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The American Ascendancy: How the United States Gained and Wielded Global Dominance (Caravan Book) | 
| Author: Michael H. Hunt
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Category: Book
List Price: $34.95
Buy New: $27.26
You Save: $7.69 (22%)
New (23) Used (9) from $17.50
Rating:  1 reviews
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 416
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.5
ISBN: 0807830909
Dewey Decimal Number: 327.7300904
EAN: 9780807830901
ASIN: 0807830909
Publication Date: April 10, 2007
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
A simple question lurks amid the considerable controversy created by recent U.S. policy: what road did Americans travel to reach their current global preeminence?
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| Customer Reviews:
Understanding why Neoliberalism is so triumphant today August 28, 2008
Ajit Balakrishnan (Bombay, India)
Neoliberalism, the belief that it is safer to repose faith in markets than on a State is the operating philosophy in many countries today. What led to this triumph? Michael Hunt's book provides many of the answers.
He points first to the influence of ideas. Hayek's, "The Road to Serfdom" for instance which presented the State as a stop on the road to totalitarianism, Milton Friedman's "Capitalism and Freedom", which presents markets as not only efficient but also the only guarantor of freedom, to name just two.
He also points to the untiring proselytism of think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation and the failure of Keynsian, state-led initiatives to solve the stagflation of the '70's and most of all the collapse of the Soviet System in the late '90's which demolished faith in the centralized planned economy model.
The Western liberal democratic model has appeared to have triumphed to the point that Francis Fukuyama called it " the end of history", the final form of human government.
The American elite, Hunt says, now have substituted "globalization" as their over-riding mantra, leaving behind the Cold War mantra.
The power of Hunt's analysis is that he views all these movements as a continuation of of an efforts by the a small group of American thinkers and statesman to seek and achieve global dominance.He traces such efforts back to its nineteenth century foundations, the "grand projects" (President McKinley's aggressive pursuit of the possessions of a declining Spanish Empire in Cuba, Puerto Rico and Philippines) onto the enormous growth of the technology -based American economy in the inter-war period, learning to deal with the complicated situation that arose with the retreat from colonialism of the European powers in the 1941-68 period.
The ends the book with questions that are currently being raised about the neo-liberal American hegemony: by the Europeans, the Japanese , the East Asians and the Chinese ,all of who remain strongly committed to the interventionist state, by a resurgent Russia, by the rise of fundamentalism in the Middle East....history has not really ended.
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