2274 – Adam Tooze: American Power in the Long 20th Century (lecture 2019)

“In 2002 Tooze was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for Modern History for his first book, Statistics and the German State, 1900–1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge.^{[citation needed]} He first came to prominence for his economic study of the Third Reich, The Wages of Destruction, which was one of the winners of the 2006 Wolfson History Prize,^[15] and a broad-based history of the First World War with The Deluge, published in 2014. He then widened his scope to study the financial crash of 2008 and its economic and geopolitical consequences with Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, published in 2018, for which he won the 2019 Lionel Gelber Prize.^[16]

Tooze writes for numerous publications, including the Financial Times,^[17] London Review of Books,^[18] New Left Review,^[19] The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian,^[20] Foreign Policy,^[21] and Die Zeit.^[22] Since 2022 he sits on the board of the ZOE Institute for Future-fit economies.^[23]” (wiki)

More by Adam Tooze on London Review of Books: https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/adam-tooze

From the YT page: The history of American power, as it is commonly written, is a weighty subject, a matter of military and economic heft, of ‘throw-weight’, of resource mobilisation and material culture, of ‘boots on the ground’. In his lecture, Adam Tooze examines an alternative, counterintuitive vision of America, as a power defying gravity. This image gives us a less materialistic, more fantastical and more unstable vision of America’s role in the world.

By subscribing as a non-payed member to Adam Tooze Chartbook substack (I urge the one who can afford it to do it!) – I felt I entered some of deep end-hole of the “Matrix”, a place where stats and economic pieces of news meet policy making and even arts. He is one of the most active internationally (planetarily) “connected” people I know (and I do not mind using this over abused word when it matches). From the current Ukraine War to the so-colled New Cold War, from the Inflation Reduction Act to de-carbonization policies – this is a place to get your information. He is also not one of these usual pundits or experts – isolated and somehow affiliated to an ominous think tank, but a historian specialized on the war economy of Germany and one with a solid Keynsian background. At the same time he is a self confessed liberal Keynesian and not afraid to admit it. He also reads a lot, and follows a LOT of empirical evidence from just about everywhere. He’s also used to track down Marxist takes on the energy crisis – on the instrumentalization of the energy crisis by the fossil fuel industries (in what he calls a “Kaleckian moment” – Kalecki being this Polish left wing Keynesian that anticipated the resistance of the business lobby in thw face of government initiatives for full employment). He’s also challenging a lot of basic assumption – regarding China or the US at this crucial moment. What I like about his approach os the dynamic feeling – almost procesual caracter that is deeply informed but does not give in to settled fact or lazy thinking.

Here is the time to forget all what you thought you knew. We take the American century as being an inevitable outcome, an accomplished fact, from the closure of the West, its golden spike – also called The Last Spike toward the middle of the 19th c – to the disappearance of its native first nations (they are still around and still resisting oppression & depredation!). Well, here is a crash course into why the US as a great power of the 20th c or winner of the Cold War was more of a funambulist act. This is an important lecture to watch to follow because it makes all this triumph, inevitability and causal efficacy of the US as something manufactured, or at best an ad-hoc momentary or emergency issue. Stay with Tooze till the end and u will not regret it. Beside the summary of several other intersting books he quotes (such as Irresistble Empire or Fear Itself), he aims at starts revising (it is a revisionist history in this sense) some of the most cherished notions about America’s place in the world. As one question from the public aptly observed – it is “a great man history” take, and this feels a bit regressive to focus on a central banker, and a US central banker at that (Timothy Franz Geithner), but Geithner is somehow less known than Rubin, Alan Greenspan or Larry Summers. The financial history books of the late 20th feels they somehow missed how Geithner has “defied gravity” or why he put it in these terms. Globalization did not start with the late 40s after-war institutions highlighted by the extrordinary biographic book on the life of Maynard Keyenes (the so-called Washington Consensus at the Bretton Woods Conference) in earnest – but only in the 1990s. What he makes clear is that the Cold War was very nearly becoming hot during the 1980s and the war games of the Able Archer 1983 NATO exercise. There are longer histories here than the complacent aberration of the Trump event might suggest – and Tooze speaks about how the Marshall Plan, the Bretton Woods and the New Deal was built on a very peculiar coalition: Northern liberals, progressives, labor and the Solid South. Even the very notion of Manifest Destiny makes things less settled or anchored in reality or certitude. That is precisely the vote that has shifted to the Republicans. He has for lack of a better word – a dialectical view on the US, and he is more interested not in the Global New Order or the 800 US military bases around the world but in the new generation of ordering efforts by the US ruling elites. An order that somehow flies in the sense of common sense or even the gravitational pull of such players like China (who in one mentioned graph is supposed to have poured more concrete btw 2010 and 2013 than the whole of the US in the 20th c!).