The Integrated Circus: The New Right and the Restructuring of Global Markets

Edelgard E. Mahant is a political sciences professor at Laurentian
University.

This is a rare find: a book in which the author does more than her
introduction promises. She promises to explain the rise of New Right
thinking and to examine its consequences. She delivers, in her first
three chapters, a brilliant and devastating critique of the assumptions
of classical liberalism. She is particularly skillful in explaining the
rational contradictions within economic liberalism (it is not rational,
she notes, to exclude the female half of the population from the search
for the best and the brightest), and in demonstrating the inherent
contradiction between a free-enterprise economy and environmentalism.
She also quite rightly points out that the world needs an ideology that
is based on more than human greed.

Although the author is less openly critical of Marxism (indeed, she
uses some Marxist vocabulary), she—intellectually speaking—destroys
Marxism as surely as she does capitalism. She tells us that “cultural
features . . . filter economic change,” and that “economic
activity” is “grounded in a moral universe.” She also points out
the futility of explanations based on the existence of the mythical
working class.

Unfortunately, Marchak has few replacements for the ideologies she so
effectively destroys. She spouts some romantic nonsense about the values
of small communities and the “natural habitat” of “native
populations.” She writes about the “public interest,” which an
international economic system based on multinational corporations cannot
address, but she offers no solution other than a vague reference to
“supranational government.”

This book demands a lot from its readers. The paragraphs are packed
with facts, but there are few tables and no diagrams to present the
information in a slightly more digestible format. Indeed, the wealth of
research and information tends to obscure the author’s main arguments,
so that a second reading is needed to extract the latter. There are
chapters on the rise of American hegemony and on its decline, on Japan,
on Europe, on the environment, and on much more. This is serious reading
for committed students of international political economy!