The Integrated Circus

When Pax Americana began to disintegrate in the late 1960s, economic leaders in corporate America joined with their counterparts in Western Europe and Japan to develop a self-interested strategy for dealing with the political and social impacts of a changing global economy. As Marchak shows, the political agenda of the emerging New Right the dismantling of the welfare state was supported by corporate-funded think-tanks which influenced public policy and by media campaigns which swayed public opinion. The New Right promoted the resurgence of laissez-faire political and economic ideas which Marchak traces back to the theories of Adam Smith. Marchak describes the changes such strategies created in the world economy and examines their effects on the United States and Canada, Western and Eastern Europe, Japan, the newly industrializing nations, and the increasingly impoverished third world countries. She includes chapters on the silicon revolution, Japanese expansion, the automobile industry, special export zones, the debt crisis, environmental issues, and international organizations.

"This study usefully and interestingly draws together many of the fast changing strands of the international political economy from the 1960s to the early 1990s. It is a book of considerable academic merit." M.J. Grieve, International Affairs. "Marchak's well-written interpretative essay relating free market ideology (the New Right') to global change in the structure of capitalism is brilliantly conceived ... The historical perspective on global political economy and the ideology of free markets will interest specialists." R.J.S. Ross, Choice. "The Integrated Circus is bursting with ideas and constitutes an impressive tour de force. The author's erudition is everywhere evident. I know of no other study which likewise situates the new right so well into the context of global political economy." Mel Watkins, Department of Economics, University of Toronto. "Marchak's intertwining of events and ideology is impressive. The book would stand alone in a crowded field in the way it juxtaposes ideological and historical developments. It is an informed sociological analysis of an important phenomenon of our times." Henry Veltmeyer, Department of Sociology, Saint Mary's University.

In The Integrated Circus Patricia Marchak examines the relationship between the emergence of the New Right and the development of a global marketplace after the Second World War. Focusing on the political organization and neo-conservative ideologies of the New Right, Marchak scrutinizes the connections between technological change, the debt and environmental crises, mounting Islamic fundamentalism, the end of the Cold War, and the rise of the Japanese and other Asian-Pacific economies and the decline in American hegemony.