William I. Robinson, "Epochal Crisis: The Exhaustion of Global Capitalism" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

About this episode

The episode discusses William I. Robinson's book 'Epochal Crisis' and the multifactorial crises impacting global capitalism.

Epochal Crisis: The Exhaustion of Global Capitalism (Cambridge UP, 2025) is the most recent book from Professor William Robinson, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This title is the latest in excellent and ground-breaking titles from Professor Robinson in a distinguished career, where he began writing books on United States intervention into Nicaragua in the late 1980s and early 1990s, expanding this focus on United States hegemony more broadly in the ground-breaking book Promoting Polyarchy in 1996, up to then grappling with the totality of the capitalist world system more recently in titles such as The Global Police State in 2020, Can Global Capitalism Endure in 2022, and War, Global Capitalism and Resistance in 2024, alongside many other books. Professor Robinson’s latest instalment we discuss in this episode, Epochal Crisis, tracks the multifactorial crises that are impacting the global capitalist system today, across economic, social, ecological, political and other dimensions, and how these intersecting and overlapping crises are degrading or exhausting the ability for capitalism to renew itself. This contemporaneous…

People in this episode

Guest: William I. Robinson

Topics covered

• global capitalism
• economic crisis
• social issues
• ecological emergencies
• political legitimacy
• intersecting crises

Keywords

• capitalism
• crisis
• sociology
• ecology
• politics
• violence
• economic system

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: University of California, Santa Barbara, Cambridge UP

Books & works: Epochal Crisis: The Exhaustion of Global Capitalism, Promoting Polyarchy, The Global Police State, Can Global Capitalism Endure, War, Global Capitalism and Resistance

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