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Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital
Matthew T. Huber
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How did gasoline and countless other petroleum products become so central to our notions of the American way of life? Huber traces the answer from the 1930s through the oil shocks of the 1970s to our present predicament, revealing that oil's role in defining popular culture extends far beyond material connections between oil, suburbia, and automobility. He shows how oil powered a cultural politics of entrepreneurial life--the very American idea that life itself is a product of individual entrepreneurial capacities. In so doing he uses oil to retell American political history from the triumph of New Deal liberalism to the rise of the New Right, from oil's celebration as the lifeblood of postwar capitalism to increasing anxieties over oil addiction. Lifeblood rethinks debates surrounding energy and capitalism, neoliberalism and nature, and the importance of suburbanization in the rightward shift in American politics. Today, Huber tells us, as crises attributable to oil intensify, a populist clamoring for cheap energy has less to do with American excess than with the eroding conditions of life under neoliberalism.
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Title Page
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Copyright Page
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Contents
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Introduction: Oil, Life, Politics
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1. The Power of Oil? Energy, Machines, and the Forces of Capital
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2. Refueling Capitalism: Depression, Oil, and the Making of “the American Way of Life”
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3. Fractionated Lives: Refineries and the Ecology of Entrepreneurial Life
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4. Shocked! “Energy Crisis,” Neoliberalism, and the Construction of an Apolitical Economy
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5. Pain at the Pump: Gas Prices, Life, and Death under Neoliberalism
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Conclusion: Energizing Freedom
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Acknowledgments
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Notes
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Bibliography
Citable Link
Published: 2013
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
- 9780816677856 (paper)
- 9780816677849 (hardcover)
- 9780816685967 (ebook)