We do not pretend to approach the subject with a neutral, apolitical attitude-our ultimate aim in writing this book is to explore different possibilities, and different worlds. Like our critic, we wonder what kind of world it would be without the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO; but we wonder for the future, not to justify and apologize for the past and present (mis)deeds of these institutions. We deliberately did not present "the other side"-by which is meant the global institutions' view of themselves; the reader can find such views in the many publications of the institutions and their apologists. They're literally all over the place, and this is one reason that motivated us to work on an alternative view, a different history. For not presenting arguments in favor of these institutions (although we always present them at length where we criticize them!), and although he finds the text "sometimes hard to understand" (quoting sentences out of context to demonstrate), our critic describes our analyses as superficial, and the discussion shallow. Maybe our critic was expecting to read another kind of book; better, maybe our critic would like to read the book again, and give another thought to what is truly "the other side".
The book seems to lay all the blame for the problems of the poor on the "Unholy Trinity", and none on the often corrupt governments of the underdeveloped nations or on any other factors. The main author, Richard Peet, is a professor of geography, and at some points tries to give a geographical interpretation to the question of how the world is run, maintaining that there is an axis from Washington to Wall Street, with an offshoot to Harvard University in Massachusetts, which issues policies for the rest of the world.
Peet takes the world-view of Italian communist journalist Antonio Gramsci and French post-structuralist philosopher Michel Foucault. This states that the world is controlled by a "hegemony", by which is meant a dominant system of thought, and, according to Foucault, this system of thought is maintained through a "discourse", meaning a constrained set of ideas that are allowed to be discussed. This results in sentences like, "Discourses with hegemonic depth originate in a few discursive command centres where only a limited set of ideas are allowed responsible presentation and elaboration. In analysing these spaces, the clusters of economic and political institutions that carry out the production and legitimation of theories, and the dissemination of policy prescriptions, are the crucial agents." I find this kind of analysis superficial, by refusing to look into the ideas themselves.
The text is sometimes hard to understand. For instance, "These diverse articulations, between the global and the local, can be described using a set of geopolitical terms that combine the political-discursive-rational dimension with the geographical-organizational-power dimension."