Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the 21st Century
In the late eighteenth century, the political economist Adam Smith predicted an eventual equalization of power between the West and the territories it had conquered. In this magisterial new work, Giovanni Arrighi shows how China's extraordinary rise invites us to reassess radically the conventional reading of The Wealth of Nations. He examines how recent US attempts to create the first truly global empire were conceived to counter China's spectacular economic success Now America’s disastrous failure in Iraq has made the People’s Republic of China the true winner in the US War on Terror.
China may soon become again the kind of noncapitalist market economy that Smith described, an event that will reconfigure world trade and the global balance of power.
Paperback, 418 pages
ISBN: 9781844672981
January 2009
$26.95 / £14.99
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Reviews
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Arrighi is a student of the French historian Fernand Braudel, and the book has the range and ambition of Braudel's work.
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Adam Smith in Beijing follows, and completes, his previous volume The Long Twentieth Century. Together they constitute a stunning work of world history with theoretical and political intent whose intellectual roots lie in a mix of radical historiographical traditions.
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This book is an impressive result; it will have a major impact ... Arrighi argues his case in great detail – using an elaborate exegesis of The Wealth of Nations, which will send many readers back to that text in amazement.
Blog
Los Angeles Review of Books challenges the legitimacy of economic soothsayers
“Autumn of the Empire” is the title to Joshua Clover’s analysis of the current economic crisis, approached within the context of four books reviewed in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Among the titles that Clover discusses are Robert Brenner’s The Economics of Global Turbulence and two books by the late Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century and Adam Smith in Beijing.
All of the books were first published before the economic bubble burst—a significant detail because like many before him, Clover disputes the retrospective argument that the crisis was unforeseen. More importantly:
The question of why so many danger cries went unheeded may seem to invite an inquiry into ideological blindness. On a different conceptual plane, however, it may be more interesting to ask instead: What counts as a prediction? Or, perhaps, the practical corollary: Who counts as an economist?
After all, other thinkers—other sorts of thinkers, concerned with broader understandings than the tightly focused technicians who dominate contemporary debates—grasped the situation at a considerable distance and with remarkable acuity. They mostly don’t appear in surveys of crisis callers, even as their predictions may have the most significant things to tell us about how best to peer from our current vantage, toward the horizon.
‘How much is too much?’—Benjamin Kunkel on David Harvey for the London Review of Books
Benjamin Kunkel has written a lengthy article on David Harvey for the London Review of Books. Nominally a joint review of his recent books The Enigma of Capital and A Companion to Marx's Capital, it engages with Harvey's entire body of work, and especially his seminal The Limits to Capital.
Over recent decades, the landmarks of Marxian economic thinking include Ernest Mandel's Late Capitalism (1972), David Harvey's Limits to Capital (1982), Giovanni Arrighi's Long 20th Century (1994) and Robert Brenner's Economics of Global Turbulence (2006), all expressly concerned with the grinding tectonics and punctual quakes of capitalist crisis. Yet little trace of this literature, by Marx or his successors, has surfaced even among the more open-minded practitioners of what might be called the bourgeois theorisation of the current crisis.
Discussions
Begin a discussionOther books by Giovanni Arrighi
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Anti-Systemic Movements
by Giovanni Arrighi, Terence K. Hopkins, et al.
Peerless examination of the rise of social movements against the global capitalist system, conducted by the leading exponents of the “world systems” perspective.
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The Long Twentieth Century
A comprehensive analysis of the development of world capitalism over seven hundred years.
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The Geometry of Imperialism
Viewing many meanings of imperialism through a single, formal model.