The End of Protest: How Free-Market Capitalism Learned to Control Dissent

Alasdair Roberts

Published by Cornell University Press 2016

The End of Protest

How Free-Market Capitalism Learned to Control Dissent

Alasdair Roberts

In the series Cornell selects

https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501714436

Overview
Contents

About this book

The United States has just gone through the worst economic crisis in a generation. Why wasn’t there more protest, as there was in other countries? During the United States’ last great era of free-market policies, before World War II, economic crises were always accompanied by unrest. "The history of capitalism," the economist Joseph Schumpeter warned in 1942, "is studded with violent bursts and catastrophes." In The End of Protest, Alasdair Roberts explains how, in the modern age, governments learned to unleash market forces while also avoiding protest about the market’s failures.

Roberts argues that in the last three decades, the two countries that led the free-market revolution—the United States and Britain—have invented new strategies for dealing with unrest over free market policies. The organizing capacity of unions has been undermined so that it is harder to mobilize discontent. The mobilizing potential of new information technologies has also been checked. Police forces are bigger and better equipped than ever before. And technocrats in central banks have been given unprecedented power to avoid full-scale economic calamities.

Tracing the histories of economic unrest in the United States and Great Britain from the nineteenth century to the present, The End of Protest shows that governments have always been preoccupied with the task of controlling dissent over free market policies. But today’s methods pose a new threat to democratic values. For the moment, advocates of free-market capitalism have found ways of controlling discontent, but the continued effectiveness of these strategies is by no means certain.

Author / Editor information

Alasdair Roberts is the Jerome L. Rappaport Professor of Law and Public Policy at Suffolk University Law School in Boston, Massachusetts. He is also a Fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Public Administration. He is the author of America’s First Great Depression, also from Cornell, The Logic of Discipline, and Blacked Out: Government Secrecy in the Information Age.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
The Quiet Crisis Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	vii
1 Schumpeter’s Paradox Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
2 Controlling Disorder in the First Liberal Age Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	5
3 The Market Comes Back Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	41
4 The New Method of Controlling Disorder Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	58
5 The End of Crowd Politics Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	94
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	99
About the Author Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	109

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 122
Keywords: american economic crisis; free market policy; political economy; market failure; history of capitalism; union capacity; mobilizing discontent; economic unrest; police and protests; controlling dissent

eBook

Published: July 1, 2017
ISBN: 9781501714436