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Capital resurgent: Roots of the neoliberal revolution Gérard Duménil & Dominique Levy. Translated by Derek Jeffers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004; 256 pp; ISBN: 978-0-67401-158-8, cloth $73.50 USD.
Review by KEVIN BRUSHEH
Capital Resurgent represents another chapter in economists Gérard Duménil and Dominique Levy's long-running project to understand neoliberalism's origins and its place in the larger history of capitalist development since the 19th century. Their central argument is that neoliberalism did not replace Keynesianism because it was bankrupt or because it was the only or even the most rational response to the crisis of capital accumulation. On the contrary, they see it as an expressly political project of "finance," which sought to restore its primacy in the capitalist order.
To this end they point directly to "the coup of 1979" when the U.S. Federal Reserve sought to strip inflation from the global economy by sending interest rates through the roof. Rather than solving the problems of capital accumulation in general, they insist the neoliberal revolution was only ever intended to solve the profitability of financial capital (American financial capital in particular) and everyone else be damned. As the latter chapters of the book show, the financialization of the global capitalist economy has had a destabilizing impact and points to the replacement of neoliberalism, but by what, they are reluctant to say.
Their account of the hegemonic rise...