Routledge City of Gold: An Apology for Global Capitalism in a Time of Discontent

Product Description David A. Westbrook argues that we live in "the city of gold"--a global, cosmopolitan polity where politics are done through markets, and where global capital markets, not states, have become the dominant force in our social life. Review ""City of Gold is an extraordinarily bold effort to understand the economic, cultural, and political implications of globalization. Westbrook draws on his deep understanding of economics, critical theory, and the world of high finance to move beyond traditional academic boundaries and thereby rethink the rise of supranational capitalism. At the same time, he moves easily and gracefully through the realms of history, classical philosophy, psychology, and art criticism. This book will entrance its readers, not just for the sweep of its argument, or the eclectic nature of its insights, but for its sheer intellectual daring and brilliance." ---Pierre Schlag, Byron White Professor of Law, University of Colorado ""City of Gold has been produced with a keen critical sensibility by an author who knows intimately the workaday and policy worlds of the law and corporations, but who is also steeped in the critical theories that have so informed cultural analysis of the past three decades. Among the several current ambitious efforts to come to terms with the changing nature of capitalism as a form of life--economic, cultural, and especially, as a system of politics and values--in the present "great transformation" in which we are all immersed, Westbrook's is the best that I know, for its passion, its readability, and the unique ways in which it is informed." ---George Marcus, Professor and Chair of Anthropology, Rice University "In "City of Gold, one of our best young international law scholars grapples with the promise and perils of globalization.David Westbrook brings imagination, realism, and moral seriousness to a set of problems that for better or worse are transforming the wayhuman beings live in every corner of the world." ---Mary Ann Glendon, Learned Hand Professor of Law, Harvard University "a powerful demonstration of the limits within which global ... organiz[es] economic interaction in our cosmopolitan society." -"Journal of World Trade "Mentioned in the Michigan Law Review." Human Rights 06/2004 About the Author David A. Westbrook is currently an associate professor of Law at the University of Buffalo, State University of New York, and is a former corporate lawyer.