F Block
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 34676 |
|---|---|
| NOME | F Block |
| PRENOMES | F |
| SOBRENOME | Block |
| ASSINATURA | BLOCK F |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of California, Davis |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3170-074X |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 105 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 897 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 105 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1975 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2024 |
| ÍNDICE H | 13 |
Revisiting the Hidden Developmental State
This essay revisits an earlier article, published in 2008, that argued that the United States had created a 'hidden developmental state' that helped move technologies from the laboratory to the marketplace. In the intervening fifteen years, this apparatus has become more elaborate with ever more government initiatives at the federal, state, and local levels. Moreover, the major pieces of legislation passed in the first two years of the Biden admi…
What counts as investment? Productive and unproductive expenditures
There have been significant changes in what economists include in the category of investment over the last six decades. The US government agency that compiles national income date, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, has tried to keep up with these changes, but it has not succeeded. The resulting tension between economic theory and official data can be overcome by adopting a different theoretical lens. Work on social reproduction and social investme…
Right-Wing Studies
Author(s): Bures, Eliah; Mudde, Cas; McIntosh, Janet; HoSang, Daniel Martinez; Lowndes, Joseph; Block, Fred; Givens, Terri; Moallem, Minoo; Ahmed, Hilal; Figueiredo, Ângela; Mason, Carol; Joffe, Carole; Griffin, Roger; Rosenthal, Lawrence
Freedom from the Market
The Ruling Class Does Not Rule
This chapter discusses the elements of an alternative Marxist theory of the state. It shows that critiques of orthodox Marxist theory of the state are flawed by their acceptance of the idea of a class-conscious ruling class. The chapter argues that there is a basis in Marx's writing for rejecting the idea of a class-conscious ruling class. The major development in the Marxist theory of the state in recent years has been the formulation of a criti…
What makes a developmental network state durable
As dynamic collaborations between networks of specialists have become more central to developing cutting‐edge innovations, designing and sustaining innovation policies that foster them has become an increasingly central concern. This article reviews the characteristics of the “developmental network” or “neo‐developmental” states that have been shown to foster innovations at the technological horizon. It then analyzes the US case to suggest why so…
Against Polanyian orthodoxy
Hannes Lacher’s article (2019) misrepresents and then denounces both the substance and the spirit of our book, The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s Critique (2014). Lacher claims his interpretation of Polanyi to be the only acceptable one, and vociferously alerts readers to beware the dangerous influence of our work. Because we continue to believe that familiarity with Polanyi’s theoretical framework is valuable for those resisting …
Introduction to the Special Issue
This essay introduces a special issue of Politics & Society in memory of Erik Olin Wright (1947-2019
Nine Theses on Twenty-First-Century Socialism
This essay, written in memory of Erik Olin Wright (1947-2019), outlines nine characteristics of a future socialism. It elaborates socialism as a set of processes and institutional arrangements that would open the way to a society that is radically more democratic, more just, and more sustainable than the existing order
The Ruling Class Does Not Rule
This chapter seeks to show that critiques of orthodox Weber Marxist theory of the state are flawed by their acceptance of the idea of a class-conscious ruling class. It argues that there is a basis in Karl Marx’s writing for rejecting the idea of a class-conscious ruling class. The chapter discusses a structural argument that shows that even in the absence of ruling-class class consciousness, the state managers are strongly discouraged from pursu…
Clarification, qualification, and the problem of authoritarianism
Problems with the concept of capitalism in the social sciences
The paper argues that the term "capitalism" carries with it baggage that interferes with our ability to understand contemporary market economies. The evolution of work in the "varieties of capitalism" literature is used to make the argument that more essentialist modes of analysis win out over those that emphasize variation and contingency. It is argued that analysts should instead use the terminology of variegated societies operating within a ca…
Financial Democratization and the Transition to Socialism
Historically, there has been little agreement between advocates of radical financial reform and socialist theoreticians. However, in the new circumstances of the twenty-first century, a productive synthesis of these two traditions might be possible. Drawing on the franchise model of credit creation elaborated by Robert C. Hockett and the dysfunctions created by the extreme concentration of private financial institutions, this article outlines a r…
Introduction to the Special Issue
This article introduces the articles and commentaries in the special issue titled 'Democratizing Finance.' Here, the term 'democratizing finance' focuses on reducing inequalities of income, wealth, and power
A Discussion of Lawrence R. Jacobs and Desmond King's Fed Power
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, political scientists have been paying more careful attention to the role of banking institutions as economic but also political institutions whose financial decisions involve the exercise of power and shape the conditions under which governmental decisions are made. Because the United States is still the world’s preeminent global economic power, the U.S. Federal Reserve looms particularly large in efforts…
How does innovation work within the developmental network state? New data on public-private agreements in a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory
The value of the Department of Energy (DOE)-owned national laboratories to the U.S. national innovation system has long been a subject of debate. Advocates have drawn attention to the central role of the labs in the development of technologies including advanced batteries, solar energy breakthroughs, imaging technologies, and various IT endeavors, among others. Critics have recurrently suggested that the labs’ innovative capacities have been unde…
Karl Polanyi in an Age of Uncertainty
The Contradictory Logics of Financialization
This introduction explains the logic of bringing together the perspectives of Hyman Minsky and Karl Polanyi to analyze processes of financialization. Although Minsky and Polanyi have very different intellectual trajectories, there are important complementarities in their approaches. The introduction also explains the focus of the three papers in this special section written by Kurtuluş Gemici, Lucas Kirkpatrick, and David Woodruff
A Neo-Polanyian Theory of Economic Crises
This article seeks to use Karl Polanyi's book, The Great Transformation, first published in 1944, to understand the global financial crisis that began in 2008. Polanyi's basic premise was that a great crisis must result from powerful causes. He argued that the crisis of the 1930s was a consequence of three distinct processes: deep imbalances in the global trading system, a crisis within the global financial mechanism that was supposed to manage t…
The Power of Market Fundamentalism
What is it about free-market ideas that gives them staying power in the face of such failures as persistent unemployment, widening inequality, and financial crises? The Power of Market Fundamentalism extends economist Karl Polanyi's work to explain why these dangerous utopian ideas have become the dominant economic ideology of our time
The Term 'Capitalism' Has Lost Its Radical Edge
Fred Block responds to the Notes from the Editors, June 2014, which drew attention to Block's recently published article, "Varieties of What?: Should We Still Be Using the Concept of Capitalism?" The editors reply.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website
The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite
No Slack
Polanyian Themes
Democratizing Finance
While financial institutions have not figured prominently in utopian thinking, the democratization of finance is central to any vision of bringing contemporary economies under democratic control. This paper is an initial effort to conceptualize a series of feasible reforms that could incrementally weaken the power of incumbent financial institutions while helping to facilitate economic development that is more egalitarian and sustainable. While t…
From Poverty to Perversity
To understand the rise of market fundamentalism from the margins of influence to mainstream hegemony, we compare the U.S. 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act and the English 1834 New Poor Law-two episodes in which existing welfare regimes were overturned by market-driven ones. Despite dramatic differences across the cases, both outcomes were mobilized by "the perversity thesis"-a public discourse that reassigned…
Swimming Against the Current
Despite the dominant role of market fundamentalist ideas in U.S. politics over the last thirty years, the Federal government has dramatically expanded its capacity to finance and support efforts of the private sector to commercialize new technologies. But the partisan logic of U.S. politics has worked to make these efforts invisible to mainstream public debate. The consequence is that while this 'hidden developmental state' has had a major impact…
Karl Polanyi and the writing of The Great Transformation
Beyond Relative Autonomy
Neo-Marxist analyses of the state and politics now centre on the vexed question of the 'specificity of the political'. What is the degree to which politics and the state have independent determining effects on historical outcomes? Can the state or the people who direct the state apparatus act as historical subjects? The questions are critical because without a clear set of answers, it is impossible to develop a consistent theory of the state
Understanding the Diverging Trajectories of the United States and Western Europe
This article proposes a neo-Polanyian theoretical framework for understanding the dynamics within contemporary market societies. It uses this framework to analyze the divergence between the United States and other developed societies that has become more pronounced in the first years of the twenty-first century. The argument emphasizes the shifting political alliances of the business community in the United States and suggests that from 1994 onwa…
Productivity as a Social Problem
The study of social indicators is valuable for understanding the role that the social sciences play in the political arena. One common pattern is for a particular social indicator to become frozen in place once it takes on political significance, and this can result in ironic consequences. This study traces out the case of indicators of aggregate productivity trends in the United States. These measures were initially developed as part of an under…
The Fiscal Crisis of the Capitalist State
It is now widely acknowledged that the long period of economic expansion that the Western capitalist societies enjoyed in the aftermath of World War II has come to a halt. Since the mid-1960s all of the developed capitalist societies have experienced greater economic difficulties in the form of higher rates of unemployment and inflation. Recessions have been deeper in the 1970s and early 1980s, and the periods of economic expan sion have been ch…
Democratizing Finance
While financial institutions have not figured prominently in utopian thinking, the democratization of finance is central to any vision of bringing contemporary economies under democratic control. This paper is an initial effort to conceptualize a series of feasible reforms that could incrementally weaken the power of incumbent financial institutions while helping to facilitate economic development that is more egalitarian and sustainable. While t…
Beyond Corporate Liberalism
Journal Article Beyond Corporate Liberalism Get access Fred Block Fred Block University of Pennsylvania Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social Problems, Volume 24, Issue 3, 1 February 1977, Pages 352–361, https://doi.org/10.2307/800086 Published: 02 August 2014
Relational Work in Market Economies
This article introduces the special issue on "Relational Work in Market Economies" by explaining the origins of the concept and its value in illuminating a dimension of market activity that has not been systematically addressed by social scientists. It also explains why this focus on individual economic transactions could be relevant for those whose interest centers on broader questions of political economy. Finally, there are brief descriptions …
Where do innovations come from? Transformations in the US economy, 1970-2006
This article seeks to reconnect to scholarship from the 1970s and 1980s that emphasized significant discontinuities in the development of the US economy. Drawing on a unique data set of prize-winning innovations between 1971 and 2006, we document three key changes in the US economy. The first is an expanding role of inter-organizational collaborations in producing award-winning innovations. The second is the diminishing role of the largest corpor…
The Power of Market Fundamentalism
What is it about free-market ideas that gives them staying power in the face of such failures as persistent unemployment, widening inequality, and financial crises? The Power of Market Fundamentalism extends economist Karl Polanyi's work to explain why these dangerous utopian ideas have become the dominant economic ideology of our time
Could we End Poverty in a Postindustrial Society? The Case for a Progressive Negative Income Tax
Problems with the concept of capitalism in the social sciences
The paper argues that the term "capitalism" carries with it baggage that interferes with our ability to understand contemporary market economies. The evolution of work in the "varieties of capitalism" literature is used to make the argument that more essentialist modes of analysis win out over those that emphasize variation and contingency. It is argued that analysts should instead use the terminology of variegated societies operating within a ca…
Karl Polanyi in an Age of Uncertainty
Postindustrial Development and the Obsolescence of Economic Categories
Crisis and renewal
Most analyses of the US financial crisis of 2007–2009 focus on the proximate causes. This article sees the crisis as a consequence of the decline of a long-term pattern of accumulation in the USA and seeks to outline the requirements for a new period of dynamic economic growth. Drawing on work done by the French Regulation theorists and the US analysts of Social Structures of Accumulation, the paper attempts to describe the types of institutional…
Economic Instability and Military Strength
Explaining the transformation in the US innovation system
Over the last four decades, the dynamics of innovation in the US economy have shifted. Whereas the development of new technologies was once dominated by large, vertically integrated firms, since the 1980s an increasingly ‘networked’ innovation environment has emerged in which small firms play a central role. But why did this shift emerge? Extant research emphasizes changes in the decision-making calculus of large firms, the rise of private ventur…
Deconstructing capitalism as a system
(2000). Deconstructing capitalism as a system. Rethinking Marxism: Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 83-98
Political choice and the multiple ?logics? of capital
Networks and Public Policies in the Global South
Déjà Vu, All Over Again
Revisiting the Hidden Developmental State
This essay revisits an earlier article, published in 2008, that argued that the United States had created a 'hidden developmental state' that helped move technologies from the laboratory to the marketplace. In the intervening fifteen years, this apparatus has become more elaborate with ever more government initiatives at the federal, state, and local levels. Moreover, the major pieces of legislation passed in the first two years of the Biden admi…
The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite
Contradictions of Capitalism as a World System
US Imperialism--a Reply to Petras and Rhodes
The article by James Petras and Robert Rhodes (‘The Reconsolidation of us Hegemony’, nlr 97) makes an important point in criticizing some interpretations of the decline of United States hegemony. However, their attempt to provide an alternative analysis ignores a number of important recent developments in
Economics and World Order
What Money Buys
The Origins of International Economic Disorder
Late Capitalism
Beyond Corporate Liberalism
Journal Article Beyond Corporate Liberalism Get access Fred Block Fred Block University of Pennsylvania Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social Problems, Volume 24, Issue 3, 1 February 1977, Pages 352–361, https://doi.org/10.2307/800086 Published: 02 August 2014
"Reply to "Before Radical Rejection
Journal Article Reply To “Before Radical Rejection” Get access Fred Block Fred Block University of Pennsylvania Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social Problems, Volume 25, Issue 3, 1 February 1978, Pages 350–351, https://doi.org/10.2307/800071 Published: 04 August 2014
The Origins of International Economic Disorder
The Origins of International Economic Disorder
The Geometry of Imperialism
New productive forces and the contradictions of contemporary capitalism
The Capitalist System
Economic Instability and Military Strength
Dualism and Discontinuity in Industrial Societies
Preface 1. Overview Part I. An Economic Approach: 2. Dualism as a response to flux and uncertainty Michael J. Piore 3. The technological foundations of dualism and discontinuity Michael J. Piore Part II. A Political Approach: 4. The traditional sector in France and Italy Suzanne Berger 5. Discontinuity in the politics of industrial society Suzanne Berger Selected bibliography Index
Introduction to Block and Hirschhorn Articles
Beyond Relative Autonomy
Neo-Marxist analyses of the state and politics now centre on the vexed question of the 'specificity of the political'. What is the degree to which politics and the state have independent determining effects on historical outcomes? Can the state or the people who direct the state apparatus act as historical subjects? The questions are critical because without a clear set of answers, it is impossible to develop a consistent theory of the state
The Fiscal Crisis of the Capitalist State
It is now widely acknowledged that the long period of economic expansion that the Western capitalist societies enjoyed in the aftermath of World War II has come to a halt. Since the mid-1960s all of the developed capitalist societies have experienced greater economic difficulties in the form of higher rates of unemployment and inflation. Recessions have been deeper in the 1970s and early 1980s, and the periods of economic expan sion have been ch…
The Development of the Modern State
The End of Social Inequality
Beyond the Economistic Fallacy
Karl Polanyi's intellectual work stands among the most significant and original contributions to social science scholarship in the period since the end of World War I. In particular, his book The Great Transformation is now widely recognized to be a classic of sociological thought. Although Polanyi was influenced by the major figures of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sociology, his work cannot easily be classified within one or another o…
Recapitalizing America
Worker Capitalism
Journal Article Worker Capitalism: The New Industrial Relations, by Keith Bradley and Alan Gelb Get access Worker Capitalism: The New Industrial Relations by Keith Bradley and Alan Gelb. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1983. 186 pp. $20.00. Fred Block Fred Block University of Pennsylvania Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quarterly, Volume 99, Issue 4, Winter 1984, Pages 757–758, https://doi.o…
The Current State of Marxist State Theory
Postindustrial Development and the Obsolescence of Economic Categories
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