Robert Paul Brenner

Robert Paul Brenner (born November 28, 1943 in New York City ) is an American historian .

Life

Brenner studied from 1964 to 1968 at Princeton University and received his doctorate in 1970 on Political Conflict and Commercial Development: The Merchant Community in Civil War in London . In 1968 he became Assistant Professor, from 1972 Associate Professor and since 1983 Full Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles .

With his text Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe , first presented in 1974 and published as an article in 1976, Brenner sparked an intense debate on the subject of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the so-called first Brenner debate.

In 2010, Brenner was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Second Brenner debate

In 1998, Brenner published the text The Economics of Global Turbulence and advocated the thesis that the main capitalist countries had been in a long-lasting economic growth downturn towards secular stagnation since the early 1970s. According to Brenner, the cause for this is the unplanned, uncoordinated and competition-supported nature of the capitalist mode of production, which leads to overcapacities and overproduction. According to Brenner, this results in a fall in the rate of profit with the result of falling growth in investment, output, productivity and rising unemployment.

Brenner's central thesis is therefore that persistent overcapacities that have not been adjusted by economic downturns, especially in the manufacturing sector, would be the determining factor for the long stagnation of the global economy that began in the 1970s. Dealing with this thesis triggered the so-called second Brenner debate around the turn of the millennium.

In 2002, after the new economy bubble burst, Brenner published the book The Boom and the Bubble. The US in the World Economy , which led to discussions about the cause of the current recession in the USA as part of the second Brenner debate. Brenner also justifies the cause of the bursting of the speculative bubble on the stock exchanges with the widespread build-up of overcapacities. The majority of economic analysts did not see how the same mechanisms with which the stock exchanges initially drove the upswing later pulled the economy downwards in parallel with the crash in stock exchange prices. The economic mainstream has thus failed to recognize that the long-lasting downturn in growth since the beginning of the 1970s could not be cured by market-driven bubbles (cf. Brenner 2003). The book has been translated into Korean, Portuguese, German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and Turkish.

Brenner's contribution was credited by some writers with a Marxist influence, as a return to empirical theory to help Marxist theoretical approaches to an empirical foundation (cf. Frieder Otto Wolf 2003).

In 2006 the work The Economics of Global Turbulence , published for the first time in 1998 , was reprinted, supplemented by a longer afterword by Brenner on the crisis-prone nature of capitalism in the middle of the first decade of the new millennium.

Publications

Monographs

• Boom & Bubble, The US in the world economy . VSA, Hamburg 2002, ISBN 978-3-87975-886-9 (American English: The Boom and the Bubble, The US in the World Economy .).
• New boom or new bubble? Is the current upswing in the US economy a soap bubble? VSA, Hamburg 2004, ISBN 978-3-89965-914-6 .
• The Economics of Global Turbulence . Verso, New York 2006, ISBN 978-1-85984-730-5 .

items

• What is Good for Goldman Sachs is Good for America The Origins of the Present Crisis . October 2, 2009. Center for Social Theory and Comparative History. Paper 2009-1. Article on the financial crisis from 2007

Meetings

• Klaus Dräger: Neo-Marxism construction site. The regulation school and Robert Brenner on the turbulence in the world economy . In: Prokla . tape 123 , 2001, ISSN  0342-8176 , p. 177-202 .
• Frieder Otto Wolf (2003): On the second Brenner debate epilogue in: Robert Brenner (2003), Boom & Bubble, Hamburg, pp. 331–337.
• Kai Burmeister, Reinhold Rünker: Capitalism today - the second Brenner debate and its significance for left politics . In: Spw - magazine for socialist politics and economy . tape 135 , 2004, ISSN  0170-4613 .

Web links

• Curriculum vitae of Robert P. Brenner (PDF; 91 kB).
• Danish collection on the Brenner debate