William I. Robinson, "Epochal Crisis: The Exhaustion of Global Capitalism" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Epochal Crisis: The Exhaustion of Global Capitalism (Cambridge UP, 2025) is the most recent book from Professor William Robinson, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This title is the latest in excellent and ground-breaking titles from Professor Robinson in a distinguished career, where he began writing books on United States intervention into Nicaragua in the late 1980s and early 1990s, expanding this focus on United States hegemony more broadly in the ground-breaking book Promoting Polyarchy in 1996, up to then grappling with the totality of the capitalist world system more recently in titles such as The Global Police State in 2020, Can Global Capitalism Endure in 2022, and War, Global Capitalism and Resistance in 2024, alongside many other books.

Professor Robinson’s latest instalment we discuss in this episode, Epochal Crisis, tracks the multifactorial crises that are impacting the global capitalist system today, across economic, social, ecological, political and other dimensions, and how these intersecting and overlapping crises are degrading or exhausting the ability for capitalism to renew itself. This contemporaneous epochal crisis, as Professor Robinson carefully details, is catalysing morbid symptoms that express themselves as wars, unprecedented violence, ecological emergencies, rock-bottom political legitimacy and a host of other dangerous and cataclysmic effects. Epochal Crisis is both a wide-ranging and extensive investigation into the current, overlapping and intersecting crises that are plaguing the world capitalist system, as it appears in its final, violent death throes, and also a highly engaging work that is easy to digest and will help you understand the very naked reality of capital crisis that is so obvious to us all today. Thankfully, Professor Robinson also addresses what we can do in this latest, perhaps final, epochal breakdown of the capitalist system, to find some revolutionary hope in these dark times.

Elliot Dolan-Evans is a sessional lecturer and tutor in law at Monash University and RMIT. His research investigates the political economy of global capitalism, forms of international governance, and questions of war and peace. His first book, Making War Safe for Capitalism: The World Bank, IMF and the Conflict in Ukraine, is now out with Bristol University Press.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(600)

How Girls Achieve

How Girls Achieve points out a simple and overlooked truth: most schools never had girls in mind to begin with. That is why the world needs what Dr. Sally Nuamah calls “feminist schools,” deliberately...

1 Okt 1h 4min

Transient Becoming: Self-Improvement and Capitalist Virtuousness in Contemporary China with Gil Hizi (NUS Press, 2026)

How do individuals seek to become better persons in contemporary China? How do they navigate the complex demands of personal growth given the fragmentation of China’s moral landscape? Gil Hizi’s caref...

30 Sep 42min

Apocalyptic Abolitionism: How Millennialists Helped Abolish Slavery and Reform America with Kevin M. Burton (NYU Press, 2026)

Shows how apocalypticism helped drive anti-slavery abolitionism and inspire progressive social reform in nineteenth-century America In March 1844, Melissa Botsford of Meriden, Connecticut, defiantly l...

27 Sep 42min

Pushpesh Kumar et al. eds., "Sociology of Gender in India: Contemporary Issues and Perspectives" (Cambridge UP, 2026)

Sociology of Gender in India brings together feminist and queer scholarship to chart the changing landscape of gender debates in Indian sociology. Spanning over five decades of disciplinary evolution,...

19 Sep 1h 8min

Class Struggle and the New York Mets: A Conversation with AM Gittlitz

With his riveting chronicle of the New York Mets baseball team, AM Gittlitz is emerging as a rising star in the field of popular social history. Writing with what the Wall Street Journal calls “the lu...

18 Sep 55min

Jim Gaona Ellis, "Educators As Designers: The Hidden Architecture of Learning" (Harvard Education Press, 2026)

An invitation to K-12 educators to reimagine their roles through the transformative lens of design In Educators as Designers, Jim Gaona Ellis draws on Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and the lates...

17 Sep 50min

Ming-sho Ho, "Be Water: Collective Improvisation in Hong Kong's Anti-Extradition Protests" (Temple University Press, 2025)

During the eventful summer of 2019 in Hong Kong, the Be Water Revolution formed to resist the proposed extradition of fugitives to mainland China’s courts. With its name derived from martial arts mast...

13 Sep 46min

Billy Fleming, "Building Postcarbon Futures: Land, Justice, and Energy Transitions" (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2026)

What would a postcarbon future look like? What would it take to build and maintain a more just, regenerative world? How would it feel to live—and to thrive—in that world? In Building Postcarbon Future...

12 Sep 1h 23min