The struggle against neoliberal order has gained momentum over the last five decades---to the point that economic elites have not only adapted to the Left's critiques but incorporated them for capitalist expansion. Venture funds expose their ties to slavery and pledge to invest in racial equity. Banks pitch microloans as a path to indigenous self-determination. Fair-trade brands narrate consumption as an act of feminist solidarity with women artisans in the global South. In Capitalist Humanitarianism Lucia Hulsether examines these projects and the contexts of their emergence. Blending historical and ethnographic styles, and traversing intimate and global scales, Hulsether tracks how neoliberal self-critique creates new institutional hegemonies that, in turn, reproduce racial and neocolonial dispossession. From the archives of Christian fair traders to luxury social entrepreneurship conferences, from US finance offices to Guatemalan towns flooded with their loan products, from service economy desperation to the internal contradictions of social movements, Hulsether argues that capitalist humanitarian projects are fueled as much by a profit motive as by a hope that racial capitalism can redeem the losses that accumulate in its wake.

This book examines the new phenomenon of celebrity humanitarianism arguing that legitimates neoliberal capitalism and global inequality.

For more than 60 million displaced people around the world, humanitarian aid has become a chronic condition. No Path Home describes its symptoms in detail. Elizabeth Cullen Dunn shows how war creates a deeply damaged world in which the structures that allow people to occupy social roles, constitute economic value, preserve bodily integrity, and engage in meaningful daily practice have been blown apart. After the Georgian war with Russia in 2008, Dunn spent sixteen months immersed in the everyday lives of the 28,000 people placed in thirty-six resettlement camps by official and nongovernmental organizations acting in concert with the Georgian government. She reached the conclusion that the humanitarian condition poses a survival problem that is not only biological but also existential. In No Path Home, she paints a moving picture of the ways in which humanitarianism leaves displaced people in limbo, neither in a state of emergency nor able to act as normal citizens in the country where they reside.

This book argues that we are undergoing a transition from industrial capitalism to a new form of capitalism - what the author calls & lsquo; cognitive capitalism & rsquo;

For many liberal commentators at the turn of the 1990s, the collapse of the Soviet Union represented a final victory for Western reason and capitalist democracy. But, in recent years, liberal norms and institutions associated with the post-Cold War moment have been challenged by a visceral and affective politics. Electorates have increasingly opted for a closing inwards of the nation-state, not just in the democratic heartlands of Europe and North America, but also on the periphery of the world economy. As the popular appeal of the 'open society' is thrown into question, it is necessary to revisit assumptions about the permanence of its enabling political and ethical projects. Previously promoted by the US and its allies as a necessary complement to liberal capitalist culture and the globalization of markets, humanitarian multilateralism seems to have lost strategic currency. In this collection of essays, public intellectuals, scholars, journalists and aid workers reflect on the relationship between humanitarianism and 'liberal order'. What role has humanitarianism played in processes of liberal ordering? Amidst challenges to liberal order, what are the implications for the political economy of humanitarianism, and for the practices of humanitarian agencies?

Argues the renewed importance of Howells's novel for an understanding of literature as a social force as well as a literary form.

Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation is generally acclaimed as being among the most influential works of economic history in the twentieth century, and remains as vital in the current historical conjuncture as it was in his own. In its critique of nineteenth-century ‘market fundamentalism’ it reads as a warning to our own neoliberal age, and is widely touted as a prophetic guidebook for those who aspire to understand the causes and dynamics of global economic turbulence at the end of the 2000s. Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market is the first comprehensive introduction to Polanyi’s ideas and legacy. It assesses not only the texts for which he is famous – prepared during his spells in American academia – but also his journalistic articles written in his first exile in Vienna, and lectures and pamphlets from his second exile, in Britain. It provides a detailed critical analysis of The Great Transformation, but also surveys Polanyi’s seminal writings in economic anthropology, the economic history of ancient and archaic societies, and political and economic theory. Its primary source base includes interviews with Polanyi’s daughter, Kari Polanyi-Levitt, as well as the entire compass of his own published and unpublished writings in English and German. This engaging and accessible introduction to Polanyi’s thinking will appeal to students and scholars across the social sciences, providing a refreshing perspective on the roots of our current economic crisis.