Seymour Melman's Political Economy

Résumé En

This presentation is about Seymour Melman, intellectual leader of American anti-war movements, once an advisor to George McGovern, co-chair of SANE the anti-nuclear weapons committee, ardent supporter of unions whose think tank and lobbying association once provided a national platform for Bernie Sanders when he was just a mayor. That is to say, Melman is rightly associated with the far, some would say radical, left in American politics. So, naturally, I'd like to start with Tom Woods. Woods is a historian, far-right political commentator, something of a Southern revanchist, and libertarian. Reasonably the polar opposite of Melman politically. Yet, in 2010 Woods published in The Journal of Libertarian Studies an article, “The Neglected Costs of the Warfare State: An Austrian Tribute to Seymour Melman,” in which he concluded “Much more needs to be written on the political economy of the warfare state from a libertarian point of view, and Seymour Melman’s body of work can and should provide a useful entry point for a fruitful research program.” The purpose of this presentation is to define political economy using Melman’s work. This is not limited to the warfare state (although that is inherent in talking about Melman), and certainly not a libertarian point of view, but I quote Woods as an indicator that Melman’s thought should rightly be seen as providing a rich background to defining political economy generally, and militarized American political economy specifically, as can be recognized even by someone who disagrees with all of Melman’s policy recommendations.