# William I. Robinson, "Epochal Crisis: The Exhaustion of Global Capitalism" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

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Podcast: [Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/exchanges-a-cambridge-up-podcast-5610159)
Published: 2026-04-30T08:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK2552105536.mp3?updated=1777441982
Audio file: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK2552105536.mp3?updated=1777441982
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Duration seconds: 3260

## Resource

Epochal Crisis: The Exhaustion of Global Capitalism (Cambridge UP, 2025) is the most recent book from Professor William Robinson, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This title is the latest in excellent and ground-breaking titles from Professor Robinson in a distinguished career, where he began writing books on United States intervention into Nicaragua in the late 1980s and early 1990s, expanding this focus on United States hegemony more broadly in the ground-breaking book Promoting Polyarchy in 1996, up to then grappling with the totality of the capitalist world system more recently in titles such as The Global Police State in 2020, Can Global Capitalism Endure in 2022, and War, Global Capitalism and Resistance in 2024, alongside many other books. Professor Robinson’s latest instalment we discuss in this episode, Epochal Crisis, tracks the multifactorial crises that are impacting the global capitalist system today, across economic, social, ecological, political and other dimensions, and how these intersecting and overlapping crises are degrading or exhausting the ability for capitalism to renew itself. This contemporaneous epochal crisis, as Professor Robinson carefully details, is catalysing morbid symptoms that express themselves as wars, unprecedented violence, ecological emergencies, rock-bottom political legitimacy and a host of other dangerous and cataclysmic effects. Epochal Crisis is both a wide-ranging and extensive investigation into the current, overlapping and intersecting crises that are plaguing the world capitalist system, as it appears in its final, violent death throes, and also a highly engaging work that is easy to digest and will help you understand the very naked reality of capital crisis that is…

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