City of Gold: An Apology for Global Capitalism in a Time of Discontent

Description

In City of Gold, David A. Westbrook argues that economic globalization has produced a "City of Gold": a global, cosmopolitan polity constituted by markets, and where capital markets-not states-have become the dominant mode of governance. But there are troubling consequences from using markets as the primary political mechanism. Traditional politics have been undermined and an inadequate economic logic rules. Despite the problems inherent in this new political economy, however, Westbrook sees the City as an acceptable response to the crisis of the nation state, and moreover, as a way of life with its own rewards and possibilities. From this basis, Westbrook advocates a political imagination that moves beyond the logic of capitalism yet which acknowledges the continuing centrality of markets-with all of their profound limitations-to our lives.

David A. Westbrook is currently an associate professor of Law at the University of Buffalo, State University of New York, and is a former corporate lawyer.

""City of Gold is an extraordinarily bold effort to understand the economic, cultural, and political implications of globalization. Westbrook draws on his deep understanding of economics, critical theory, and the world of high finance to move beyond traditional academic boundaries and thereby rethink the rise of supranational capitalism. At the same time, he moves easily and gracefully through the realms of history, classical philosophy, psychology, and art criticism. This book will entrance its readers, not just for the sweep of its argument, or the eclectic nature of its insights, but for its sheer intellectual daring and brilliance."
---Pierre Schlag, Byron White Professor of Law, University of Colorado
""City of Gold has been produced with a keen critical sensibility by an author who knows intimately the workaday and policy worlds of the law and corporations, but who is also steeped in the critical theories that have so informed cultural analysis of the past three decades. Among the several current ambitious efforts to come to terms with the changing nature of capitalism as a form of life--economic, cultural, and especially, as a system of politics and values--in the present "great transformation" in which we are all immersed, Westbrook's is the best that I know, for its passion, its readability, and the unique ways in which it is informed."
---George Marcus, Professor and Chair of Anthropology, Rice University
"In "City of Gold, one of our best young international law scholars grapples with the promise and perils of globalization.David Westbrook brings imagination, realism, and moral seriousness to a set of problems that for better or worse are transforming the wayhuman beings live in every corner of the world."
---Mary Ann Glendon, Learned Hand Professor of Law, Harvard University
"a powerful demonstration of the limits within which global ... organiz[es] economic interaction in our cosmopolitan society."
-"Journal of World Trade
"Mentioned in the Michigan Law Review."
Human Rights
06/2004