Caleb Wellum is Assistant Professor of U.S. History at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. This interview is based on his new book, Energizing Neoliberalism: The 1970s Energy Crisis and the Making of Modern America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023).
JF: What led you to write Energizing Neoliberalism?
CW: I first learned about the 1970s oil shocks and energy crisis during the revival of high oil prices and peak oil fears in the summer of 2008, when I was starting out in graduate school. It seemed odd to me that many Americans had apparently forgotten the 1970s crisis, or written it off as an anomaly, despite the fact that it raised similar fears as the 2008 crisis and had produced an enormous amount of debate about the relationship between fossil fuels, U.S. democracy, and consumer capitalism. At the time I was also developing an interest in environmental issues, and it surprised me that this moment of doubt about the future of postwar America’s incredible economic growth had been so little studied by historians.
I decided to develop a dissertation project on the causes and consequences of the energy crisis, which seemed more and more intriguing as a pivotal but underappreciated moment in postwar history. And, after reading Anson Rabinbach’s magisterial The Human Motor and Timothy Mitchell’s provocative Carbon Democracy, I began to see “energy” as more than an economic or scientific issue—it was also about culture and politics.
Around this time, historians were starting to reassess the significance of the 1970s. Like the energy crisis, the 1970s had often been dismissed as a decade in which “nothing happened.” I had been reading histories about the postwar U.S. that were written during the George W. Bush years, and which were trying to explain the decline of the New Deal and the rise of neoconservatism. But those arguments did not always satisfy me, in part because they rarely addressed the energy issues of the 1970s. The Great Recession and the rise of Left and Right populisms (Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party) also put their inadequacy into relief by raising the specter of neoliberalism’s free market extremism, which I didn’t see represented either. American historians were too busy trying to explain the rise of conservatives in U.S. party politics to see what I think were the deeper currents of neoliberal political and cultural transformation.
So, the book took off from my converging interests in the 1970s as an underappreciated period of consequential change, in energy as a social and political force, and in the need to understand the historical development of neoliberalism. I began to ask: what if the overlap between the 1970s crisis of energy and the rise of neoliberalism wasn’t coincidental? What if they were connected?
JF: In 2 sentences, what is the argument of Energizing Neoliberalism?
CW: The 1970s energy crisis revealed the importance of fossil fuel consumption to the functioning of American society and democracy, and generated fears about a future without access to cheap and abundant energy. Debates about the meaning of the energy crisis, as well as responses to it, helped to consolidate a neoliberal capitalist order marked by petro-populist sentiment and financialized energy markets that foreclosed alternative energy and social futures.
JF: Why do we need to read Energizing Neoliberalism?
CW: The book will help readers to see the 1970s energy crisis as a pivotal moment not only in postwar U.S. history, but in the history of the twentieth-century world more broadly. Its methodological approach to the energy crisis helps to show how closely linked the use of energy resources is to deeper social and political currents. In light of ongoing struggles (and failures) to transition away from fossil fuels, it is important to understand not only why the energy crisis failed to generate an energy transition, but also to grasp the neoliberal legacy that it left behind.
The book will also introduce readers to the broad range of ideas and debates about energy and society that swirled around in the 1970s but were then promptly forgotten. There is an enormous well of ideas and possibilities from that period that we’re busily reinventing right now. Other scholars are beginning to see this. Michael Hardt recently published a book on the 1970s in which he presents the decade as a reservoir of ideas for radical political practice in the present. In a similar way, it is my hope that engaging with the decade’s debates about energy and society will help advance today’s conversation on energy, consumption, capitalism, and climate.
In a time seemingly and endlessly beset by crises, I think now is an important time to reflect on the concept and use of crisis. In that spirit, Energizing Neoliberalism is a self-reflexive examination of “crisis” as a historical and political category. In this, I’m drawing on Janet Roitman’s 2013 book, Anti-Crisis, which critiqued the use of crisis in accounts of the 2007-08 financial crisis. Roitman argued that crisis discourse made space for certain explanations of what was going on but foreclosed the possibility of other explanations. Like Roitman, I pay attention to the ways in which different constituencies mobilized claims of an energy crisis for their own ends. Central to my argument about the history of neoliberalism is my claim that it thrived on crisis.
Even more fundamentally, Roitman and Reinhart Koselleck have both noted that crisis has become a key marker of historical meaning in a world drained of transcendent meaning, which strikes me as a remarkably insightful assessment not only of current cultural and political discourse, but of historical writing as well. I have more to say about the dynamics of crisis in modern historical writing, but this book is my first attempt to think about what it means to organize historical narratives, and often to arrange politics, around crisis.
JF: Why and when did you become an American historian?
CW: I am a slightly uncomfortable calling myself an “American historian.” I prefer to say that I am a historian of modernity whose historical lab is the United States.
I gravitated toward American history in graduate school, but I think my reasons—and my approach to the historical study of the United States—go further back in time. I grew up in a Southwestern Ontario border town in the 1990s, a time of American triumphalism and optimism followed by the shattering experience of 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a Canadian, I imbibed U.S. cultural and economic hegemony: American movies, music, fashions, television, religion, and much more. So, while I’m interested in many different themes and places in modern history, I decided to focus on the United States because I wanted to understand the empire next door. Although the U.S. may now be experiencing relative decline (this is debatable), it remains one of the world’s most consequential nations in many respects.
So, my approach to American history is not as an American trying to understand his or her own country. I come to it as an outsider trying to understand the hegemon of what Eric Hobsbawm called the “Age of Extremes,” the twentieth century. In my view, a lot of American history, as written by Americans and within American institutions, is too parochial. I try to bring an outsider’s perspective to U.S developments that are significant beyond its borders.
JF: What is your next project?
CW: I’m starting work on two new projects. One is about the role of energy in the philosophy and practice of history. I’m interested in both how the historical study of energy and how access to abundant energy by those who study history has given shape to modern historical thought and practice. Hopefully this project will help me to think more deeply about the use of crisis in history as well.
The other project is a cultural and environmental history of the New Economy. In the wake of the 1970s energy crisis, there was a lot of talk about the power of technological innovation, especially with respect to computers, to solve the limits to growth problem that seemed to plague industrial capitalism. This is the world we continue to inhabit, a world of techno-utopian fantasy amid social and political chaos and ongoing climate breakdown. My aim is to develop a historically-informed critique of the New Economy and technological innovation in relation to midcentury energy imaginaries and in relation to the end of the 1970s energy crisis, to offer a deeper understanding of its cultural imaginaries of limitlessness and its connected cultural and resource demands.
JF: Thanks, Caleb!