Dr. Stephen Maher is an Assistant Professor of Economics at SUNY Cortland and co-editor of The Socialist Register. He earned his PhD from York University in Toronto, Canada, in 2020, and an MA from American University in Washington, D.C., in 2011. Additionally, he holds an appointment as an Adjunct Research Professor at the Institute of Political Economy at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, where he was a Visiting Professor in 2022-2023.
Dr. Maher’s research primarily focuses on the relationship between the state, multinational corporations, and the financial system in both American and global contexts from the nineteenth century to the present. He has written widely in academic and popular forums on financialization, globalization, corporate governance, and the role of the state in contemporary capitalism. His most recent book, The Fall and Rise of American Finance: From J.P. Morgan to BlackRock (Verso, 2024), co-authored with Scott Aquanno, challenges the perspective that financialization signifies the decline of capitalism or has come at the expense of the “real” productive economy. Instead, it demonstrates how finance has facilitated the mobility and competitiveness of capital supported by the ever-deeper integration between finance and state power.
His previous book, Corporate Capitalism and the Integral State: General Electric and a Century of American Power (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) challenges the idea that the relationship between the modern state and corporation is primarily a matter of business lobbying a passive state. The book illustrated how the development and restructuring of the modern corporation has not simply been the result of market logic but is infused with state power, just as linkages to business were critical in the internal development of state organization. Drawing on extensive original archival research, Dr. Maher shows that state personnel actively engage with business associations to organize corporate consensus around critical policy initiatives, bring corporate elites into the policymaking process, and coordinate Congressional lobbying efforts.
He is also the co-editor, with Greg Albo and Alan Zuege, of State Transformations (Haymarket Books, 2022), an edited collection published in honor of the late Professor Leo Panitch. Dr. Maher is currently co-editing a volume on the Canadian State with Bryan Evans and Greg Albo (under contract with the University of Toronto Press), as well as a volume on the political economy of the far-right in Europe and North America with Jordan House and Scott Aquanno.