Robert Brenner
Biographic Data
| ID | 3614530 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robert Brenner |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robert |
| FAMILY NAME | Brenner |
| SIGNATURE | BRENNER R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Los Angeles |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1036-8031 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 310 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 34 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1972 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
The Long Downturn and Its Political Results
Seven Theses on American Politics
Bidenism analysed as the outcome of a bipartisan lurch towards growthless Keynesianism, in a new stage of capitalist accumulation emerging from the long downturn. Classes—and class politics—redefined in a strikingly original intervention
Escalating Plunder
In the US, amid soaring unemployment, loss of health insurance and rising poverty, a $4 trillion hand-out to capital, with Biden’s party and Trump’s shoulder to shoulder. Robert Brenner analyses the Covid-19 bailout in the broader context of a faltering productive economy and growing elite predation
L'économie mondiale et la crise américaine
Overproduction not Financial Collapse is the Heart of the Crisis
Jeong Seong-jin: Most media and analysts label the current crisis as a "financial crisis." Do you agree with this characterization?Robert Brenner: It's understandable that analysts of the crisis have made the meltdown in banking and the securities markets their point of departure. But the difficulty is that they have not gone any deeper. From Treasury Secretary Paulson and Fed Chair Bernanke on down, they argue that the crisis can be explained si…
Property and Progress
During the first half of the twentieth century there was widespread agreement as to whether the way to understand the historical emergence of economic development in the West was through the theoretical lens provided by Adam Smith. This chapter critiques Smith's view of the transition through which the pre-capitalist social property relations were transformed into capitalist property relations – a transition that is believed to have been mistaken…
Assessment of menstruation in the vervet ( Cercopithecus aethiops )
Vervet monkeys ( Chlorocebus aethiops ) are Old World nonhumans that display attenuated menstruation that requires detection by vaginal swab. The physiology underlying attenuated menstruation in this species has not been previously studied. To fill this gap, we evaluated endometrial cell proliferation, steroid receptor localization and expression of menstruation‐associated matrix metalloproteinase (MMP) enzymes in vervets during natural and artif…
Structure vs Conjuncture
Robert Brenner reads the US mid-term results against deeper structural shifts in the American polity. The rise of the Republican right seen in the context of the long downturn and dismantling of the liberal compact: from New Deal and Great Society to the capitalist offensive under Reagan, Clinton and Bush
From theory to history
Introduction Mann's post-modern enlightenment conception Michael Mann's notion of ‘The European Dynamic’ lies at the heart, and is the ultimate payoff, of his enquiry into the sources of social power. It constitutes his account of the emergence of both the modern agro-industrial economy and the modern centralized state and international system of multiple states, in terms of what he understands to be the four networks and sources of social power.…
What Is, and What Is Not, Imperialism
New Boom or New Bubble
The shape of the US economy as it emerges from recession, in election year. With the giant manufacturing sector still crippled by over-capacity, can the take-off be sustained by bubble-driven finance, retail and construction booms
Vers le précipice
England's Divergence from China's Yangzi Delta
In the great divergence, Kenneth Pomeranz (2000) proposes a radical revision of our understanding of the pattern of economic evolution in the eastern and western ends of Eurasia over the course of the early modern and modern periods, roughly late Ming and Qing. A recent restatement of the standard or traditional view can be found in the macro-economic historian Angus Maddison's account of world economic development in the very long run,The World …
The world economy at the turn of the millennium toward boom or crisis
This paper addresses the question of whether the long stagnation that gripped the world economy for a quarter century after 1973 has been transcended. To do so, it offers an account of the long downturn, in terms of the fall and failure of recovery of the profitability, especially in the international manufacturing sector, itself rooted in the rise and persistence of over-capacity and over-production on a system-wide scale, originating in the int…
The Low Countries in the Transition to Capitalism
The Boom and the Bubble
In the last four years, the US economy has posted its best performance since the sixties. What is the connexion between the formidable boom in the real economy and the historically unprecedented bubble on the stock market? Could the inflation of asset values far beyond the rise in corporate earnings be preparing a Japanese-style nemesis
Reply to Critics
Research Article| August 01 1999 Reply to Critics Robert Brenner Robert Brenner Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (1999) 19 (2): 61–85. https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-19-2-61 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Robert Brenner; Reply to Critics. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 1 August 1999; 19…
Competition and Class
The postwar economy is widely understood to have gone through two major phases. During the long boom between the end of the 1940s and the early 1970s, most of the advanced capitalist economies (outside the United States and the United Kingdom) experienced record-breaking rates of investment, output, productivity, and wage growth, along with low unemployment and only brief, mild recessions. But during the long downturn that followed, the growth of…
The Economics of Global Turbulence (Special Issue)
Merchants and Revolution
Merchants and revolution
"In Merchants and Revolution Robert Brenner offers a socio-political account of the transformation of English commerce in the century after 1550 and a socio-economic explanation of the political activities and alignments of the London merchant community in the conflicts of the early Stuart period. In a major reinterpretation of long-term commercial change, he shows that new possibilities in the import trades - more so than problems in the traditi…
The World of Maurice Thomson
Who was Maurice Thomson? Arguably the most significant English colonial merchant of the early seventeenth century, Thomson plays no part in such pioneering accounts of the commercial development of England's Atlantic empire as Wesley Frank Craven's The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 1607-1689 (1949) or Bernard Bailyn's New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (1955).1 Thomson apparently left no diary, account books, or othe…
Why is the United States at War with Iraq
Why is the United States at war with Iraq? It is a lot easier to say what are not the reasons for us intervention in the Gulf than to provide a fully satisfactory account of its presence there. According to the Bush administration, the usa is
The Regulation Approach
In the past two decades the French (or Paris) School of Economic Regulation has developed an ambitious historical-economic theory which has already had a major impact on efforts to understand the current malaise of the capitalist system and the accompanying economic transformations. On the face of it, the
La base sociale du développement économique
Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe
Journal Article AGRARIAN CLASS STRUCTURE AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN PRE-INDUSTRIAL EUROPE Get access Robert Brenner Robert Brenner University of CaliforniaLos Angeles Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 70, Issue 1, February 1976, Pages 30–75, https://doi.org/10.1093/past/70.1.30 Published: 01 February 1976
Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe
AGRARIAN CLASS STRUCTURE AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN PRE-INDUSTRIAL EUROPE: THE AGRARIAN ROOTS OF EUROPEAN CAPITALISM Get access Robert Brenner Robert Brenner University of CaliforniaLos Angeles Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 97, Issue 1, November 1982, Pages 16–113, https://doi.org/10.1093/past/97.1.16 Published: 01 November 1982
What Is, and What Is Not, Imperialism
The Low Countries in the Transition to Capitalism
England's Divergence from China's Yangzi Delta
In the great divergence, Kenneth Pomeranz (2000) proposes a radical revision of our understanding of the pattern of economic evolution in the eastern and western ends of Eurasia over the course of the early modern and modern periods, roughly late Ming and Qing. A recent restatement of the standard or traditional view can be found in the macro-economic historian Angus Maddison's account of world economic development in the very long run,The World …
The Social Basis of English Commercial Expansion, 1550–1650
for each period into which our economic history may be divided, there is a distinct and separate class of capitalists. In other words, the group of capitalists of a given epoch does not spring from the capitalist group of the preceding epoch. At every change in economic organization we find a breach of continuity. It is as if the capitalists who have up to that time been active, recognize that they are incapable of adapting .... They withdraw fro…
The Origins of Capitalist Development
The appearance of systematic barriers to economic advance in the course of capitalist expansion—the ‘development of underdevelopment’—has posed difficult problems for Marxist theory. There has arisen, in response, a strong tendency sharply to revise Marx’s conceptions regarding economic development. In part, this has been a healthy reaction to
The Civil War Politics of London's Merchant Community
Journal Article THE CIVIL WAR POLITICS OF LONDON'S MERCHANT COMMUNITY Get access Robert Brenner Robert Brenner University of CaliforniaLos Angeles Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 58, Issue 1, February 1973, Pages 53–107, https://doi.org/10.1093/past/58.1.53 Published: 01 February 1973
New Boom or New Bubble
The shape of the US economy as it emerges from recession, in election year. With the giant manufacturing sector still crippled by over-capacity, can the take-off be sustained by bubble-driven finance, retail and construction booms
Competition and Class
The postwar economy is widely understood to have gone through two major phases. During the long boom between the end of the 1940s and the early 1970s, most of the advanced capitalist economies (outside the United States and the United Kingdom) experienced record-breaking rates of investment, output, productivity, and wage growth, along with low unemployment and only brief, mild recessions. But during the long downturn that followed, the growth of…
The Regulation Approach
In the past two decades the French (or Paris) School of Economic Regulation has developed an ambitious historical-economic theory which has already had a major impact on efforts to understand the current malaise of the capitalist system and the accompanying economic transformations. On the face of it, the
Seven Theses on American Politics
Bidenism analysed as the outcome of a bipartisan lurch towards growthless Keynesianism, in a new stage of capitalist accumulation emerging from the long downturn. Classes—and class politics—redefined in a strikingly original intervention
The world economy at the turn of the millennium toward boom or crisis
This paper addresses the question of whether the long stagnation that gripped the world economy for a quarter century after 1973 has been transcended. To do so, it offers an account of the long downturn, in terms of the fall and failure of recovery of the profitability, especially in the international manufacturing sector, itself rooted in the rise and persistence of over-capacity and over-production on a system-wide scale, originating in the int…
The Economics of Global Turbulence (Special Issue)
The Long Downturn and Its Political Results
La base sociale du développement économique
The Social Basis of English Commercial Expansion, 1550–1650
for each period into which our economic history may be divided, there is a distinct and separate class of capitalists. In other words, the group of capitalists of a given epoch does not spring from the capitalist group of the preceding epoch. At every change in economic organization we find a breach of continuity. It is as if the capitalists who have up to that time been active, recognize that they are incapable of adapting .... They withdraw fro…
The Civil War Politics of London's Merchant Community
Journal Article THE CIVIL WAR POLITICS OF LONDON'S MERCHANT COMMUNITY Get access Robert Brenner Robert Brenner University of CaliforniaLos Angeles Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 58, Issue 1, February 1973, Pages 53–107, https://doi.org/10.1093/past/58.1.53 Published: 01 February 1973
Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe
Journal Article AGRARIAN CLASS STRUCTURE AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN PRE-INDUSTRIAL EUROPE Get access Robert Brenner Robert Brenner University of CaliforniaLos Angeles Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 70, Issue 1, February 1976, Pages 30–75, https://doi.org/10.1093/past/70.1.30 Published: 01 February 1976
The Origins of Capitalist Development
The appearance of systematic barriers to economic advance in the course of capitalist expansion—the ‘development of underdevelopment’—has posed difficult problems for Marxist theory. There has arisen, in response, a strong tendency sharply to revise Marx’s conceptions regarding economic development. In part, this has been a healthy reaction to
Reply to Sweezy
Readers will have to judge for themselves whether or not I have mischaracterized Paul Sweezy’s arguments. I do not think my understanding of his case is idiosyncratic. Other writers, most recently John Merrington in his ‘Town and Country in the Development of Capitalism’ (nlr 93, September–October 1975
The Origins of Capitalist Development
The appearance of systematic barriers to economic advance in the course of capitalist expansion—the "development of under-development"—has posed difficult problems for Marxist theory. There has arisen, in response, a strong tendency sharply to revise Marx's conceptions regarding economic development. In part, this has been a healthy reaction to the Marx of the Manifesto, who envisioned a more or less direct and inevitable process of capitalist ex…
Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe
AGRARIAN CLASS STRUCTURE AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN PRE-INDUSTRIAL EUROPE: THE AGRARIAN ROOTS OF EUROPEAN CAPITALISM Get access Robert Brenner Robert Brenner University of CaliforniaLos Angeles Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 97, Issue 1, November 1982, Pages 16–113, https://doi.org/10.1093/past/97.1.16 Published: 01 November 1982
Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe
General interpretations of the processes of long-term economic change in late medieval and early modern Europe have continued to be constructed almost exclusively in terms of what might loosely be called “objective” economic forces – in particular, demographic fluctuations and the growth of trade and markets. A variety of models have been constructed centring on these forces. But whatever the exact nature of the model, and whether the pressure fo…
The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism
In my original article I began from the idea that social-property systems, once established, tend to set strict limits and impose certain overall patterns upon the course of economic evolution. They do so because they tend to restrict the economic actors to certain limited options, indeed quite specific strategies, in order best to reproduce themselves – that is, to maintain themselves in their established socio-economic positions. On this basis …
La base sociale du développement économique
Why is the United States at War with Iraq
Why is the United States at war with Iraq? It is a lot easier to say what are not the reasons for us intervention in the Gulf than to provide a fully satisfactory account of its presence there. According to the Bush administration, the usa is
The Regulation Approach
In the past two decades the French (or Paris) School of Economic Regulation has developed an ambitious historical-economic theory which has already had a major impact on efforts to understand the current malaise of the capitalist system and the accompanying economic transformations. On the face of it, the
Merchants and revolution
"In Merchants and Revolution Robert Brenner offers a socio-political account of the transformation of English commerce in the century after 1550 and a socio-economic explanation of the political activities and alignments of the London merchant community in the conflicts of the early Stuart period. In a major reinterpretation of long-term commercial change, he shows that new possibilities in the import trades - more so than problems in the traditi…
The World of Maurice Thomson
Who was Maurice Thomson? Arguably the most significant English colonial merchant of the early seventeenth century, Thomson plays no part in such pioneering accounts of the commercial development of England's Atlantic empire as Wesley Frank Craven's The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 1607-1689 (1949) or Bernard Bailyn's New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (1955).1 Thomson apparently left no diary, account books, or othe…
Merchants and Revolution
The Economics of Global Turbulence (Special Issue)
Reply to Critics
Research Article| August 01 1999 Reply to Critics Robert Brenner Robert Brenner Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (1999) 19 (2): 61–85. https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-19-2-61 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Robert Brenner; Reply to Critics. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 1 August 1999; 19…
Competition and Class
The postwar economy is widely understood to have gone through two major phases. During the long boom between the end of the 1940s and the early 1970s, most of the advanced capitalist economies (outside the United States and the United Kingdom) experienced record-breaking rates of investment, output, productivity, and wage growth, along with low unemployment and only brief, mild recessions. But during the long downturn that followed, the growth of…
The Boom and the Bubble
In the last four years, the US economy has posted its best performance since the sixties. What is the connexion between the formidable boom in the real economy and the historically unprecedented bubble on the stock market? Could the inflation of asset values far beyond the rise in corporate earnings be preparing a Japanese-style nemesis
The world economy at the turn of the millennium toward boom or crisis
This paper addresses the question of whether the long stagnation that gripped the world economy for a quarter century after 1973 has been transcended. To do so, it offers an account of the long downturn, in terms of the fall and failure of recovery of the profitability, especially in the international manufacturing sector, itself rooted in the rise and persistence of over-capacity and over-production on a system-wide scale, originating in the int…
The Low Countries in the Transition to Capitalism
England's Divergence from China's Yangzi Delta
In the great divergence, Kenneth Pomeranz (2000) proposes a radical revision of our understanding of the pattern of economic evolution in the eastern and western ends of Eurasia over the course of the early modern and modern periods, roughly late Ming and Qing. A recent restatement of the standard or traditional view can be found in the macro-economic historian Angus Maddison's account of world economic development in the very long run,The World …
Vers le précipice
New Boom or New Bubble
The shape of the US economy as it emerges from recession, in election year. With the giant manufacturing sector still crippled by over-capacity, can the take-off be sustained by bubble-driven finance, retail and construction booms
From theory to history
Introduction Mann's post-modern enlightenment conception Michael Mann's notion of ‘The European Dynamic’ lies at the heart, and is the ultimate payoff, of his enquiry into the sources of social power. It constitutes his account of the emergence of both the modern agro-industrial economy and the modern centralized state and international system of multiple states, in terms of what he understands to be the four networks and sources of social power.…
Economics (16 works) · Political science (15 works) · Political Economy and Marxism (10 works) · Law (8 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Economic history (7 works) · Geography (7 works) · History (7 works) · Politics (7 works) · Capitalism (6 works)