Socialists Will Never Understand Elizabeth Warren (I’d have chosen a different title)

The Democratic candidate is part of a long intellectual tradition that’s gone forgotten in the West: pro-market leftism.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s politics seem like a tangle of contradictions. She wants free markets, but also wants to tax billionaires’ capital. Her enemies on the right claim that she is a socialist, but Warren describes herself as “capitalist to my bones.”

Warren’s politics are so confusing because we have forgotten that a pro-capitalist left is even possible. For a long time, political debate in the United States has been a fight between conservatives and libertarians on the right, who favored the market, and socialists and liberals on the left, who favored the government.

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Other Writing:

Chapter in an Edited Volume

“Global Institutions without a Global State,” in the Oxford Handbook on Historical Institutionalism – with Martha Finnemore – eds. Orfeo Fioretos, Tulia Falletti and Adam Sheingate

Historical institutionalism has not yet grappled with the deeper intellectual challenges of “going global.” Understanding international, particularly global, institutions, requires attention to and theorizing of a global social context, one that does not rely on a national government in the background, ready to enforce laws and rules. It also requires theories about the global organizations ...
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Essay

Into the Breach: China Miéville’s Other Reality

When Granta compiled its decennial list of the best young British writers ten years ago, it did not include China Miéville, thank to his well-known connections to fantasy and science fiction. Yet it paid him the even greater compliment of including him by name in its salon des refusés. Miéville is unabashedly a writer of ...
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