Overview

The untold story of how welfare and development programs in the United States and Latin America produced the instruments of their own destructionIn the years after 1945, a flood of U.S. advisors swept into Latin America with dreams of building a new economic order and lifting the Third World out of poverty. These businessmen, economists, community workers, and architects went south with the gospel of the New Deal on their lips, but Latin American realities soon revealed unexpected possibilities within the New Deal itself. In Colombia, Latin Americans and U.S. advisors ended up decentralizing the state, privatizing public functions, and launching austere social welfare programs. By the 1960s, they had remade the country's housing projects, river valleys, and universities. They had also generated new lessons for the United States itself. When the Johnson administration launched the War on Poverty, U.S. social movements, business associations, and government agencies all promised to repatriate the lessons of development, and they did so by multiplying the uses of austerity and for-profit contracting within their own welfare state. A decade later, ascendant right-wing movements seeking to dismantle the midcentury state did not need to reach for entirely new ideas: they redeployed policies already at hand.In this groundbreaking book, Amy Offner brings readers to Colombia and back, showing the entanglement of American societies and the contradictory promises of midcentury statebuilding. The untold story of how the road from the New Deal to the Great Society ran through Latin America, Sorting Out the Mixed Economy also offers a surprising new account of the origins of neoliberalism.

Full Product Details

9780691205205

Table of Contents

Reviews

Sorting Out the Mixed Economy [is Amy Offner's] epic and field-changing work. ---Quinn Slobodian, Dissent Magazine Sorting Out the Mixed Economy is an ambitious and thought-provoking study that reframes our understanding of both development and neoliberalism and will shape research in many scholarly fields. . . . In terms of the history of relations between the United States and Latin America, Offner inverts one of the field's most important narratives. ---Margarita Fajardo, H-LatAm Co-Winner of the EHS First Monograph Prize, Economic History Society [A] dazzling, transnational history. . . . [The] insights it provides into the link between decentralized development from 50 years ago and contemporary privatization across the Americas is revelatory. ---J. M. Rosenthal, Choice Reviews Finalist for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize Honorable Mention for the Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Co-Winner of the Michael H. Hunt Prize in International History, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations The strengths of the book are many, and the originality of the argument and the well-researched chain of events on the micro and meso levels make the book both a page-turner and a real contribution to the discussion on how and why the mixed economy, or the third way, is such a tightrope, both in the Americas and elsewhere. ---Martin Andersson, Economic History Review In telling the story of Lilienthal and other ex-New Deal officials, Amy C. Offner's Sorting Out the Mixed Economy remakes a popular understanding of how today's neoliberalism was built. . . . Offner's book has left us better equipped to understand this past, and to look ahead toward future turbulence. ---Pablo Pryluka, Public Books Winner of the Murdo J. MacLeod Book Prize, Latin American and Caribbean Section of the Southern Historical Association

Author Information

Amy C. Offner is assistant professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available