Business as Usual The Roots of the Global Financial Meltdown

"The high quality of the wide-ranging essays makes this volume a worthwhile addition to library collections and a valuable resource for both students and specialists wanting to explore the complex roots of the financial crisis." - M. Perelman (Choice) "A brilliant and inspiring collection of analyses from world-renowned international social theorists and political economists, far-reaching in its implications for our understanding, not just of the current crisis, but of its historical roots and the importance of politics to the future of global socio-economic structures." - Kate Nash,author of The Cultural Politics of Human Rights "There may be a silver lining to the global financial meltdown of 2008, for it has made possible a book such as this one. In Business as Usual, Craig Calhoun and Georgi Derluguian have brought together some of & the best and brightest in the business and given them a most unusual task: to tell the story of the financial crisis in all its complexity, in a manner that is both clear and precise. The result is critical social science at its best: more than explanation, prediction or prescription, this book offers the promise of actual understanding." - Ivan Ascher,University of Massachusetts, Amherst "Calhoun and Derlugians co-edited book will be important for sociologists because of the wide range of arguments enlisted in an attempt to correlate the various parameters and focus discussion on specific theoretical aspects of the crisis." (Critical Sociology)

Craig Calhoun is Director of the London School of Economics and Global Distinguished Professor of Sociology at New York University. His most recent book is The Roots of Radicalism: Tradition, the Public Sphere, and Early Nineteenth-Century Social Movements.Georgi Derluguian is Associate Professor of International Studies and Sociology at Northwestern University and is the author of Bourdieu's Secret Admirer in the Caucasus: A World-System Biography.