Giampaolo Conte reviewed Melinda Cooper’s book, Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance, for The Journal of European Economic History. Click here to read the full review. Click here to purchase the book. An excerpt appears below:

“Melinda Cooper is a scholar with the undisputed ability to effectively use interdisciplinarity (ranging from sociology, economics, and in some respects even history) to support her thesis. In the study of neo- liberalism, this approach is more necessary than ever. Since it is a system that unleashes deep interconnections on multiple levels (social, economic, political, psychological, etc.), there is a need for wide-ranging studies capable of capturing not only the technical subtleties (which are necessary to understand the breaking points between the “old” and the “new”) but the “system” at a high level of interconnection. Cooper is indeed able to grasp the deep transformations by bringing to the surface the ‘deep forces’ that govern the long-lasting transformative movement of capitalism in the form of neo-liberalism.”