Book Launch – Energizing Neoliberalism

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Book Launch – Energizing Neoliberalism: The 1970s Energy Crisis and the Making of Modern America by Caleb Wellum

11 October 2023 – 7:00 – 8:30 pm EDT

Another Story Bookshop, 315 Roncesvalles Avenue, Toronto

How the 1970s energy crisis facilitated a neoliberal shift in US political culture.

In Energizing Neoliberalism, Caleb Wellum offers a provocative account of how the 1970s energy crisis helped to recreate postwar America. Rather than think of the crisis as the obvious outcome of the decade’s “oil shocks,” Wellum unpacks the cultural construction of a crisis of energy across different sectors of society, from presidents, policy experts, and environmentalists to filmmakers, economists, and oil futures traders. He shows how the dominant meanings ascribed to the 1970s energy crisis helped to energize neoliberal visions of renewed abundance and power through free market approaches to energy.

Book launch poster for Energizing Neoliberalism
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Caleb Wellum

Caleb Wellum is an Assistant Professor (limited term) in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. In addition to teaching courses in modern history, Wellum is the Editor of Energy Humanities and a co-convener of After Oil 3. He is currently at work on several new projects, among them an environmental history of the New Economy and a study of energy in the philosophy of history.

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