Trade Fetishism
Magical and Materialist Thinking in Global Political Economy
Patrick Clark author Gavin Fridell author
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd
Publishing:11th Mar '26
£145.00
This title is due to be published on 11th March, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Trade Fetishism argues that ‘trade’ not only meets material goals, but simultaneously works as a fantasy that seeks to satisfy and sooth our unconscious desires and anxieties. Countering the idea that trade is driven ultimately by rational economic, political, and strategic logics, it argues that non-rational beliefs and unconscious desires are equally motivating in our obsession with trade and its promises of enjoyment.
Reassessing trade and trade politics, Fridell and Clark make a distinct contribution through systematic case studies that explore trade agreements in North America, between Europe and the Caribbean, and at the World Trade Organization. Drawing on case study research on specific trade agreements and trade justice movements, and engaging with a wide range of thinking about trade - from neoclassical economics and international law, to Marxist, feminist, postmodern and other critical approaches – the book contends that trade and trade agreements are increasingly ‘fetishized’: offered up as near-magical objects that meet our desires, soothe our anxieties, and offer simple solutions to complex problems, even if they perpetually disappoint.
An exploration of the desires and anxieties embedded in the widespread and enduring faith in global trade and free trade - a faith that persists despite abundant contradictions, gaps, and injustices – Trade Fetishism will appeal to scholars of sociology, social and political theory and economics with interest in international trade and political economy.
“This stunning book couldn’t be more timely—for examining today’s trade regime at a global moment of economic and tariff instability and warfare—or more perspicacious—for offering shrewd psychoanalytic insights on global trade that political economy by itself is unable to provide. A not-to-be-missed smart, original, and case study-based investigation.”
Ilan Kapoor, author of Confronting Desire: Psychoanalysis and International Development
“At a time when global trade relations are in turmoil, Gavin Fridell and Patrick Clark offer an avant-garde political economy perspective that shows us how the human psyche models and remodels the perpetual dream of global commerce, and what this means for the politics of trade. Trade Fetishism provides a most welcome and highly timely theoretical alternative in a domain of economic theorising that remains mired in an – increasingly anachronistic - orthodoxy. The book will prove helpful to activists, scholars, students and policy-makers who are keen to pluralise trade theory and to build alternative trade futures.”
Silke Trommer, co-author of A Feminist Political Economy of Trade: Beyond Free Trade Feminism
“There are very few works that truly deserve the label ‘revolutionary.’ Trade Fetishism is one of them. It is one of the pioneering works in the promising field of libidinal economics.
Trade negotiations have traditionally been analyzed through the lens of neoclassical political economy, where the bedrock assumption is that free trade brings about the best possible outcome, by bringing down costs and increasing benefits for all parties concerned. Fridell and Clark challenge this reigning paradigm. Bringing key concepts from psychoanalysis to political economy, the authors argue that while the dominant players may imagine themselves to be guided by rational calculus, more consequential are the subliminal predispositions they bring to negotiations.
Borrowing from Lacan and Freud, they provide a provocative alternative framework that posits that the conditions imposed on weaker partners in trade negotiations derive not so much from the likelihood of their bringing about the promised growth and development than from the psychic rewards, or jouissance, produced by the repeated affirmation of the hierarchical domination of the stronger partner.”
Walden Bello, author of Deglobalization: Ideas for a New World Economy and Paper Dragons: China and the Next Crash
ISBN: 9781032447001
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
192 pages