Thanks for the thoughtful review! I once commented to you that “each of the people who writes a book has a different perspective, and each perspective makes sense from a certain point of view. But all perspectives are partial (including mine and yours).” In addition, each person who READS a book has a different perspective and a unique take-away from a book. I tend to look at general patterns, rather than details. (I’m a lumper, not a splitter.) When I read Arrighi’s book, what I saw was both a general cyclical pattern and an (exponential) expansion of “the hegemon's world” due to ever increasing technology. But that is what I was looking for. It seems you were looking for something somewhat different.
I’m not a Marxist expert and I was less interested in the details of his M, C, M’, but rather in the general picture he painted, which I interpreted as normal changes due to people growing up and living in different parts of the cycle, which caused them to think and act differently. (See Sir John Glubb’s 1976 article “The Fate of Empires” for a discussion of how cultures and their people tend to evolve similarly over time as an empire evolves: http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf.) We have been in the financialization part of Arrighi’s cycle for some years. Whether we will have a new hegemon or the US will grow out of this stage due to our increasing technology, the global nature of our hegemony, and/or our developing a maturity beyond prior cycles, only time will tell.
Thank you! I agree with you perhaps more than you think... I also think Arrighi has a great talent for discerning general patterns, and that is valuable. I guess I am also trying to dig at it as critically as I can, but I wouldn't say I was looking for something *that* different :)
I enjoy this blog enormously. I'm not an economist, just a political theorists who aspires to basic literacy and I share your taste in economics books so much I'm slightly embarrassed, everything you've picked I've either read or want to read.
RE: Tooze, do you know this lecture he gave in Vienna? He gives a really handy breakdown of the "macrofinancial" thinking that informed *Crashed* and compares it to Arrighi. He's already arguing that cyclical finance-centered theories, even the ones he likes, can't explain the Great Acceleration and he makes an interesting gesture towards Schumpeter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36bfqHZtSiU
Thank you, that is very kind! And no, I haven’t seen that lecture — I’ll have to give it a listen. Everyone gestures towards Schumpeter: left, right and centre… an extraordinarily broadly admired thinker.
I completely agree with your take in the post: Tooze somewhat oversimplifies Arrighi, the Tooze critique nevertheless has bite, what's needed is a concrete theory about what the Great Acceleration amounts to, if (as Tooze thinks) radically new circumstances (climate and China) have indeed made even the most sophisticated neo-Marxisim (from Anderson and Arrighi) anachronistic.
The gesture to Schumpeter is fine in the context of Tooze's lecture—we certainly need something like what Schumpeter tried to deliver with his business cycle theory. But Tooze has to deliver the goods, which I guess is the objective of his Tanner Lectures and the forthcoming climate book.
Is this posting a bad joke or bourgeois hubris or both? You can stop reading at this sentence: «I think this venerable circuit is among the least insightful formulations from Capital.» The whole posting is brimming with nonsense and empty platitudes that one would not know where to start to debunk that kind of garbage disguised as fancy political talk, while it is meaningless incoherent babble. Possibly the single biggest unqualified nonsense on the entire internet that has ever been written about Arrighi or Marx. Those who lash out hardest against Marx are always those who have not read a single line of his work. It is only fitting that quotes from a bourgeois elitist windbag like Adam Tooze are incorporated. But at least intellectually it is an pathetic display of outstanding quality. Or probably - to reference the text - it might be just a parody - expressed for instance in meaningless absurd wording of ‘a two-period representative agent neoclassical model for a macroeconomic, long-run growth problem’ - to pick just one statement of the pseudo analysis in rehashing ‚points‘ of ‚epochal trends‘ and other empty sterotypes produced by the likes of Financial Times anylysts like Tooze. The originality and significance ran out at the title alluding to Arrighi’s ‘Adam Smith in Beijing’. If you want a a lot more of smart-sounding economic nonsense in line with bourgeois fantasies, wait for the announced review of Arrighi’s book about Adam Smith - certainly a lot more warmed up platitudes cobbled together to sound appealing to an audience as uninformed as the author.
hahaha - I may be cobbling together warmed up platitudes, but you are evidently a much more original and humorous mind... very witty! I am frankly blown away to have written the *single biggest* nonsense on the *entire* internet that has *ever* been written about Arrighi *or* Marx - given the substantial competition, that is quite an achievement! So thank you.
Your substantial wit aside, however, the substance of your critiques is hazy (to me at least). Do you think Marx understood his M-C-M' circuit as generalisable to the world-historical level? My reading of Volume I is that Arrighi is making quite the stretch by doing so... and as you perhaps did not get, I was not making a critique of Marx at all, so much as Arrighi. I apologise if my little aside offended you...
Further, what part of 'two-period representative agent neoclassical model for a macroeconomic, long-run growth problem’ is meaningless, exactly? I would love to be enlightened.... same goes for 'epochal trends', which I would have thought has a pretty clear meaning.
Thanks for reading, and for taking the time to write such a well-crafted, entertaining riposte!
Thanks for the thoughtful review! I once commented to you that “each of the people who writes a book has a different perspective, and each perspective makes sense from a certain point of view. But all perspectives are partial (including mine and yours).” In addition, each person who READS a book has a different perspective and a unique take-away from a book. I tend to look at general patterns, rather than details. (I’m a lumper, not a splitter.) When I read Arrighi’s book, what I saw was both a general cyclical pattern and an (exponential) expansion of “the hegemon's world” due to ever increasing technology. But that is what I was looking for. It seems you were looking for something somewhat different.
I’m not a Marxist expert and I was less interested in the details of his M, C, M’, but rather in the general picture he painted, which I interpreted as normal changes due to people growing up and living in different parts of the cycle, which caused them to think and act differently. (See Sir John Glubb’s 1976 article “The Fate of Empires” for a discussion of how cultures and their people tend to evolve similarly over time as an empire evolves: http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf.) We have been in the financialization part of Arrighi’s cycle for some years. Whether we will have a new hegemon or the US will grow out of this stage due to our increasing technology, the global nature of our hegemony, and/or our developing a maturity beyond prior cycles, only time will tell.
Thank you! I agree with you perhaps more than you think... I also think Arrighi has a great talent for discerning general patterns, and that is valuable. I guess I am also trying to dig at it as critically as I can, but I wouldn't say I was looking for something *that* different :)
I enjoy this blog enormously. I'm not an economist, just a political theorists who aspires to basic literacy and I share your taste in economics books so much I'm slightly embarrassed, everything you've picked I've either read or want to read.
RE: Tooze, do you know this lecture he gave in Vienna? He gives a really handy breakdown of the "macrofinancial" thinking that informed *Crashed* and compares it to Arrighi. He's already arguing that cyclical finance-centered theories, even the ones he likes, can't explain the Great Acceleration and he makes an interesting gesture towards Schumpeter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36bfqHZtSiU
Thank you, that is very kind! And no, I haven’t seen that lecture — I’ll have to give it a listen. Everyone gestures towards Schumpeter: left, right and centre… an extraordinarily broadly admired thinker.
I completely agree with your take in the post: Tooze somewhat oversimplifies Arrighi, the Tooze critique nevertheless has bite, what's needed is a concrete theory about what the Great Acceleration amounts to, if (as Tooze thinks) radically new circumstances (climate and China) have indeed made even the most sophisticated neo-Marxisim (from Anderson and Arrighi) anachronistic.
The gesture to Schumpeter is fine in the context of Tooze's lecture—we certainly need something like what Schumpeter tried to deliver with his business cycle theory. But Tooze has to deliver the goods, which I guess is the objective of his Tanner Lectures and the forthcoming climate book.
Is this posting a bad joke or bourgeois hubris or both? You can stop reading at this sentence: «I think this venerable circuit is among the least insightful formulations from Capital.» The whole posting is brimming with nonsense and empty platitudes that one would not know where to start to debunk that kind of garbage disguised as fancy political talk, while it is meaningless incoherent babble. Possibly the single biggest unqualified nonsense on the entire internet that has ever been written about Arrighi or Marx. Those who lash out hardest against Marx are always those who have not read a single line of his work. It is only fitting that quotes from a bourgeois elitist windbag like Adam Tooze are incorporated. But at least intellectually it is an pathetic display of outstanding quality. Or probably - to reference the text - it might be just a parody - expressed for instance in meaningless absurd wording of ‘a two-period representative agent neoclassical model for a macroeconomic, long-run growth problem’ - to pick just one statement of the pseudo analysis in rehashing ‚points‘ of ‚epochal trends‘ and other empty sterotypes produced by the likes of Financial Times anylysts like Tooze. The originality and significance ran out at the title alluding to Arrighi’s ‘Adam Smith in Beijing’. If you want a a lot more of smart-sounding economic nonsense in line with bourgeois fantasies, wait for the announced review of Arrighi’s book about Adam Smith - certainly a lot more warmed up platitudes cobbled together to sound appealing to an audience as uninformed as the author.
hahaha - I may be cobbling together warmed up platitudes, but you are evidently a much more original and humorous mind... very witty! I am frankly blown away to have written the *single biggest* nonsense on the *entire* internet that has *ever* been written about Arrighi *or* Marx - given the substantial competition, that is quite an achievement! So thank you.
Your substantial wit aside, however, the substance of your critiques is hazy (to me at least). Do you think Marx understood his M-C-M' circuit as generalisable to the world-historical level? My reading of Volume I is that Arrighi is making quite the stretch by doing so... and as you perhaps did not get, I was not making a critique of Marx at all, so much as Arrighi. I apologise if my little aside offended you...
Further, what part of 'two-period representative agent neoclassical model for a macroeconomic, long-run growth problem’ is meaningless, exactly? I would love to be enlightened.... same goes for 'epochal trends', which I would have thought has a pretty clear meaning.
Thanks for reading, and for taking the time to write such a well-crafted, entertaining riposte!