Both of these books look to explain recent and ongoing transformations of capitalism (although Brown, like Michel Foucault, is wary of the term capitalism); however, they reach different conclusions and draw on different theories. This presents a challenge for the reviewer, but an interesting one—to use the arguments and presuppositions of each book to rub the other against the grain, and see what sparks ignite.
Wendy Brown’s book is part of an ongoing conversation on the left about the implications of neo-liberalism for democracy. The book is written both with and against Foucault—with Foucault in that it adopts much of his characteristic mode of inquiry, and further develops his fragmentary thoughts on neo-liberalism; and against Foucault, in that it is far more specifically and directly critical of neo-liberalism than Foucault was, and grounds its critique in a qualified defense of the institutions of liberal democracy and society. Brown is elegiac for the liberal institutions that she believes we are losing, not because she herself is a liberal, but because she sees these institutions as accommodating more radical modes of inquiry. For example, she laments how universities have difficulty in recruiting students who are interested in discovering their true passions through a liberal arts education. In a world where neo-liberalism sets the rules, students cannot easily afford to think about their passions, since they instead have to focus on competing with other students for scarce jobs and opportunities.
For Brown then, neo-liberalism is “an order of normative reason that, when it becomes ascendant, takes shape as a governing rationality extending a specific formulation of economic values, practices, and metrics to every dimension of human life” (p. 30). The ‘every dimension’ part of that formulation is important—for Brown, much of what is objectionable about neo-liberalism lies in its totalizing tendencies, to extend and insinuate itself into areas such as politics and education. It is not so much the logic behind the market as the logic through which market ways of thinking are becoming near ubiquitous.
In particular, this challenges the demos and the particular stature of the political. As homo (and femina) politicus (politica) become homo economicus, they lose their ability to inquire into the best ways to pursue their lives and become conditioned by a logic that masquerades as economic freedom, but is actually a bundle of disciplining tendencies. Politics shrivels into a debased market (Brown provides a detailed exegesis of the market logic of Citizens United). The university ceases to engage in education, and it instead reconceives itself as providing human capital.
Pablo Beramendi et al.’s edited volume couldn’t be more different. It addresses arguments in comparative political science about where the politics of advanced capitalist countries (especially Western European countries) are going. Rather than looking at changing orders of normative reason, the authors are concerned with changes in the relationship between political parties, general publics, and the economy.
The book is one important part of a general shift towards reconsidering the role that political parties and democratic choice play in shaping the economy and welfare provision. Together with recent articles by Kimberly Morgan and Peter Hall, it moves a little distance from the traditional focus of comparative political economy onto interest groups such as business (although Anke Hassel’s chapter examines variation in trade union decline), and emphasizes the preferences of voters and partisan contention as key explanatory factors.
This leads to a number of interesting conclusions, which are sometimes underpinned and sometimes qualified by the more specific chapters. There are strongly persisting patterns of national institutional continuity, which constrain radical movements, but which allow progress within institutional confines. Thus, convergence accounts (which often stress how neo-liberalism is leading to a convergence on a lowest common denominator) and Varieties of Capitalism accounts (which stress how national equilibria are self-enforcing) may blind us to the real choices and real changes that different countries are undergoing. Policy makers may look to make better systems, but not in conditions of their own making.
Some countries continue with market-based reforms; others have segmented or dualized labor markets, in which insiders have protections but there is a large body of unprotected workers. Some, however, such as the Netherlands and Denmark, have been able to move closer towards a system where welfare is oriented less towards consumption than towards training and investment. Differences in institutions, and in the kinds of coalitions that are possible between citizens and the parties that represent them, explain how different countries face varying constraints.
Both these books succeed well on their own terms. Brown’s book provides a revision of Foucault that is more alert to the value of democracy and liberal institutions, and hence more politically useful (although she understandably has far more to say about the difficulties faced by the Left than the ways they might seek to surmount them). Beramendi et al. present an excellent and empirically valuable (space constraints prevent me from discussing the many specific research contributions of the individual chapters) overview of how party politics and capitalism intersect. At the same time, by forcing the books into a mutually uncomfortable conversation with each other, it might be possible to think more clearly about the points that each book does not address.
For example, one of the most intriguing arguments in Brown’s book is that neoliberalism is a thinly disguised collectivist endeavor that disciplines individuals as human capital to contribute to collective goods such as macroeconomic growth, so that the “throne of interest has vanished and at the extreme is replaced with the throne of sacrifice.” Such a throne—barbed perhaps with rusty blades that cut you if you move an inch in the wrong direction—updates and radicalizes Weber’s stahlhartes gehäuse (iron cage). Yet arguments about human capital can cut in different directions. Are the investment-oriented regimes described in Beramendi et al.—which do not leave citizens to improve human capital on their own, but instead provide skills and training—oppressive in the same way? After all, there is a long line of radical thinking, most obviously represented by Marx, which argues that skilled labor can be a potent form of self-realization under the right political conditions.
More generally, Beramendi et al.’s arguments might caution scholars of neo-liberalism like Brown to think comparatively. Brown’s version of neo-liberalism is both totalizing and implicitly based on the experience of American politics. While it speaks briefly on German ordoliberalism and mentions the fights over European austerity in passing, its major examples are drawn from the United States—how U.S. judges think about American democracy, and how U.S. universities are becoming market oriented. Doubtless, many of these lessons could be extended, but Beramendi et al. and other comparativists point to how different local contexts might modify—perhaps even radically modify—arguments about the governing rationality of neo-liberalism.
Equally, Beramendi et al. might learn from Brown. Political theorists are typically more explicit about their normative priors than more empirically-oriented political scientists—but this is not to say that such political scientists aren’t motivated by normative questions as well. Even if they are willing to test their motivating ideas against empirics, the ideas themselves may emerge from normatively tinged debates.
This is surely the case for the debates to which Beramendi et al. seek to contribute. They identify themselves explicitly with the varieties of capitalism approach stretching back to Andrew Shonfield (Modern Capitalism: The Changing Balance of Public and Private Power, 1966), an approach which has become more empirically oriented over the years, but which is nonetheless tied to a clear political agenda. Shonfield wished to alert Anglocentric readers to the benefits of economic planning, as practiced by the advanced states of Continental Europe. His successors have maintained an implicit interest in the lessons that continental capitalism can offer to English speaking countries, while sometimes fearing that alternative models will be extinguished by competition with its more ruthless Anglo-American competitors.
These normative questions lie beneath the empirical disputes that Beramendi et al. engage in. Scholars of the varieties of capitalism have split; some, like Wolfgang Streeck argue that neo-liberalism is crushing alternative forms of capitalist organization, while others, like the contributors to this volume, imply that more market-friendly reforms along the lines of Denmark present an attractive alternative. This dispute underlies empirical disagreements over such things as the representativeness of party systems.
Bringing out this normative dimension more explicitly—as Brown does in her book—might better situate the empirics and the important underlying questions. For example, it would push the editors and authors to engage with counterarguments; or another example, either Mark Blyth or the late Peter Mair might argue that the findings of consonance between voter preferences and parties on some scale miss how the issue space underlying left-right scales has plausibly shrunk dramatically in the last twenty years.
Both Mair and Streeck would surely also point to changes in the relationship between the EU and its member states. These upheavals are pushed to the sidelines of the volume—Hassel briefly mentions them, Häusermann and Kriesi talk about how external politics may change citizens’ preferences, and the volume’s conclusions finally discuss the financial crisis as an “external shock” and clash of national approaches—yet it is surely more than that.
Peter Gourevitch famously joked that for a comparativist, happiness “is finding a force or event which affects a number of societies at the same time.” In a recent essay, however, he has argued that the economic crisis did not involve “external forces shaping internal outcomes,” but “the two interacting.” These kinds of interactions are uncomfortable for comparativists to think about, but are crucial to understanding what has happened in a Europe where some states now find their economic policies largely being made for them by the “Troika,” while other states are subject to more intrusive monitoring and potential intervention than in the past. It simply may not matter much that the policy preferences of Greek citizens and parties match with a .95 r2 if those citizens and parties aren’t making the real decisions.
These are difficult questions—and not just for Beramendi et al. It may be that the comparative political economy of Europe cannot just be comparative any more, since so much of what is important is happening at the EU and even international levels. Addressing both the normative questions raised by Brown and the empirical questions raised by Beramendi et al. doesn’t simply mean giving normative arguments stronger empirical grounding or drawing out the normative claims implicit in empirical work. It also involves both approaches coming to terms with a world where the crucial causal forces simply cannot be cleanly segmented into neat national spaces.
