We live in an era of economic fabling where often fantastic representations of economic life in popular culture sit uncomfortably alongside a neoliberal capitalist fairy tale that the Earth's resources can continue to be exploited into an indefinite future. Popular Culture and Political Economic Thought: Fables of Commonwealth examines a variety of animated movies, TV shows, written fictions, adventure travelogues, and Paleo archeologies (and diets) to suggest that popular culture poses a multiform challenge to the failing theories and practices of neoclassical economics. This book contends that it does so most successfully by implementing older formations of political economic thought: stages theory, bioeconomics, and a robust discourse on commonwealth. An era of eco-crisis demands a new economics. It, therefore, also requires a new appraisal of the popular imaginary and its potential for leveraging alternative conceptions of economic and political relations. This book begins that conversation.
This book studies the relationship of popular culture to older formations of political economic thought, which have made their way into a range of fictions as a fabulous, though feasible, source of resistance to the hegemony of neoclassical economics.
