For a recent issue of New Left Review, Nic Johnson discusses Counterrevolution:Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance by Melinda Cooper. Click here to learn more about the book. Click here to read the review. An excerpt appears below:

“What turned the tide in the last half century? Why did the fiscal state’s redistributive mechanisms suddenly stop, and go into reverse? Explaining the regressive course of us monetary and fiscal policy since the 1970s has been the project of Melinda Cooper’s highly acclaimed recent monographs, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (2017) and Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance (2024). Cooper is a sociologist based at the Australian National University, and each of her books could be described as contributions to fiscal sociology, the field Schumpeter pioneered.”