Lifeblood
Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital
Format:Paperback
Publisher:University of Minnesota Press
Published:9th Aug '13
Should be back in stock very soon
If our oil addiction is so bad for us, why don’t we kick the habit? Looking beyond the usual culprits—Big Oil, petro-states, and the strategists of empire—Lifeblood finds a deeper and more complex explanation in everyday practices of oil consumption in American culture. Those practices, Matthew T. Huber suggests, have in fact been instrumental in shaping the broader cultural politics of American capitalism.
How did gasoline and countless other petroleum products become so central to our notions of the American way of life? Huber traces the answer from the 1930s through the oil shocks of the 1970s to our present predicament, revealing that oil’s role in defining popular culture extends far beyond material connections between oil, suburbia, and automobility. He shows how oil powered a cultural politics of entrepreneurial life—the very American idea that life itself is a product of individual entrepreneurial capacities. In so doing he uses oil to retell American political history from the triumph of New Deal liberalism to the rise of the New Right, from oil’s celebration as the lifeblood of postwar capitalism to increasing anxieties over oil addiction.
Lifeblood rethinks debates surrounding energy and capitalism, neoliberalism and nature, and the importance of suburbanization in the rightward shift in American politics. Today, Huber tells us, as crises attributable to oil intensify, a populist clamoring for cheap energy has less to do with American excess than with the eroding conditions of life under neoliberalism.
"Lifeblood offers a radically alternative way of thinking about ‘cheap oil’ and ‘oil addiction’ and in so doing peers beneath the liquid surfaces of petroleum to see how the long century of American oil consumption has been central to the rise of American neoliberalism itself. An original and masterful account of oil in contemporary American capitalism."—Michael Watts, University of California, Berkeley
"Compellingly presented and enlivened by fascinating archival research, Huber’s arguments about the ‘ecology of politics’ and the centrality of oil to the making of ‘entrepreneurial life’ are important and intriguing."—Gavin Bridge, Durham University
"Huber offers a poignant analysis of how oil shapes “the American way of life” and neoliberal hegemony in the US."—CHOICE
"Huber makes it abundantly clear that the problems with patterns of oil consumption are not fundamentally technical and economic but cultural, social, and political."—Economic Geography
"An incisive look into how oil permeates our lives and helped shape American politics during the twentieth century."—New Books in Geography
"The most succinct, theoretically grounded critique of the culture of oil yet in print."—Humanities and Social Sciences Review Online
"[Lifeblood Oil] is a compelling account, and is highly recommended."—Urban Studies
"Huber takes us. . . into Americans’ own subconscious minds, to their un-thought-out daily patterns, and their emotional attachments to a sense of entrepreneurial success--and shows how these are linked materially to oil."—Environmental History
"An elegantly written and empirically rich account which joins economic history, cultural analysis, and Marxist political economy."—Human Geography
- Winner of Lifeblood 2014
ISBN: 9780816677856
Dimensions: 216mm x 140mm x 38mm
Weight: unknown
288 pages