Department of Politics Associate Professor Rodney Loeppky has published a new book titled A Deal They Can’t Resist: Adaptive Accumulation and American Public Policy (De Gruyter Publishers, 2022).
The book argues that a component of U.S. neoliberalism involves adaptive accumulation, a process where capital seeks to enlarge public programs in order to reroute public revenues into private revenue streams. Along the way, corporations project quasi-public aspirations as a central part of their commercial mission as the state carves out new – or expands old – areas of accumulative growth for corporate America.
Loeppky’s book interrogates the depiction of U.S. political economy as uniquely Anglo-American and “hyper-liberal,” with an eye to enhance understanding of variations within neoliberalism.
“This work tries to recalibrate our image of the United States as the most capitalist, most liberal country in the world. It points to a growing reality in which corporate America views both the state and government contracts as an increasingly large component of profit strategy,” says Loeppky. “American neoliberalism, it turns out, is not so much about limited government, but rather an enlarged public domain, highly attuned to the accumulation needs of U.S. companies in healthcare, education and even incarceration. The results of this are not positive – an already grossly unequal political economy is being exacerbated, with widespread effects along both class and racial lines.”
The book is volume seven in the De Gruyter Contemporary Social Sciences, an interdisciplinary series which provides a platform for disseminating topical analyses of current events, showcasing new theoretical, empirical or applied research across the social sciences and related disciplines.
Loeppky received his doctorate from York University in 2002. After serving as a Social Sciences and Humanities Research council (SSHRC) postdoctoral Fellow in both University of California, Davis, and the University of Toronto, he held a faculty position at the University of Sussex in Brighton, U.K. In 2006, he joined York University’s Department of Political Science. He is the author of Accumulation and Constraint: Biomedical Development and Advanced Industrial Health (Fernwood Publishing, 2015) and Encoding Capital: The Political Economy of the Human Genome Project (Routledge, 2005).