Spurred by China’s rise, the revealed fragility of globalized production networks, and declines in domestic productive capabilities, “industrial policy” ideas have experienced a revival in political support in the United States not seen since the 1980s. Yet our knowledge of that era’s political struggles remains incomplete: Why did past efforts to expand the American state’s power to govern markets or promote targeted industries and technologies result in only limited success? Who led and opposed these efforts and what were the outcomes of key political battles waged between them during these years? To answer these questions, this talk focuses on two such battles using archival sources, committee hearing transcripts, and government reports and supplemented with a secondary analysis of ten further cases of state-building breakthroughs, partial successes, and outright failures. It concludes by discussing how revisiting these past struggles not only improves upon the prevailing historical narrative of neoliberal triumph and industrial policy defeat in the past but also provides new insights on ongoing debates and conflicts in the present.
Matthew J. Baltz is currently Assistant Professor of Sociology at Bucknell University. His work focuses on the politics of state building, institutional change, nationalism, and development and has appeared in Theory and Society, Review of International Political Economy, and Nations and Nationalism. He is an alumnus of CEU’s Nationalism Studies Program (M.A., 2007) and the University of California, Los Angeles (Ph.D. in Sociology, 2017).
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