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Plus Ça Change

The Merkel era in Germany—and Europe—brought to an end by the crushing defeat of her party. Prospects for country and continent under the enlarged ‘extreme centre’ of Scholz, Lindner and the Greens. Does the resurrection of the SPD conceal a shuffle to the right?

Engels’s Second Theory

The author of Buying Time detects a state-political supplement to Marxian social theory in Engels’s analyses of 19th-century militarism. The interplay of modes of production and destruction, class struggle and international warfare, from the Crimea to the War on Terror.

Progressive Regression

A periodization of European social policy, from attempts to manage the militant labour upsurge of the late 1960s to a supra-national lever for neoliberal restructuring, by way of Maastricht’s Social Protocol. The upshot: a deleterious relocation of social-policy battles from the terrain of welfare-state building to the fields of fiscal policy and immigration.

The Fourth Power?

Wolfgang Streeck on Joseph Vogl, The Ascendancy of Finance. The historic interpenetration of government and haute finance, epitomized in the secrecy of the Federal Reserve and ECB.

The Return of the Repressed

Is the long reign of neo-liberalism coming to an end, struck by the untoward blows of Brexit, Trump and spread of populist insurgencies across Europe, as victims of its pattern of globalization start to find a voice? If so, with no radical alternative yet in sight, is a strange interregnum looming, where ‘everything is possible and nothing consequential’?

Why the Euro Divides Europe

A landmark critique of Smithian notions of money as neutral medium of exchange, naturalized in social theory from Parsons to Habermas. Arguing instead for Weber’s concept of money as weapon in the market struggle, Wolfgang Streeck reveals how the single currency has transformed Europe’s qualitative horizontal diversity into quantitative vertical inequality.

The Politics of Exit

Wolfgang Streeck on Peter Mair, Ruling the Void. Diagnosis of Western democracy’s hollowing in the final work of a political-science master.

How Will Capitalism End?

Its challengers apparently vanquished, the main threat to capitalism may now come from disorders that lurk within the system itself. Wolfgang Streeck diagnoses its crisis symptoms, from persistent stagnation to global anarchy, and asks what lies in store as they multiply.

Citizens as Customers

Post-Fordist capitalism has transformed consumers’ expectations, offering limitless diversification of commodities. Wolfgang Streeck explores the implications for a public sphere which cannot hope to match the cornucopia of the market. The consumption of politics by the politics of consumption?

Markets and Peoples

Today’s Euro-turmoil as amplification of the clash between popular and financial interests. Turns of the dialectic of democracy and capitalism, and possible escape routes from the dictatorship of capital markets.

The Crises of Democratic Capitalism

The roots of today’s Great Recession are usually located in the financial excesses of the 1990s. Wolfgang Streeck traces a much longer arc, from 1945 onwards, of tensions between the logic of markets and the wishes of voters—culminating, he argues, in the international tempest of debt that now threatens to submerge democratic accountability altogether beneath the storm-waves of capital.