Browsing by Author "Bailey, Kyle"

This thesis advances and substantiates the claim that financialization and hegemony in the twentieth century are two sides of the same process. It begins by reviewing the insights and limitations of existing theories of hegemony and world order in the international political economy and international relations literature. Foundational categories in the theory of hegemony, such as capital, the state, money, finance and globalization are then re-examined with the intent of superseding some of the major limitations of existing theories. This re-examination yields the rudiments of a social and political theory of United States hegemony, one that understands the structure of hegemony as being rooted in both the state and capitalist society and explains its historical evolution with reference to the successive attempts of US state institutions to problematize, manage and contain the social antagonisms, structural contradictions and strategic dilemmas generated by the expanded reproduction of capitalist social relations. These theoretical insights are then deployed in order to construct a historical account of the material and social reproduction and transformation of US hegemony from the interwar period to the 1980s. This account demonstrates much more concretely the complex and contradictory historical dialectic of financialization and the state that has been the motor force of hegemony in the twentieth century.