Our First 20 Years

Abstract

The launch of the Socio-Economic Review 20 years ago should have surprised no one with any scholarly interest in capitalism. The journal was the result of more than a decade-long intellectual movement that began with the creation of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics in 1989 at the initiative of Amitai Etzioni. His communitarian vision, academic reputation and entrepreneurship attracted both top scholars and young researchers to the intellectual project of developing alternatives to the dominance of neoliberal thinking. The alternative approach was to view the economy in the wider context of political and social forces and moral concerns, and that in turn, called for inviting social science disciplines that had been marginalized by neoclassical economics to investigate the economy. Years of gathering scholars from both sides of the Atlantic and community building resulted in the Madison Declaration on the Need for Socio-Economic Research in 1999. If the idea of socio-economics looked quaint and marginal in the late 1980s, by the 2000s it was a thriving intellectual movement very much riding the waves of the times. As the Socio-Economic Review appeared, the world economy was struggling. After the roaring 1990s, the Washington consensus, which had previously guided economic policies, was crumbling, and the triumphalist phrase, ‘the end of history’, was reduced to a punchline. The Asian Crisis in 1997 was an early warning, quickly followed by the crash of the ruble, revealing the failure of the capitalist transition in Russia. Next came the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, a large hedge fund, led by two economists, who just the year before won the Nobel prize. The fund that heavily invested in Russian bonds had to be rescued with a $3.6 billion bailout. The burst of the dotcom bubble in 2000 further reinforced the notion that global capitalism was much more fragile than neoliberal ideas had led us to believe, and was not at all a self-contained, self-driving and self-correcting system, but was at the mercy of politics, and social and cultural processes. The terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, on the physical centre of world finance, demonstrated in a crude fashion the power of political forces. A more benign form of the power of politics over the economy was on exhibit in January of 2002, when the euro was launched as the currency in most of the member countries of the European Union. Less spectacular, but equally important was the steady rise of social inequalities. It has been an obsession for sociologists, but long ignored by mainstream economics until Piketty and Saez forced the topic into economics in an article published a month after SER appeared.