Skip to Main Content (Press Enter)
Taking Back Control? by Wolfgang Streeck
Add Taking Back Control? to bookshelf
Add to Bookshelf

Look Inside

Taking Back Control?

States and State Systems After Globalism

States and State Systems After Globalism

By Wolfgang Streeck
Translated by Ben Fowkes and Joshua Rahtz

By Wolfgang Streeck
Translated by Ben Fowkes and Joshua Rahtz

By Wolfgang Streeck
Translated by Ben Fowkes and Joshua Rahtz

By Wolfgang Streeck
Translated by Ben Fowkes and Joshua Rahtz

Best Seller

Category: World Politics

Category: World Politics

Hardcover $34.95

Nov 19, 2024 | ISBN 9781839767296

Ebook $14.99

Nov 19, 2024 | ISBN 9781839767326

All Formats
+
    Taking Back Control? by Wolfgang Streeck
    Hardcover $34.95
    Nov 19, 2024 | ISBN 9781839767296

    Buy from Other Retailers:

    See All Formats (1) +
    • $34.95

      Nov 19, 2024 | ISBN 9781839767296

      Buy from Other Retailers:

    • Nov 19, 2024 | ISBN 9781839767326

      Buy from Other Retailers:

    Buy the Ebook:

    About Taking Back Control?

    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.

    About Taking Back Control?

    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.

    Also by Wolfgang Streeck

    Critical Encounters
    How Will Capitalism End?
    Buying Time
    See all books by Wolfgang Streeck

    Also by Wolfgang Streeck

    Critical Encounters
    How Will Capitalism End?
    Buying Time
    See all books by Wolfgang Streeck

    Product Details

    Category: World Politics

    Hardcover | $34.95
    Published by Verso
    Nov 19, 2024 | 416 Pages | 6 x 9-1/5 | ISBN 9781839767296

    Category: World Politics

    Ebook | $14.99
    Published by Verso
    Nov 19, 2024 | 416 Pages | ISBN 9781839767326

    YOU MAY ALSO LIKE

    Praise

    “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

    Table Of Contents

    Introduction: Political Economy beyond Globalism: States, War, and Capitalist Democracy

    Part I: The Demise of Centralism
    1. Global Politics and Regional Planning
    The Neoliberal Interlude
    A Critical Moment

    2. The Demise of the New World Order
    Globalisation and Hyperglobalisation
    A New European Order: The European Union
    Forever Unfinished

    3. Stuck: Between Globalism and Democracy
    What Next? A Tug of War
    Left Globalism
    Culture versus Unculture
    Democracy as a De-proletarianised Value System

    4. Breaking the Deadlock: Democracy and the
    Politics of Scale
    Economic Crisis and State Systems
    Megalomania?
    Decomposing Complexity

    Part II: After Three Decades
    5. A Dual Crisis I: Capitalism
    Stagnation
    The Neoliberal Crisis Sequence
    The Central Bank State as the Last Stage of Neoliberalism
    Keynes from the Ashes?
    Debt without Remorse?
    The Emergency State
    Clueless
    The Great Uncertainty
    Capitalism and Nothing Else

    6. A Dual Crisis II: Democracy
    States between Democracy and Globalism
    Globalism against Democracy
    Democracy against Globalism
    Post-globalist Democracy?

    Part III: States and State Systems
    7. Integration and Differentiation
    Gibbon: Unity or Diversity?
    The Contemporary State System: A Survey
    Metamorphoses of the Nation-State
    Statehood and the Constitutive Particularism of
    Human Socialisation
    Excursus I: Scotland and Catalonia
    Excursus II: Germany in Comparison
    ‘Taking Back Control’
    Confederation or Empire?
    The Dimensions of States and State Systems, and their Political Economy

    8. The European Union: From Neoliberal to Geopolitical Integration
    Europe as Battleground and Place of Desire
    Before Ukraine: Critical Fault-Lines, Impending Failure
    More Unity through Less Unity?
    Integration by Militarisation?
    After Ukraine
    Liabilities Old and New
    Beyond Superstate and Empire
    Learning from Europe

    Part IV: Beyond Globalist Centralisation
    9. Mega-statism and Its Limitations
    The Contradictions and Limits of Neoliberal Globalisation:
    Eight Theses
    Globalisation and Hyperglobalisation
    Global Market Economy, National Democracy
    Unity from Above: Global Governance
    Global Governance as Technocratic Utopia
    Another Plan A
    Global Governance as Liberal Empire
    COVID: The (Long-Hidden) Costs of Globalisation
    COVID and the Fiscal Crisis of the State: A Conjecture

    10. Small-Statism and Its Possibilities
    Simon: Decomposing Complexity
    Keynes: National Self-Sufficiency
    Deglobalisation and Alternative Development
    Global Polycentrism
    Disentanglement: COVID and the Supply Chains
    The Keynes-Polanyi State: National, Sovereign, Democratic
    Better Smaller
    ‘Economic Patriotism’: Globalism and Back
    Big Crisis, Small States
    The Question of Money
    Democratic Particularism and Global Collective Goods
    Cooperative, Not Imperial: A Prospect of a New International Order

    Epilogue
    Index

    Looking for More Great Reads?
    21 Books You’ve Been Meaning to Read

    Visit other sites in the Penguin Random House Network

    Raise kids who love to read

    Brightly

    Raise kids who love to read

    Today's Top Books

    Today's Top Books

    Want to know what people are actually reading right now?

         An online magazine for today’s home cook

    TASTE

    An online magazine for today’s home cook