Radhika Desai Geopolitical Economy : After US Hegemony , Globalization and Empire . The Future of World

The book by Radhika Desai titled Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire and part of The Future of World Capitalism book series, represents a profound introspection, as well as an overview of the most important politico-economic relations in the world, from the late-19thcentury until the current period. This book deconstructs common myths present in the mainstream literature devoted to international political and economic relations by using a scientific approach oriented towards processes and laws of political economy. Drawing mainly on the critique of the hegemony stability theory (HST), and using the theoretical perspective of scientific Marxism, the author overturns cosmopolitan visions of the world and describes the political and economic prerequisites crucial for the functioning of the capitalist economy. This is a book that rejects the possibility of a contemporary world hegemony, which according to the author could not be conducted by any state, not even the U.S.A. Maybe the most important contribution of this book, as this reviewer sees it, is the deconstruction of mainstream ideas about the functioning of the world economy, and of ideas that Desai calls cosmopolitan and that include hegemony, globalization and “global economy”, which dominate the discipline of international relations (and to which Desai refers as “the bourgeois discipline”).