Robert Gilpin
Robert Gilpin is a scholar of International Political Economy and the professor emeritus of Politics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.
One reason for the primacy of the market in shaping the modern world is that it forces a reorganization of society in order to make the market work properly . When a market comes into existence, as Marx fully appreciated, it becomes a potent force driving social change.
The core of the Marxist critique of capitalism is that although the individual capitalist is rational (as liberals assume), the capitalist system itself is irrational.
The dreams of "leaving it up to the market" or of returning to a politically neutral gold standard cannot succeed because the nature of the monetary system has a profound impact on the interests of powerful groups and states. Affected groups and states will always try to intervene in the operation of the system to make it serve their interests.
Among the many factors that make a return to halcyon days of the first decades of the postwar era virtually impossible is the decline of clearly defined political leadership.
In many societies the domestic social costs of adjustment to changing patterns of comparative advantage are believed to outweigh the advantages of further trade liberalization.
In the abstract world of American economists, equations run both ways; they believe that by changing the sign of a variable from plus to minus or from minus to plus or the price and quantity of x or y, the direction of historical movement can be reversed.
These two opposed forms of social organization, the modern state and the market, have evolved together through recent centuries, and their mutual interactions have become increasingly crucial to the character and dynamics of international relations in our world.
When once asked what was missing from his classic textbook, Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson is reported to have responded, "the class struggle."
Specialization makes the welfare of the society vulnerable to the market and to political forces beyond national control.
Japanese refer to Europe as a "museum" and America as a "farm."