1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910792608503321

Autore

Roberts Alasdair (Alasdair Scott)

Titolo

The end of protest : how free-market capitalism learned to control dissent / / Alasdair Roberts

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Ithaca ; ; London : , : Cornell University Press, , [2016]

©2013

ISBN

0-8014-7003-X

1-5017-1443-0

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (122 pages)

Collana

Cornell selects

Disciplina

303.3/30973

Soggetti

Social control - United States - History

Social control - Great Britain - History

Capitalism - United States - History

Protest movements - United States - History

Capitalism - Great Britain - History

Free enterprise - Social aspects - United States

Free enterprise - Social aspects - Great Britain

Democracy - Economic aspects - United States

Democracy - Economic aspects - Great Britain

Protest movements - Great Britain - History

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references.

Nota di contenuto

Schumpeter's paradox -- Controlling disorder in the first liberal age -- The market comes back -- The new method of controlling disorder -- The end of crowd politics.

Sommario/riassunto

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.