Bulletin n. 1/2015
June 2015
CONTENTS
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
    • Reinert Sophus A.
    The Way to Wealth around the World: Benjamin Franklin and the Globalization of American Capitalism
    in American Historical Review , Volume 120, Issue 1, February ,  2015 ,  61-97
    “Time,” Benjamin Franklin professed poignantly in his 1748 Advice to a Young Tradesman, “is Money,” an iconic statement that, by commodifying existence itself, helped articulate the emotive core of modern capitalism.1 Indeed, few historical figures today enjoy a more prominent place in the cultural and intellectual constellation of capitalism than that most elusive of Founding Fathers.2 His myth uniquely inspires and inflects economic life not only in America but across the world, from the impromptu exhortations of costumed impersonators in Boston to the musings of Bangladeshi bloggers.3 A seemingly timeless herald and savior of capitalism, hailed as “our global citizen to show the way to the next golden age,” Franklin is frequently approached, caricatured, and interrogated in this ongoing period of economic turmoil for operational advice both personal and political.4 We can gain a richer and more nuanced sounding board for the preoccupations of our own time by examining how he became such a savant of capitalism in the first place and to what purpose; the extraordinary yet hitherto unknown extent to which his economic ethos was disseminated and acculturated internationally in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; and ultimately what perhaps was lost of his wider political economy during the global apotheosis of his writings. That Franklin's contribution to the development of capitalism has again attracted …
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