Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital

(Paperback)

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If our oil addiction is so bad for us, why don't we kick the habit Looking beyond the usual culprits--Big Oil, petro-states, and the strategists of empire-- Lifeblood finds a deeper and more complex explanation in everyday practices of oil consumption in American culture. Those practices, Matthew T. Huber suggests, have in fact been instrumental in shaping thebroader cultural politics of American capitalism.

Reviews

"Lifeblood offers a radically alternative way of thinking about cheap oil and oil addiction and in so doing peers beneath the liquid surfaces of petroleum to see how the long century of American oil consumption has been central to the rise of American neoliberalism itself. An original and masterful account of oil in contemporary American capitalism."Michael Watts, University of California, Berkeley

"Compellingly presented and enlivened by fascinating archival research, Hubers arguments about the ecology of politics and the centrality of oil to the making of entrepreneurial life are important and intriguing."Gavin Bridge, Durham University

"Huber offers a poignant analysis of how oil shapes the American way of life and neoliberal hegemony in the US."CHOICE

"Huber makes it abundantly clear that the problems with patterns of oil consumption are not fundamentally technical and economic but cultural, social, and political."Economic Geography

"An incisive look into how oil permeates our lives and helped shape American politics during the twentieth century."New Books in Geography

"The most succinct, theoretically grounded critique of the culture of oil yet in print."Humanities and Social Sciences Review Online

"[Lifeblood Oil] is a compelling account, and is highly recommended."Urban Studies

"Huber takes us. . . into Americans own subconscious minds, to their un-thought-out daily patterns, and their emotional attachments to a sense of entrepreneurial success--and shows how these are linked materially to oil."Environmental History

"An elegantly written and empirically rich account which joins economic history, cultural analysis, and Marxist political economy."Human Geography

Author Bio

Matthew T. Huber is assistant professor of geography at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University.