Conversation with the author Henning Trüper is associate professor of the history of ideas at the University of Oslo. After his PhD at EUI, Florence, he held postdoctoral and research positions in Zurich, Paris, Princeton, Berlin, and Helsinki. From 2020-2025 he...
What is capitalism, and what is the state? In the advanced stage that appears in the USA today, the distinction seems unclear. However, is it an advanced stage? Isn’t what looks like the future, where Europe and the world will follow, a déjà-vu reiteration of an...
Jonathan White is innovative and convincing in his approach to the question of how the future was made in the past and is or isn’t made today. He goes beyond a mainstream debate that departs from opposites like predictable or not predictable, makeable or not...
The development of the financial markets since the 1970s crisis has rejected the assumption about mutually reinforcing dynamics between capitalism and democracy. Joseph Vogle argues in Capital and Ressentiment: A Brief Theory of the Present, Cambridge: Polity Press...
Fred L Block, Capitalism. The Future of an Illusion. Oakland, Cal: University of California Press 2018 describes capitalism as an illusion: the understanding of capitalism as a closed system, self-regulated and self-propelling, following its own laws and logic...
The conversations’ topic is the overexploitation of the energy that nature provides. The propellor of this overexploitation is our understanding of the economy as driven by growth through value added in a transaction chain with our present monetary price system as the gauge. Quilligan argues for an alternative value system steered by nature’s replenishment and resilience. The price does not have money but energy value in his order. The current price for a liter of petrol driving a combustible engine is valued in money as a currency with a shifting market value. It must have a value in joules of sunlight embodied within the fossil fuel, Quilligan argues. The price must be derived from biophysical calculation. Earth’s carrying capacity is a key term in his reasoning.’
Mariana Mazzucato’s proposal for a new embedding of capitalism is inspired by the Kennedy administration’s Apollo project for landing a man on the moon. The contrast proposal is an anarcho-capitalist’s Mars project. She departs from the postulation that...
When the environmental and resource exhaustion problems from the beginning of the 1970s could no longer be swept under the carpet, and the Fordist labour productivity ceased to increase, the pie stopped growing. Wages and profits, consumer prices and production...
