Popular Culture and Political Economic Thought

This book studies the relationship of popular culture to older formations of political economic thought, which have made their way into a range of fictions as a fabulous, though feasible, source of resistance to the hegemony of neoclassical economics.

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We live in an era of economic fabling where often fantastic representations of economic life in popular culture sit uncomfortably alongside a neoliberal capitalist fairy tale that the Earth's resources can continue to be exploited into an indefinite future. This book examines a variety of animated movies, TV shows, written fictions, adventure travelogues, Paleo archeologies (and diets) to suggest that popular culture poses a multiform challenge to the failing theories and practices of neoclassical economics. Popular Culture and Political Economic Thought: Fables of Commonwealth contends that it does so most successfully by implementing older formations of political economic thought: stages theory, bioeconomics, and a robust discourse on commonwealth. An era of eco-crisis demands a new economics. It therefore also requires a new appraisal of the popular imaginary and its potential for leveraging alternative conceptions of economic and political relations. This book begins that conversation.