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Expulsions: Brutality And Complexity

Decent Essays

In Michèle Lamont’s review, of Saskia Sassen’s “Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy,” She explains the issues and concepts that makes her arguments flawed and ultimately not as strong to reach her intended audience. Before analyzing Lamont’s contribution, we should look at her scholarly background and disciplinary field. Lamont is a professor of sociology/African and African American studies/ Robert I. Goldman professor of European studies at Harvard University. In addition, she has received the 2017 Erasmus prize for her advancement in the social sciences in Europe and other Global Countries. She mainly studies the inequalities, social change, and societies of these developing countries. The main review of this piece …show more content…

Her arguments were lacking in conceptual connection and didn’t provide a lot of context for her “new” contributions. ‘Predatory formations’ was one of the examples that was brought up but wasn’t explained in detail; similarly to the term of ‘expulsion’. She first brings it up, “…predatory “formations,” a mix of elites and systemic capacities with finance a key enabler, that push toward acute concentration.” (Sassen, 13). It wasn’t made clear with her examples, until she fully explains what makes up the predatory formations. She writes, “It is this type of predatory logic embedded in an assemblage of diverse elements, each only a bit a larger formal institutional domain, that marks much of our current period.” (Sassen, 78). In which, all elements she describes (land acquisitions, accumulation by capital, and dangers to biospheres) is truly when she is able to define these predatory formations. Sassen does provide all of strong evidence for scholarly discussion in inequality, accumulated capital, and exploitation but lacks to expand the concepts of them further. One example of a strong example is the shadow market and the process of financialization. She explains, “…shadow banking accounted for 70 percent of banking at the time that the crisis exploded.” (Sassen, 142). Her analysis of shadow banking and financialization bought the concept of dispossession by accumulation, which by far was her strongest argument in the book. Overall, I felt like Sassen did bring new concepts to the scholarly discussion but didn’t further or provide solutions to solve these problems. As lamont points out, it would be an important contribution, if it reaches the large audience but only time will

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