Wolfgang Streeck’s new book Taking Back Control? argues that the neoliberal era of free trade and trickle-down rhetoric lies in the past. He spoke to Jacobin about the political shocks this might bring.
Wolfgang Streeck’s Taking Back Control? had only been out for a few weeks when it was applauded by Martin Wolf as one of the best books on economics for 2024. For the Financial Times sage Wolf, Streeck “is arguably the most thoughtful critic of globalisation.”
In Taking Back Control?, Streeck further pursues the thesis developed in its 2014 precursor, Buying Time. There, the leading German sociologist argued that the contradictions of capital that came to a head during the “stagflation crisis” of the 1970s were never solved but merely kicked down the road. This was done in the 1980s and 1990s, argues Streeck, by using budget deficits and runaway public debt as a buffer; in the 2000s by using credit cards, mortgages, and private debt as the shock absorber — what the British sociologist Colin Crouch once called “privatized Keynesianism.” It worked nicely, for some at least, until 2008, when it didn’t.
Streeck’s latest book continues the story right up to the populist backlash against the liberal global order, now brought to its knees by the combined forces of pandemics, imperial overstretch, climate change, and the return of geopolitics. Streeck shows that the neoliberal era of free trade and trickle-down rhetoric is now solidly behind us.
Building on insights from classic but largely forgotten texts by Karl Polanyi and John Maynard Keynes, Streeck deconstructs the claim that global problems require global solutions — that is, the underpinning of the liberal dream of global governance.
Streeck’s main cautionary case is the European Union, arguably…
Auteur: Wolfgang Streeck
