Synopses & Reviews
The worldwide spread of neoliberalism has transformed economies, polities, and societies everywhere. In conventional accounts, American and Western European economists, such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, sold neoliberalism by popularizing their free-market ideas and radical criticisms of the state. Rather than focusing on the agency of a few prominent, conservative economists,
Markets in the Name of Socialism reveals a dialogue among many economists on both sides of the Iron Curtain about democracy, socialism, and markets. These discussions led to the transformations of 1989 and, unintentionally, the rise of neoliberalism.
This book takes a truly transnational look at economists' professional outlook over 100 years across the capitalist West and the socialist East. Clearly translating complicated economic ideas and neoliberal theories, it presents a significant reinterpretation of Cold War history, the fall of communism, and the rise of today's dominant economic ideology.
Review
"Johanna Bockman's book, Markets in the Name of Socialism, seeks to chip away at [the] conventional wisdoms [about neoliberalism, the postsocialist transitions, and the economics profession, which calcified after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989]. To do so, she takes her readers on a historically and geographically ambitious worldwide tour of the history of economic thought . . . This elegantly written book reveals a compelling vision in which markets are not, as in the orthodox Marxist view, a Trojan horse for the social hierarchies of capitalism, but a variety of human interaction compatible with many different social systems."Sarah Babb, American Journal of Sociology
Review
"Johanna Bockman's Markets in the Name of Socialism offers a refreshing take on a fairly well-trodden question: the relationship between economics and neoliberalism in the late twentieth century . . . One of its central strengths is its historically and internationally grounded delineation of the boundary between neoclassicism and neoliberalism . . . Bockman offers a useful corrective to unipolar notions of economic knowledge as developing mainly in the West while Eastern European and Soviet economics, subordinated to Marxist ideology, stagnated . . . Bockman's work is an important step toward thinking outside of neoliberalism's self-presentation by undermining the problematic dichotomies upon which its has ben built socialism versus capitalism, states versus markets . . . Markets in the Name of Socialism remains an important work that is necessary reading for anyone interested in neoliberalism, economics and the intersection between the two."Stephanie Lee Mudge, Social Forces
Review
"[H]er research offers an important historical complement to recent attempt to revisit the conventional wisdom about neoclassical methodology, socialist politics, and market economics."Tim Barker, Dissent
Synopsis
Challenging conventional accounts, Markets in the Name of Socialism chronicles a transnational dialogue among economists on both sides of the Iron Curtain about democracy, socialism, and markets. These exchanges led to the transformations of 1989 and, unintentionally, the rise of neoliberalism.
About the Author
Johanna Bockman is Associate Professor of Sociology at George Mason University. Her current research explores socialist entrepreneurship, the debt crisis of the 1980s, Yugoslav socialism in Latin America, and gentrification in Washington, D.C.