Conférence organisée dans le cadre du séminaire "Capitalisme et inégalités" animé par Romain Huret, Alexia Blin, Gabriel Lattanzio et Jean-Christian Vinel.

Since WWII, the United States has created the most formidable innovation engine the world has ever seen. Although difficult to quantify, its benefits for the commercial economy have been enormous. America’s rise as high-tech hegemon is not a free market story, nor is it an industrial policy tale. Rather, it is the product of a national security state (NSS) that has pursued technological supremacy as a strategic imperative essential to sustaining U.S. power. This NSS creation, however, is now threatened by financialization of the U.S. economy, manifested in the growing disconnect between innovation and production, declining private investment in productive assets, and rapidly rising inequality. To this extent, the main threat to U.S. preeminence would appear to come not from a rising power such as China, but from within.  

Intervenant 

Linda Weiss is Professor Emeritus in Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, and Honorary Professor of Political Science at Aarhus University. She has lectured widely in North America, Europe, and East Asia and has held visiting research appointments at UCLA, Cornell, the LSE, the European University Institute, University of Rome (La Sapienza), Stockholm School of Economics, Academia Sinica, Seoul National University, the Kyungnam Institute for Far Eastern Studies (Seoul), and the Academia Sinica. She currently serves on the editorial boards of several international journals.

Her specialism is the comparative and international politics of economic development, with a focus on state capacity and public-private sector relations. Several of her publications on the topics of globalisation and state power, developmental states, and trade politics have been translated into Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Korean, Romanian, Turkish and Chinese. Her forthcoming book, 'Hybrid State, Hybrid Capitalism', shifts the focus of earlier work from Europe and East Asia to the United States. This project on the political economy of national security focuses on the links between security, technology, and political culture. The study has been six years in the making and is her largest to date.