This timely book examines austerity's conflicted meanings, from austerity chic and anti-austerity protest to economic and eco-austerity. Bramall's compelling text explores the presence and persuasiveness of the past, developing a new approach to the historical in contemporary cultural politics.

In a world of increasing austerity measures, democratic politics comes under pressure. With the need to consolidate budgets and to accommodate financial markets, the responsiveness of governments to voters declines. However, democracy depends on choice. Citizens must be able to influence the course of government through elections and if a change in government cannot translate into different policies, democracy is incapacitated. Many mature democracies are approaching this situation as they confront fiscal crisis. For almost three decades, OECD countries have - in fits and starts - run deficits and accumulated debt. As a result, an ever smaller part of government revenue is available today for discretionary spending and social investment and whichever party comes into office will find its hands tied by past decisions. The current financial and fiscal crisis has exacerbated the long-term shrinking government discretion; projects for political change have lost credibility. Many citizens are aware of this situation: they turn away from party politics and stay at home on Election Day. With contributions from leading scholars in the forefront of sociology, politics and economics, this timely book will be of great interest to students and scholars throughout the social sciences as well as general readers.

The Political Ecology of Austerity explores the environmental dimension of austerity that has thus far escaped academic, policy, and media attention. Offering a better comprehension of the full socio-environmental impact of austerity measures, the book highlights the importance of considering environmental issues when designing responses to economic crisis in the future. Mobilising detailed case studies from across the world, the volume documents the ways in which austerity impacts global and local ecologies, shapes environmental conflicts and gives rise to new forms and practices of social moblisation and resistance. Bringing together theoretical debates and rigorous case studies, the book proposes ‘the political ecology of austerity’ as an appropriate method of analysis that can inform our understanding of the shift in environmental protection policies and the intensification of growth practices (green or otherwise) that followed the 2008 global economic crisis. The Political Ecology of Austerity discloses austerity to be a globalised set of tools not only for budgetary discipline, but also for socio-environmental discipline that justifies the continuation of capital accumulation at the expense of further global environmental degradation. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of social and political sciences, environmental studies, urban studies, and political ecology.

In Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, Mark Blyth, a renowned scholar of political economy, provides a powerful and trenchant account of the shift toward austerity policies by governments throughout the world since 2009. The issue is at the crux about how to emerge from the Great Recession, and will drive the debate for the foreseeable future.

This book analyses the IMF's role as arbiter of legitimate economic policy since the 2008 crash, and during aftershocks of the Eurozone crisis.

One of our foremost economic thinkers challenges a cherished tenet of today’s financial orthodoxy: that spending less, refusing to forgive debt, and shrinking government—“austerity”—is the solution to a persisting economic crisis like ours or Europe’s, now in its fifth year. Since the collapse of September 2008, the conversation about economic recovery has centered on the question of debt: whether we have too much of it, whose debt to forgive, and how to cut the deficit. These questions dominated the sound bites of the 2012 U.S. presidential election, the fiscal-cliff debates, and the perverse policies of the European Union. Robert Kuttner makes the most powerful argument to date that these are the wrong questions and that austerity is the wrong answer. Blending economics with historical contrasts of effective debt relief and punitive debt enforcement, he makes clear that universal belt-tightening, as a prescription for recession, defies economic logic. And while the public debt gets most of the attention, it is private debts that crashed the economy and are sandbagging the recovery—mortgages, student loans, consumer borrowing to make up for lagging wages, speculative shortfalls incurred by banks. As Kuttner observes, corporations get to use bankruptcy to walk away from debts. Homeowners and small nations don’t. Thus, we need more public borrowing and investment to revive a depressed economy, and more forgiveness and reform of the overhang of past debts. In making his case, Kuttner uncovers the double standards in the politics of debt, from Robinson Crusoe author Daniel Defoe’s campaign for debt forgiveness in the seventeenth century to the two world wars and Bretton Woods. Just as debtors’ prisons once prevented individuals from surmounting their debts and resuming productive life, austerity measures shackle, rather than restore, economic growth—as the weight of past debt crushes the economy’s future potential. Above all, Kuttner shows how austerity serves only the interest of creditors—the very bankers and financial elites whose actions precipitated the collapse. Lucid, authoritative, provocative—a book that will shape the economic conversation and the search for new solutions.

The ascendance of austerity policies and the protests they have generated have had a deep impact on the shape of contemporary politics. The stunning electoral successes of SYRIZA in Greece, Podemos in Spain and the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S) in Italy, alongside the quest for a more radical left in countries such as the UK and the US, bear witness to a new wave of parties that draws inspiration and strength from social movements. The rise of movement parties challenges simplistic expectations of a growing separation between institutional and contentious politics and the decline of the left. Their return demands attention as a way of understanding both contemporary socio-political dynamics and the fundamentals of political parties and representation. Bridging social movement and party politics studies, within a broad concern with democratic theories, this volume presents new empirical evidence and conceptual insight into these topical socio-political phenomena, within a cross-national comparative perspective.