Colin Danby publishes The Known Economy: Romantics, Rationalists, and the Making of a World Scale

IAS faculty member Colin Danby publishes The Known Economy: Romantics, Rationalists, and the Making of a World Scale. The book engages in and advances debates concerning globalization by starting from a deceptively simple question: Why do critics and celebrants of globalization concur that international trade and finance represent an inexorable globe-bestriding force with a single logic? In addressing this question, Danby shows that both camps rest on the same ideas about how the world is scaled. Beginning at least two centuries ago, romantic and rationalist theorists concurred that the world was divided into discrete nations, moving at different rates toward a “modernity”, split between love and money. Though differing over whether this history is tragedy or triumph, they united in projecting an empty “international” space in which a Moloch-like global capitalism could lurk.