Taking Back Control? - by Wolfgang Streeck (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Taking back control? States and state systems after globalization.

The era of hyperglobalization once hailed as the 'end of history' was characterised by boundless capitalist expansion. The neoliberal revolution gave rise to a politics of scale aimed at the centralization and unification of states and state systems: the replacement of national with global governance or, in Europe, of the nation-state with a supranational superstate, the European Union. The 'New World Order' proclaimed by the United States in the wake of the Soviet collapse proved to be ungovernable by democratic means. Instead, it was ruled through a combination of technocracy and mercatocracy, failing spectacularly to provide for political stability, social legitimacy and international peace. Marked by a series of economic and institutional crises, hyperglobalization gave rise to various kinds of political countermovements that rebelled against and ultimately stopped the upward transfer of state authority in its tracks. This book analyses the ongoing tug-of-war between the forces of globalism and democracy, of centralization and decentralization, and unification and differentiation of states and state systems, and how they are tied to the advance of global capitalism and the prospects for its social and democratic regulation. Exploring the possibility for states and the societies they govern to take back control over their collective fate, the book is an attempt at a renewed theory of the state in political economy. Inspired by the work of Karl Polanyi and John Maynard Keynes, it discusses the potential outlines of a state system allowing for democratic governance within and peaceful cooperation between sovereign nation-states.

Review Quotes

"The most interesting person around today on the subject of the relationship between democracy and capitalism."
--Christopher Bickerton, University of Cambridge

"The most interesting person on the most urgent subject of our times."
--Aditya Chakrabortty, Guardian

"In this wild ride of a must-read book, Wolfgang Streeck clarifies the depth of current crises in both capitalism and democracy, offers a detailed condemnation of the disastrous post-1989 unipolar neoliberal politics of enforced hyper-globalization, and suggests his own rules and structure for a more diverse, democratic, and peaceful state system we might begin to build, but that a long-tired politics and now mindless militarism still keep from public view."
--Joel Rogers, co-author of American Society: How it Really Works

"Taking Back Control? provides both a brilliant diagnosis of what has gone wrong with globalization and a persuasive prescription for renewing democratic governance. Wolfgang Streeck synthesizes arguments from politics, economics, and sociology in a book that deserves a place besides those of his 20th century intellectual forebears--Karl Polanyi and John Maynard Keynes."
--Fred Block, author of Capitalism: The Future of an Illusion

"To me, one crucial question emerges from this masterclass in contemporary political economy: does the current breakdown of a neoliberalism underpinned by US hegemony portend a regression to fascism and war as in the 1930s, or is there a more hopeful prospect? Drawing on Dani Rodrik's critique of hyper-globalisation and the democratic alternative offered by the 'Keynes-Polanyi state', Wolfgang Streeck argues compellingly for a de-globalised world polity founded on a humane economic nationalism. 'The nation state', he claims, 'is the only institution capable of asserting the primacy of society over capitalism'. Agree or disagree, Streeck offers a radical and necessary challenge to conventional wisdom."
--Robert Skidelsky, author of The Machine Age

"Taking Back Control? combines a brilliant diagnosis of the political crisis of neoliberal globalization with a tough-minded case for "small-statism" as our best chance for a democratic-socialist resolution. Left internationalists may not like that conclusion but cannot ignore it. Streeck's challenging new book raises the scale-of-democracy debate to a new level."
--Nancy Fraser, author of Cannibal Capitalism

"Arguably the most thoughtful critic of globalisation"
--Martin Wolf, Financial Times

"Taking Back Control? helped me think of what a politics beyond liberalism could look like and expanded my sense of what is possible."
--John-Baptiste Oduor, Granta, Books of the Year 2024

"In recent decades, Mr. Streeck has described the complaints of populist movements with unequaled power. That is because he has a convincing theory of what has gone wrong in the complex gearworks of American-driven globalization, and he has been able to lay it out with clarity."
--Christopher Caldwell, New York Times

"This maverick thinker is the Karl Marx of our time"
--New York Times

"[E]ssential for any scholar seeking to make sense of a range of current trends: the ongoing retreat from 1990s-style globalization, the crisis of liberal democracy, and the rapid return of hot wars, cold wars, and trade wars to a world that just yesterday claimed to have overcome them all."
--David Singh Grewal, Chronicle of Higher Education

"Streeck's book has already done much of the heavy lifting for the necessary political and economic discussion that lies before us."
--Mathew D. Rose, Brave New Europe

About the Author

Wolfgang Streeck is a Senior Research Associate and Emeritus Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. He is a Member of the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and an Honorary Member of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE).