At the 9th Australian International Political Economy Network (AIPEN) annual workshop, hosted by Monash University (8-9 February 2018), a roundtable was hosted featuring Wesley Widmaier’s book Economic Ideas in Political Time: The Rise and Fall of Economic Orders from the Progressive Era to the Global Financial Crisis.
As part of wider work on agent-centred constructivism—that grants a focus on how elite agents’ constructions of wars and crises act as turning points for policy change and the role of intersubjective consensus formation, persuasion making engagements, and legitimacy building—Economic Ideas in Political Time understands the rise and fall of economic policy orders through a specific paradox. That paradox is that stability causes instability: intellectual and institutional stability has repeatedly caused market instability and crisis. Focusing on political orders as an amalgam of ideas and institutions over three stages of US economic policy in 1) the Progressive era; 2) the Keynesian order; and 3) the Neoliberal period, the book analyses how each epoch underwent processes of construction, conversion and crises to lead to misplaced certainty and thus the onset of the Great Depression, Stagflation and the Global Financial Crisis.
Deploying a social psychological institutional argument, it is argued, then also enables the development of a general theory of stability and instability focusing on the role of ideas in reducing uncertainty but—over time—causing misplaced certainty and crises.
The roundtable consisted of commentaries on the book in alphabetical order of appearance from Penny Griffin (University of New South Wales), Shahar Hameiri (University of Queensland), Sara Meger (University of Melbourne), John Mikler (University of Sydney) and Adam David Morton (University of Sydney) with a rejoinder from Wesley Widmaier (Griffith University) himself.
This section of the blog will publish each contribution as an individual post to build up a repository of engagements with Economic Ideas in Political Time.
Rather than evoke a notion of ‘great transformations’ shaping the rise and fall of market economy in the tradition of Karl Polanyi, Economic Ideas in Political Time by Wesley Widmaier offers an enticing argument on the construction of political economic orders across time.
Focusing on [...]
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International Political Economy (IPE) tends to be tribal. IPE scholars often say what they are as well as what they study. Wesley Widmaier is an avowed constructivist and in his book Economic Ideas in Political Time he goes further down the ideational rabbit hole to study the rise and fall [...]
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Wesley Widmaier’s Economic Ideas in Political Time is an ambitious book that foregrounds not only the role of political actors in shaping the course of economic revisions of twentieth-century America, but importantly the role of the speech act in generating the ideological conditions in [...]
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Wesley Widmaier has produced an outstanding and original book in Economic Ideas in Political Time, drawing together and extending upon several branches of political economy and social psychology. His signature contribution is to combine constructivist and institutionalist approaches and [...]
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It doesn’t surprise us any longer, I think, to hear stories about how middle-aged, white, probably Anglo-American, men have ruined everything.
The media, and various academic texts, have presented to us stories of the so-called global financial crisis that invariably centre [...]
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