The spatial lives of a failed idea: US industrial policy after Fordism

Abstract

This article asks why the US industrial policy debate of the 1970s and 1980s, around an idea widely regarded as a defeated alternative to neoliberalism, nonetheless left a durable imprint on American political economy, using the case as a vantage point through which to develop a geographical political economy of economic ideas. It builds a dialogue with ideational political economy around two lenses – regionalization and scalar bricolage – for tracing how this idea failed to consolidate nationally. Rather than treating industrial policy as a precursor to its contemporary revival, it shows how the idea became unevenly embedded in regional coalitions and scalar architectures that limited its consolidation at the federal level while enabling its partisans to implement the idea in altered forms. By following the lives and afterlives of a defeated economic idea, the article demonstrates how the spatiality of failure actively conditions subsequent trajectories of policy formation and state transformation.