilst Latin America in particular embarks on post-neoliberal political-economic projects. The prior framework is thus set upon its head, as the past of Latin America may indicate the future of the West, and analysis of the future of the global economy must emerge within rising nations rather than outside them.
E. H. Carr and F. A. Hayek: the road to international order
A thread left hanging from my previous post on F.A. Hayek entitled ‘What the heck’s going on with Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom?’ was the focus on international order, which entails Hayek’s assessment of the scalar problems of planning and his advocating the absorption of separate states in a federal organisation. The focus of Chapter 15 on international order in The Road to Serfdom is wide-ranging, addressing aspects of planning and including what Hayek refers to as ‘super-state’ or ‘super-national’ authority within an international system of states. Interesting positions are therefore reflected in this analysis on world-state formation that have been neglected within international theory. What does Hayek have to say that may interest approaches to the political economy and historical sociology of state formation and thinking on ‘the international’ today?
Update: Polanyi-Hayek Workshop
As a short squib on the forthcoming workshop ‘Questioning the Utopian Springs of Market Economy’ (15-16 August 2014), to be held at the University of Sydney on Karl Polanyi and Friedrich Hayek, I want to highlight the introduction of an ‘early bird’ registration process. Registrations are now open for the workshop: HERE. At that link you will find further details on the workshop theme; conference registration; the draft programme; dinner arrangements; and a section ‘around the workshop’ covering accommodation, visa information for international travellers to Australia, local travel, and child care facilities.
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