Moving Money: Banking and Finance in the Industrialized World

Extract

Moving Money: Banking and Finance in the Industrialized World. By Daniel Verdier. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 326p. $65.00 cloth, $23.99 paper.

Although it may seem arcane or prosaic to some, the literature on the political economy of money and finance has burgeoned within political science since the mid-1980s. The two decades after the end of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s was a time of considerable macroeconomic volatility and cooperative effort to coordinate suitable policy responses. This stimulated scholarly inquiry. Since then, financial globalization has drawn in those interested in the challenge financial markets seem to pose to the official political order centered on states. This developing political science research tradition has, however, existed on the periphery of two other longer-standing literatures. The first is the economic history of monetary and financial affairs. This tradition has exhaustively investigated the formation, organization, and implications of the classical gold standard and the Bretton Woods order. This research stimulated many of the political science pioneers and remains seminal and vibrant. The other tradition to mention is that impulse in the social sciences to identify and characterize different forms, tendencies, or cycles in capitalism, and link these to distinct political and social orders. This much more controversial way of thinking has its origins in the great nineteenth-century systems of ideas. In more recent times, Karl Polanyi, Joseph A. Schumpeter, Alexander Gerschenkron, John Zysman, and the many authors associated with core-periphery and world systems theory have kept the tradition alive. Although many readers will assume Daniel Verdier's new book is unproblematically part of the political science tradition, it should be read squarely as a product of this last tendency, making use of the established historical work to generate a reinterpretation.