What does this picture make you think of? What does it make you think of if you know that Kristallnacht has just occurred and that the next day the young boy pictured will board a train on the Kindertransport which ferried thousands of Jewish children from Nazi Germany to Britain from late 1938?
The boy pictured thinks you’re, probably overdoing it. It’s a picture of family life. The boy is Gerd Bernstein. Or was. He came to Australia and changed his name to the one we all knew him by: Bern Brent. Bern died on Thursday, 7th September, aged 100, the last living Dunera Boy in Australia. This is from an essay written by Seumas Spark, the coauthor of several books on the Dunera.
The thing that struck me about the essay is Bern’s refusal to entertain dramatically negative narratives of the Dunera. Just like my father. I guess one way to keep you from playing the victim when through no fault of your own you’re incarcerated and several years going stir crazy behind barbed wire would be to realise that you had been lucky to be kept out of harm’s way while the entire world descend into madness, war and genocide on an unimaginable scale with your own family being the target.
After the visual history appeared, Bern and I discussed readers’ reactions to this photograph and the intense, heavy sadness it prompted in many, me included. Bern would have none of it.
Here’s Dunera Boy George Rapp, on the subject
In Memoriam
Have you heard my story most brave of the thousand dead men without grave in that wonderful town with the moon upside down and the wires in need of a shave?
Each man is a corpse, as he sits decaying and doubting his wits whilst far, far away, where the night is the day his world is breaking to bits. . . .
I’ll conclude with the last few paragraphs of a speech I gave to the Dunera reunion when there were a few more of them around. Nov 2016:
So in conclusion I’d like to address the Dunera Boys who are with us today. As he was dying, my Dad allowed himself to think of the blighted lives of his parents’ generation. If they were not killed in WWI, they were ruined in the depression and if they survived that they were engulfed in what came after.
The Dunera Boys were witnesses, albeit from afar, to the very worst things people are capable of. But they made it through to better times – and helped build the peace and prosperity their children and their children’s children would inhabit. I thank them and honour them.
A week or so ago I was engaged in a truly cross-cultural experience. Travelling on a nineteenth century technology – a tram, I was using my 21st century smartphone to read an article about a sixteenth and seventeenth century playwright – Shakespeare. Somehow it struck me that the words I read – the last lines of Shakespeare’s play King Lear – were a fitting end to this speech:
The oldest have borne most. We that are young Shall never see so much, nor live so long.
Leonard Adam's Kreutzer Sonata, performed in the camp, 1942
Vale Bern Brent. Vale the Dunera Boys.
Bern exerted a strong influence on the writing of the two volumes of Dunera Lives, saving us from mistakes and misinterpretations, and suggesting lines of enquiry that emerged as themes in the books. He was our most prolific and important informant. If our telling of a story differed from the one he knew, he always gave our version a fair hearing. On the odd occasion, we might even have convinced him.
On other occasions, not at all. In Dunera Lives we took a strong line on Winston Churchill’s role in the Dunera affair. While Churchill’s wartime government would later issue an apology of sorts to the Dunera internees for the appalling treatment they suffered, by that time many had already concluded that British liberalism was a chimera. Bern was of the opposite view. He held that Churchill had no choice but to act as he did, and that to suggest otherwise was to allow historical judgement to be derailed by the luxury of hindsight.
This position was entwined with another view to which Bern stuck fast. The Dunera had delivered him to Australia, where he made a rewarding and productive life. As he said often, there was nothing for him in postwar Europe, whereas in Australia, as a young man with energy and purpose, he was able to embrace education and new beginnings, free of the restrictions and prejudices that had shaped his life in Germany.
For Bern, his good fortune was the story, and this mattered more than issues such as the question of Churchill’s culpability. He thought the Dunera the luckiest thing to ever happen to him. Perhaps the fact that his parents survived the Holocaust also influenced this position. …
But never did he allow the pain and injustice of the past to determine the direction of his life. It was a remarkably brave choice, and one that not all Dunera boys were able to make, or even wanted to.
Willows and wind vanes: fixing economic forecasting
In the wake of my column proposing that central banks should hold open forecasting competitions - and particularly suggesting it for Bernanke's review of the Bank of England's forecasting, Gene Tunny and I discuss the issues in more detail and some of the reactions to the column appearing in the comments section. Kenneth Grahame and Wind in the Willows comes up. And why not?
I think you’ll find it pretty interesting.
If you'd like to listen to the audio, find it here.
Dogmatism, Data, and Public Health
The case of passive smoking
An excellent article showing how competition for what the philosopher Alasdair McIntyre calls external goods (money, fame, status) can compromise the internal goods necessary to the basic integrity of professional thought. We are witnessing the upshot of that in the various integrity scandals associated with the banks, Qantas, Robodebt, PwC and KPMG to name a few.
Marketising universities has intensified those problems as I argued here.
In any event, we are in the advanced stages of something McIntyre prophesied in his classic 1981 book After Virtue.
In any society which recognized only external goods, competitiveness would be the dominant and even exclusive feature… We should therefore expect that, if in a particular society the pursuit of external goods were to become dominant, the concept of the virtues might suffer first attrition and then perhaps something near total effacement, although simulacra might abound.
Anyway, on with the show.
Twenty years ago, I found myself in the middle of a different health controversy, which seems almost quaint in retrospect. This was the question of how dangerous it is for a non-smoker to be exposed to other people’s tobacco smoke. … However, because [of] the raging “tobacco wars” of the 1970s and 1980s, what should have been a relatively simple scientific question became transmuted into a moral campaign. …
The result has been an unqualified success in terms of public health—the prevalence of smoking declined from 45 percent in 1954 to 12 percent in 2023, with a concomitant decline in exposure to passive smoking. However …
After several years of work, our paper was published by the BMJ on May 17th, 2003, addressing the same question Takeshi Hirayama had posed 22 years earlier in the same journal: whether living with a spouse who smokes increases the mortality risk of a spouse who never smoked. Based on our analysis of the American Cancer Society’s data on over 100,000 California residents, we concluded that non-smokers who lived with a smoker did not have elevated mortality and, therefore, the data did “not support a causal relation between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality.”
The publication caused an immediate outpouring of vitriol and indignation, even before it was available online. … The focus was overwhelmingly on our conclusion—not on the data we analyzed and the methods we used. Neither of us had never experienced anything like the response to this paper. It appeared that simply raising doubts about passive smoking was beyond the bounds of acceptable inquiry. …
Particularly striking was the fact that not one of our epidemiology colleagues wrote in to vouch for our integrity. …
There is the well-known tendency among those who favor a particular hypothesis to “cherry-pick” the data, selecting those results which support their position. In a systematic review and meta-analysis published in 2006, Enstrom and I showed how this occurred in the passive-smoking literature. We laid out all the results of the major epidemiologic studies and highlighted which results were selected for inclusion in different meta-analyses and how the selection influenced the results. It is telling that this paper, which demonstrated a high degree of overlap among studies, got very little attention, in contrast to our BMJ paper. …
It took two sociologists to bring out the deeper significance of the responses to the paper. In an article published in 2005 under the title “Silencing Science: Partisanship and the Career of a Publication Disputing the Dangers of Secondhand Smoke,” Sheldon Ungar and Dennis Bray analyzed the rapid responses to the BMJ that appeared in the first two months following publication of the article, as well as international newspaper coverage. The authors started from the premise that the scientific enterprise presupposes an openness to divergent ideas, even though contemporary science is increasingly subject to pressures stemming from “commercial exploitation of science, expanded media coverage of research, growing public concern with risks, and the greater harnessing of science to social and policy goals.” Unger and Bray used the term partisans to describe individuals who not only have an unreasoned allegiance to a particular cause but who also engage in efforts to silence opposing points of view.
Among their findings were that the rapid responses can best be understood as an attempt by partisans to silence results that go against the reigning consensus concerning the health effects of passive smoking. Drawing attention to the vehemence of many of the negative rapid responses, the authors commented that, “Silencing is based on intimidation, as partisans employ a strident tone full of sarcasm and moral indignation. There are elements of an authoritarian cult involved here: uphold the truth that secondhand smoke kills—or else!” They proceeded to examine the concern, voiced by many who attacked the paper, that it would attract extensive media coverage and set back progress in achieving bans on smoking.
But contrary to this expectation, they found that the study received relatively little media attention and that only one tobacco company referred to the study on its website. Their explanation for this surprising lack of media coverage, given the strength of public opinion regarding smoking and passive smoking, was that the media engaged in “self-silencing.” Their overall conclusion was that “the public consensus about the negative effects of passive smoke is so strong that it has become part of a truth regime that cannot be intelligibly questioned.” …
Unlike the questionable risks that receive so much media attention, the work that leads to transformative achievements typically takes place over a long period of time and away from the spotlight. We should develop an appreciation for the arduous process of trial-and-error that has led to such triumphs as the development of vaccines against human papillomavirus, the development of anti-retrovirals for the treatment of HIV-AIDS, and the development of effective mRNA vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 built on research conducted 15 years earlier. Armed with examples like these, we will be better able to resist the siren-call of risks that never seem to reach the level of having a detectable effect.
An interesting article by Greg Conti in the crossover journal Compact.
In recent years, as opposition to the cluster of ideological shibboleths known as wokeness has become the unifying cause of the political right, negative polarization has ensured that much of the left continues to fall in line with the latest progressive cause. Nonetheless, one strain of anti-woke politics has managed to gain some influence within the Democratic coalition: so-called popularism, identified especially with the pollster/strategist David Shor [on which see David Walker’s post at Troppo]. Rather than contest woke ideology on the merits, popularists limit themselves to pointing out its unpopularity with voters outside of highly educated settings. Politicians attempting to appease the boutique activist concerns of their far-left college-educated voters, they argue, will turn off working-class voters and thereby set back the liberal agenda as a whole. …
There is doubtless some truth to all this. But the popularist critique of wokeness is hampered by its limited aims, which amount to keeping Trump out of office and electing Democrats. In other words, popularists offer only a self-interested reason for liberals to temper their aggressive cultural posture—namely, that if they don’t, they will wind up elevating their enemies. But the phenomenon they identify is also politically regrettable for principled reasons. This is because there is an important connection between a vibrant and genuinely inclusive democracy and a small-c conservatism that opposes incessant elite-led cultural revolution. In other words, the core problem with wokeness isn’t that it is bad for the Democrats, but that it is bad for democracy. …
To adopt a phrase from the political philosopher Claude Lefort, there is no truly democratic system absent “legibility,” by which he meant that those portions of the population remote from the political-cultural apices are nevertheless “capable of understanding the political game.” The kind of well-heeled cultural progressivism which now sets the moral tone and discursive rules in many Western states, by its very nature, compromises this legibility, and widens the gap between elites and non-elites which it is the goal of a functional democracy to minimize. …
It seems hardly a coincidence that the period of breakneck cultural transformation through which we have been living has coincided with a rise in economic inequality, a growing disaffection with the central institutions of state and civil society, and survey results consistently showing a loss of faith in democracy. The latter, I suspect, might best be interpreted as indicating not that citizens no longer believe in the democratic ideal, but that they hardly feel they live in real democracies any more. …
A picture of the author (below) and a tree (above). From the author’s university website. Very nice too.
The old labor left in the West, which prevailed before the turn to “postmaterialist” considerations and identity politics that mark the neoliberal era, understood these truths intuitively. When these coalitions were capable of winning electoral victories and defending the needs of broad non-elite constituencies, their programs—whatever a few highfalutin social theorists might have wanted—didn’t entail transforming the working classes into a higher sort of being or foisting new values and traditions on them. Rather, they presented their mission predominantly as protecting the ability of working people to live according to their own values and traditions by granting them the material security, civic status, and organizational capacity to resist at once the morally and traditionally dissolvent effects of unchecked markets and the dominion of the better-resourced classes above them in the social hierarchy. It must be admitted that despite some great successes, these parties did not always prove satisfactory vessels for achieving this aim. But at least they aimed at something other than a kind of alien rule at home—something other than what political scientist Michael Lind recently referred to as a permanent cultural revolution from on high.
Another excellent essay by Brink Lindsay whose work I’ve featured previously. He’s moved a lot from his early support for Ayn Rand, and latter support for libertarianism. Today he’s senior vice president at the Niskanen Center, which is rightly touted as one of the most interesting think tanks around.
When I was a kid, there were still extensive spaces in American social life relatively free from commercialization, guided by values and goals other than maximizing economic competitiveness and profit-taking. But those holdovers from a traditional, pre-capitalist past have been steadily weakened and then eliminated. And as a result, notwithstanding the post-1960s celebration of diversity and the subsequent explosion of subcultural variety, in the crucial realm of motives we are becoming increasingly uniform. …
I’m also old enough to remember when Sunday was still set apart, shielded by law and custom from the full brunt of commercial hustle and bustle. … Over the course of the 70s and 80s, Sundays lost most of their distinctiveness. Just as the day of rest once stood apart, so did certain ways of making a living. Medicine and law became known as “learned professions” in medieval times, and practitioners developed special codes of ethics that were supposed to orient their work toward public service rather than commercial gain. …
Another medieval institution that survived into the modern world, the university, also stood apart. American universities were originally dedicated to molding the character of the future elite through humanistic education. … Whether they focused on teaching the liberal arts or advancing the frontiers of scientific knowledge, universities were clearly governed by a distinct ethos that prioritized the “life of the mind” over the practical business of getting and spending. …
But the dominant trend was clearly toward increasing vocationalism, and that trend has only accelerated in recent decades. … With college now the nearly-exclusive gatekeeper for the meritocracy, the further commercialization of the campus experience proved irresistible. By 2020, history, English, foreign languages, and philosophy majors accounted for less than 5 percent of degrees conferred [down from 17 percent in the 1970s]. Course requirements were scaled back or eliminated altogether; outside of the more rigorous STEM fields, college became a “buffet” of random specialized electives. Students started to be thought of as “customers”; climbing walls and lazy rivers proliferated. …
I feel about the passing of the pre-modern holdovers in American life much as I do about the passing of the industrial working class. I don’t mourn either’s exit, but I do lament what has followed. Blue-collar life was physically debilitating and intellectually stunted; we cannot wish for the return of filthy smokestacks and soul-deadening assembly lines. Even so, when we look out at the atomization and anomie so prevalent today outside the elite, we are hard pressed to deny that, in important ways, the quality of life for ordinary people has declined. In similar fashion, I’m no reactionary who wants to live in a world of invidiously restricted opportunity. On the contrary, I celebrate the fact that women and minorities are no longer excluded from the economic mainstream, society’s juiciest plums are no longer reserved for an inbred old boys’ network, and serious academic study is no longer available only to a cossetted few.
The demolition of the old institutions and social structures was a necessary step in social progress, clearing the landscape for new and better social forms. But we have bulldozed away the old, only to leave the social landscape flattened and denuded. Our failure to build anything new — to move past deconstruction and on to reconstruction — strikes me as a kind of regress. We have been reduced to a grim, economistic tunnel vision: all means other than competition, all ends other than profit, have been shunted to the margins of life. Some recent poll results are illustrative. In a survey of people ages 18 to 40, 75 percent said that making a good living was necessary for a fulfilling life, while only 32 percent said the same thing about marriage. Meanwhile, when parents were asked what they consider most important for their children, 88 percent said financial independence, and the same percentage said a job they enjoy; only 21 percent said marriage, while a mere 20 percent said children.
Quinn Slobodian on the (Australian) history of capitalism
I’ve recently read Quinn Slobodian’s two most recent books. The Globalists and Crack-up Capitalism.
They’re excellent. I’ve read and even written a fair bit on neoliberalism, but I was quite bowled over by his perspective on it. I have a theory which is that the discipline history is one of the few modern academic disciplines that’s not crippled by its ‘theory’. Economics is the academic discipline in which the tail of theory wags the dog of practice most egregiously. In history, theory isn’t much more than sustained reflection on all aspects of practice. That means that rather than being procrustean (as theory in economics is, it’s protean. It’s anything that it needs to be to enrich practice.
Be that as it may, while I’ve read plenty of books on neoliberalism, the two books I’ve just mentioned focus not so much on the doctrine that neoliberalism developed but rather on what concrete change the neoliberals targeted and what they managed to achieve. And it is pretty gob-smacking.
In 2013, the New York Times published a flattering profile of a clutch of young US historians working on topics of finance, debt, insurance, and risk. ‘In History Departments, It's Up with Capitalism’, the title read.Footnote1 Head shots were included. So unaccustomed are historians to the glare of the spotlight that, flush with equal parts embarrassment and optimism, we birthed a subfield. One observer noted that the article cast young historians as disruptive entrepreneurs and the history of capitalism ‘as a kind of start-up’.Footnote2 There has been a slightly mercenary undercurrent to the subfield ever since: some have cultivated hopes that branding oneself as a historian of capitalism might provide a crucial edge in a tight and tightening job market. Several years on, though, the wave of new job postings in ‘History of Capitalism (HoC)’ remained as speculative as the takeover of the classroom by the MOOC (massive open online course) – twin acronyms on the wreckage-strewn path of higher-ed hype. None of this, of course, makes the investigation of the history of capitalism any less exciting or, considering the concatenating challenges facing humanity, existentially important. But the question remains: how to do it? The New York Times article contrasted the new history of capitalism with the ‘history from below’ that had preceded it. Only a second's reflection leads us to ask whether the experiences of women and people of colour are not quite clearly histories of capitalism as well. So, some clarification is necessary.
One of the most exciting things about this collection of articles in this issue of Australian Historical Studies is how explicit it is in addressing this very question. By looking at the elephant of capitalism from many different angles, we begin to get a sense of what it is as the object of study. The five authors offer us five entry points to a standing challenge, and, whether by chance or design, do so in a way that builds both consecutively and cumulatively across the last two hundred years of Australian history. The articles bear some similarities to work being done in other areas of study but also harbour some striking innovations which no doubt will be picked up elsewhere.
The collection of articles begins with ‘The Capitalist in Colonial History’, featuring a methodological gambit by Ben Huf so brilliant and elegant that it comes as a shock that it's never been done before: to plumb the history of ‘the capitalist’ as an actor's category. Concept histories of the category of ‘the economy’ have united and divided historians of capitalism for two decades now but somehow nobody thought to turn their attention to the capitalist as Huf does.Footnote3 His discoveries are fascinating. Australia, it turns out, was envisioned for much of the nineteenth century as an engine for making capitalists. Huf finds emigrant guides and farming manuals interpellating people as ‘capitalists’ both current and aspirational. Taking centre stage here is not the ‘big capitalist’ of industry, let alone the financier crowding the stock exchange. Rather, reflecting the nature of economic activity in Australia at the time, ‘the capitalist’ was most often meant to be the ‘small capitalist’, the proprietor of the grocery, the apothecary, and the tobacconist. Indeed, the constitutive binary was not the worker and the capitalist but the big and little capitalist. It is only by century's end, with the emergence of an organised workers’ movement alongside the rise of domestic industry, that we begin to see the more familiar caricature of ‘Capital’ as fat, top-hatted and dowdy, against lean, masculine and independent ‘Labour’. Huf's story brings to mind recent work on neoliberal subjectivity, human capital, and market populism.Footnote4 The ‘capitalist’ as a cultivated habitus and self-applied label adds a textured early genealogy to these more recent investigations.
Claire E. Wright's piece, with the enigmatic title ‘The Boarding Pass’, helps us to understand even more clearly why the turn of the twentieth century brought a crystallisation of the capitalist-in-spats of a more familiar kind. Deploying the network analysis she has used to great effect to study scholarly communities in the past, Wright asks how interconnected the corporate elite were that everyone agrees arose in Australia in the early 1900s.Footnote5 Expanding on Huf, she points out that the depression of the 1890s had also ‘hardened class consciousness and weakened mass confidence in capitalist organisation’.Footnote6 Wright finds there was indeed a high level of interconnection: 70 per cent of the largest firms ‘had interlocked directors’. In other words, the caricature was partially true. A ‘big capitalist’ elite had emerged before World War I and it was one that was also largely domestic. Although capital may have been flowing into the country from many national directions, the directorships remained largely homegrown. We see here affirmation of one of the points made most forcefully by the German school of global history around Sebastian Conrad and Jürgen Osterhammel: that the First Age of Globalisation had both centrifugal and centripetal effects.Footnote7 It globalised and nationalised simultaneously. Wright's use of network analysis remains rare in history in comparison to political science but her judicious and illuminating application of the technique helps create hope for its expanded use for other enquiries.
Yves Rees' article, ‘From Socialists to Technocrats’, is a model of concise and compelling argument. If Huf and Wright undertook the History of Capitalism by studying capitalists, self-identified and otherwise, Rees studies those who studied capitalism. What they find is a repetition of what happened elsewhere – but with local variations. As in the UK and the US, the discipline of economics arose first as a body of progressive reformers, bent on applying knowledge to the conduct of government in service of productivity, social improvement and, often, economic equality.Footnote8 As in other countries, World War I is the crucible of empiricist economics as barriers between business and state are bulldozed for the sake of total mobilisation and statistic-gathering becomes an intensive – and globe-spanning – undertaking.
Read alongside the pieces that precede it, one can see how the discipline of economics is also transformed into a kind of court science for the very corporate elite that Wright and Huf describe, rising with the twentieth century. Rees shows how the respectability of the economics profession is effectively premised on its willingness to put itself at the service of that very class. ‘In this new marriage of business and science’, Rees writes felicitously, ‘Australian economics shrugged off its rebellious youth and began to naturalise the same capitalist order that had, only years earlier, been the focus of scrutiny’.Footnote9 Rees sees clearly how the very claim of objectivity, under which this new regime trades, hides its own politics: ‘In practice, this reorientation towards positivism was no less embedded in questions of power and ideology than the leftist critiques’ that preceded it.Footnote10 Prioritising the economy as an abstract entity leads to ‘narrowing the sphere open to political contestation’, as Patricia Clavin put it in another context.Footnote11
In the managerial economics born in the 1930s, the economy becomes machine-like, an apparatus able to be measured, engineered, and tinkered with.Footnote12 In ‘The Cultivation of an Australian Identity’, Jack Fahey shows some of this process in miniature in the construction of an actual machine – the motor car. Aspirations and anxieties about capitalism's unfolding across territories of nation and world are performed here at a small scale. Must the automobile be entirely nationally created? Was dependence on other parts of the world good or bad? To use more current terminology, did the supply chain sustain or shackle the national body? What affective relationship should people have to the things they buy – and produce? The tensions of global political economy are on display here – often manifesting as a repression of the worldly origins of the things we like to see as somehow specially our own. This is the mystique of capitalism unpacked by Fahey in the case of the first Australian-produced car and through the public relations material of General Motors (GM). Reminiscent of Victoria de Grazia's work on postwar consumer culture, where capitalism is both a structure of feeling and a mode of production, Fahey's story has a fitting arc as it passes through the era of Fordism – always both global and national – to its denouement in the post-global financial crisis world when GM ceases manufacturing in Australia in 2013.Footnote13
Most of the articles in this collection operate effectively as immanent critiques: they take capitalism on its own terms and sometimes in its own words and seek its neuralgic points from within. They reveal disavowed politics; delusions of autonomy; dreams of the nation and the world. The final essay, ‘Indigenous Self-Determination under Settler Colonial Capitalism’, by Tim Rowse, stands out for its effort to stand outside of capitalism's own narrative of modernity. His interpretative move is to ask whether we must treat Indigenous populations under Australian modern capitalism as doubled figures. They are always both feudal actors – required to remain somehow different and apart from the patterns of waged life – and liberal actors – compensated through wages in a deferred state of catch-up to their ‘fellow’ Australians.
Rowse's exploration of capitalism in terms of social relations is a fitting way to end the collection as it loops back to the (false) transition originally noted in the New York Times: the supposed transition from the ‘history from below’ to the ‘History of Capitalism’. The contributions here show that the concerns of these two historiographies are shared. Who has power? Who gains? Who loses? How are patterns of gain and loss embedded and routinised to the point that they either seem natural or become incontestable? The sobriquet of History of Capitalism can be accused with some fairness of a lexicological teleology: by writing the history of capitalism for the last few hundred years, we imply willy-nilly that capitalism was the only possible endpoint. A defensible History of Capitalism is one that remains shot through with struggle and a keen eye on systems of disempowerment and the thwarted possibility of alternative, unrealised futures. These articles keep hope alive that just such a subfield is coming into maturation.
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Jennifer Schuessler, ‘In History Departments, It's Up with Capitalism’, New York Times, 6 April 2013.
3 See Susan Buck-Morss, ‘Envisioning Capital: Political Economy on Display’, Critical Inquiry 21, no. 2 (1995): 434–67; Timothy Mitchell, ‘Fixing the Economy’, Cultural Studies 12, no. 1 (1998): 82–101; Margaret Schabas, The Natural Origins of Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); J. Adam Tooze, ‘Imagining National Economies: National and International Economic Statistics, 1900–1950’, in Imagining Nations, ed. Geoffrey Cubitt (New York: Manchester University Press, 1998), 212–28. I address this debate throughout Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).
4 See Sören Brandes, ‘The Market's People: Milton Friedman and the Making of Neoliberal Populism’, in Mutant Neoliberalism: Market Rule and Political Ruptures, eds William Callison and Zachary Manfredi (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019); Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015); Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (New York: Zone Books, 2017).
5 Claire E. Wright, ‘The 1920s Viennese Intellectual Community as a Center for Ideas Exchange: A Network Analysis’, History of Political Economy 48, no. 4 (2016): 593–623.
6 Claire E. Wright, ‘The Boarding Pass: Pathways to Corporate Networks in Early Twentieth Century Australia’, Australian Historical Studies 50, no. 4 (2019): this issue.
7 See Sebastian Conrad, ‘Globalization Effects: Mobility and Nation in Imperial Germany, 1880–1914’, Journal of Global History 3, no. 1 (2008): 43–66; Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels P. Petersson, Globalization: A Short History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
8 See Michael A. Bernstein, A Perilous Progress: Economists and Public Purpose in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Thomas C. Leonard, Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Mary S. Morgan, The History of Econometric Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
9 Yves Rees, ‘From Socialists to Technocrats: The Depoliticisation of Australian Economics’, Australian Historical Studies 50, no. 4 (2019): this issue.
10 Ibid.
11 Patricia Clavin, ‘Men and Markets: Global Capital and the International Economy’, in Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History, eds Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 87.
12 See Mary S. Morgan, The World in the Model: How Economists Work andThink (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
13 Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005). See also Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
