America Inc.?

Linda Weiss attributes the U.S. capacity for transformative innovation to the strength of its national security state, a complex of agencies, programs, and hybrid arrangements that has developed around the institution of permanent defense preparedness and the pursuit of technological supremacy.

Linda Weiss is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Politics at the University of Sydney. She is the author of The Myth of the Powerless State, also from Cornell, and coeditor most recently of Developmental Politics in Transition: The Neoliberal Era and Beyond.

While America Inc.? is not a book for those desiring a normative critique of US policy, it is, instead, an invaluable analytical explanation as to how the US has been preeminent in its inexorable innovative drive to achieve and maintain its defense primacy. As such, Weiss lays out a forceful challenge to the traditional conceptualization of the US as a paradigmatic liberal capitalist state.

Mark Zachary Taylor:

This dense, powerful volume offers profound insights into the U.S. innovation system and its driving forces....It deserves close attention from anyone with an interest in innovation or America's place at the technological frontier.

William W. Keller, University of Georgia, author of Arm in Arm: The Political Economy of the Global Arms Trade:

As the quintessential Cold War institution, MIT spawned innovation from the military industrial complex to the digital age. This perceptive exegesis of the American state as technology progenitor goes a long way to debunk the myth of the free market and the Silicon Valley start-up entrepreneur.

Peter Trubowitz, London School of Economics, author of Politics and Strategy: Partisan Ambition and American Statecraft:

America Inc.? is a timely book on the contribution of state investment in national security to U.S. technological leadership. Challenging much received wisdom about the American state and the linkages between national security and economic development, Linda Weiss advances an original, compelling argument about how geopolitical imperatives have driven American technological innovation since World War II. This is an important book that merits the attention of scholars and practitioners alike.