The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times
Paperback, 432 pages
ISBN: 9781844673049
February 2010
$26.95 / £14.99
Other Editions
Hardback, 400 pages
ISBN: 9781844673216
February 2010
$110.00 / £60.00
Reviews
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“A vivid, fact-filled expose of the cyclical monetary forces that surge through human society.”
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“The Long Twentieth Century has the grandeur of a sprawling epic and the schematic grace of a Richard Neutra blueprint... It is the single most useful text on offer for anyone who wants to narrate the story of world capitalism—from its nascent form on the rim of the Mediterranean to the current reach of the United States’ empire, and beyond.”
Blog
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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.
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‘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.
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“America's Century is Over, But it Will Fight On”
In an article for the Guardian on the deep-seated structural problems of the US economy, longtime Economics Editor Larry Elliott discusses the late Giovanni Arrighi's book The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times, of which a new and updated edition was published by Verso in February 2010.
