Thermoeconomics in a Time of Monsters: Rethinking Theory, China and International Geopolitical Economy

In an era when the old world is dying and the new one struggles to be born, Thermoeconomics in a Time of Monsters delivers a groundbreaking reframing of political economy through the unforgiving laws of thermodynamics.Warwick Powell argues that all social-economic systems are fundamentally energetic and metabolic. Their reproduction, stability and resilience are perpetually threatened by entropy—the natural tendency toward disorder and energetic dispersion. Successful societies survive and thrive through deliberate negentropic interventions: energetic renewal, efficiency gains, and institutional arrangements that convert energy surpluses into sustained order.Building on classical concerns with value, surplus, production and circulation, Powell develops Systemic Exchange Value (SEV) theory. Money, information, supply chains and fictitious capital are reinterpreted as energetic phenomena. The result is a coherent ontology that integrates thermodynamics, endogenous money and information theory.Applying this lens, Powell offers a compelling account of China’s developmental success as a negentropic political economy and contrasts it with the accelerating entropic decay of US hyper-financialisation. The book illuminates today’s geopolitical turbulence and the material forces reshaping global power.Essential reading for anyone seeking to understand our “time of monsters.” Read more