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OUR MILLENIUM: POLITICAL SCIENCE CONFRONTS THE GLOBAL CORPORATE ECONOMY
Theodore J. Lowi
; Senior Professor of American Institutions at the Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, U.S.A.
Abstract
Of all the freedoms for which the cold war was fought, free eterprise was deemed sufficient for acquisition of all other freedoms. The task of political science should now be to expose the loose and insecure moorings of economic ideology and to develop an approach more appropriate to the realities of our time. Our new millennium is a corporate millenium that has been interpreted in the hegemonic model to mean private and free (that is, unregulated) markets. However, any theory capable of incorporating the corporation has to be one of political economy. The first section of this article identifies six state-provided assumptions homo economicus has to be able to make prior to making or entering a market, without which homo economicus stays home. The second section puts the issue in a global context by identifying three developmental tracks – macro, meso, and micro. Their existence denies the possibility of a pure economic theory of globalization. The third section describes the distinctive politics of each of the three tracks, demonstrating still more conslusively that political economy is the only approach competent to deal with the new corporate millenium. In conclusion, the autor argues that political economy is and should be the new political science that this new era requires.
Keywords
global political science; globalization; market economy; political economy
Hrčak ID:
24535
URI
Publication date:
28.1.2002.
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