Faculty Book Talk: Cornel Ban Discusses Ruling Ideas
Cornel Ban, Assistant Professor of International Relations and Co-Director of the Global Economic Governance Initiative, kicked off the 2016 Faculty Book Talk Series with a discussion on his new book, Ruling Ideas: How Global Neoliberalism Goes Local.
The event was attended by Pardee School faculty and students and included a talk by Ban on Ruling Ideas as well as a question and answer session.
Ruling Ideas challenges conventional explanations of the global diffusion of neoliberalism and emphasizes the agency of local translators. Ban theorizes and empirically tests for the first time the mechanisms that make neoliberal ideas become more radicalized in some countries and more moderate in others and examines how neoliberal hybrids survive crises.
“It attempts to provide more precision in terms of how we understand what the real economic ideas that govern us look like,” Ban said. “In the process it slaughters a number of holy cows in terms of how we understand neoliberalism, and provides a theory of how economic paradigms travel in general.”
In Ruling Ideas Ban offers a historical perspective which covers the Franco period in Spain and the Ceausescu period in Romania, discussing the economic integration of these countries into the EU and continues through Europe’s Great Recession and the European debt crisis. The broad historical coverage enables a careful analysis of how neoliberalism rules in times of stability and crisis and under different political systems.
“It’s not enough to say that neoliberalism has many hybrids. You need to explain why you have this hybrid in Spain or this hybrid in Romania,” Ban said. “It’s kind of lazy to say that everything is a hybrid, you have to explain why the hybrids look the way they do.”