Public Debt, Inequality, and Power The Making of a Modern Debt State

Until now, we have not had any satisfactory answers to these questions. Public Debt, Inequality, and Power is the first comprehensive historical analysis of public debt ownership in the United States

Re-thinking the Fiscal and Monetary Political Economy of the Green State

Proponents of the Green State repudiate the historical antipathy to the state from many in the green movement and endorse the pragmatic usage of state capacity and legitimacy to realise environmental protection. This article offers a sympathetic critique of the Green State’s fiscal and monetary institutional design in order to refine the concept further. It will investigate an under-theorised contradiction in the political economy of the Green State; centring upon the operationalisation of an interventionist state, moving beyond economic growth, and deference to the ceteris paribus conventions of state financing. It is argued that the three cannot co-exist harmoniously, given the ramifications of moving beyond growth for the fiscal capacity of the state. Therefore, there is a need to go further than even Eckersley does in re-politicising and challenging capitalist conventions. Specifically, Eckersley’s own critical constructivist approach is invoked to interrogate the capitalist conventions that constitute the constraints surrounding state financing, such as the depoliticised production of money and the viability of debt relations

The social purpose of new governance: Lisbon and the limits to legitimacy

This article examines the extent to which the Lisbon strategy, with its utilisation of the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) as the new mode of governance for supranational social policy, has delivered on the pledge of acting as a counterweight to neoliberal market integration in the EU. Adopting a critical political economy perspective, we transcend the focus on institutional form of existing approaches, and seek to explain the social purpose of Lisbon. In this context we argue that both form and content of the Lisbon strategy reflect a hegemonic project of embedded neoliberalism, inasmuch as the Lisbon strategy's institutional mechanisms such as the OMC reaffirm the asymmetric nature of European governance through the promotion of market-making rather than market-correcting policies, bolstering the power of transnational capital while simultaneously incorporating subordinate projects through limited forms of embeddedness. The contradictions inherent in this strategy have come to test the limits of its legitimacy. © 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd