Beverly Silver’s Ciampi Lecture: Hegemonic transitions and the international order

The decline of U.S. hegemony in a global system marked by instability and conflict is at the centre of the Ciampi Lecture, held by Beverly Silver, Johns Hopkins University, and Ciampi Visiting Scholar. Silver identifies the beginning of this phase of decline in the 1970s, when the response to the compression of profits was to abandon the phase of material expansion of capitalism led by the United States. Productive growth slowed, and excess capital was directed towards finance and speculation.