Taking Back Control?

The most interesting person around today on the subject of the relationship between democracy and capitalism. – Christopher Bickerton, University of CambridgeThe 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 WorksTaking 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 IllusionTo 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 AgeTaking 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 CapitalismArguably 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 *

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).