The Boom and the Bubble: The US in the World Economy

Most intellectuals would be pleased to have one major debate named after them. The Marxist economic historian Robert Brenner has managed the remarkable feat of unleashing two significant intellectual controversies. The first, in the historical journal Past & Present during the late 1970s and early 1980s, was provoked by his interpretation of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in early modern Europe. More recently, however, Brenner has switched his attention from the longue durée of European history to the economic dynamics of contemporary capitalism. In a massive journal-length article published in New Left Review in 1998 he offered a comparative analysis of the three major Western economies—the USA, Japan and Germany—from 1945 onwards, tracing the development of a protracted crisis of profitability that, Brenner contended, explained the ‘long downturn’ experienced by global capitalism since the early 1970s.