Radical Economics as Journalism: The Origins of Dollars & Sense

Abstract

In this essay, I argue that radical economics innovated in the communication of economic ideas, engendering new idioms and print formats to intervene in circuits of progressive activism. The essay mentions the pamphlet work of the Union for Radical Political Economics’ various public engagement projects of the early 1970s but at its heart is the 1974 founding of the mass distribution monthly Dollars & Sense. It looks at the positions taken by the periodical over the years and asks, “What kind of print object was it?” It places the publication within a twentieth century history of left political economy periodicals and compares it with its closest contemporaries in the cultures of print of the American Left, notably Monthly Review and Radical America. The attention to the print ventures of radical economics in the 1970s is a contribution to a new kind of historiography that takes an expanded and extra-curricular outlook of economics.