Evan Lieberman has produced a first-rate work of comparative political economy. Just as importantly, he has done so by going boldly (and engagingly) where so few have gone before—into the tax state. Given how critical the capacity of a state to tax economic elites is to the provision of public goods, redistribution, and the promotion of development in general, it is indeed shocking to realize just how little attention this question has received from political scientists (there being as always some notable exceptions). Lieberman sets out to correct this gap not only by carefully and meticulously defining and measuring different tax states but also by providing a rich historical and comparative account of the rise and consolidation of the two very different tax states of South Africa and Brazil.

As the author shows, South Africa has what he calls a cooperative tax state, one that is capable of securing significant tax revenues from a comparatively compliant dominant class. Brazil, on the other hand, is saddled with an adversarial tax state, in which dominant interests assiduously resist taxation. The result is that the tax structure in South Africa is efficient and progressive (with the largest portion of taxes coming from income and property), whereas the Brazilian tax state is inefficient and regressive (with the largest share coming from consumption taxes and social security contributions). Locating his analysis squarely in the Joel Migdal-Atul Kohli-Vivienne Shue state-in-society paradigm (State Power and Social Forces, 1994) he in effect paints a vivid contrast between a highly synergistic state–society relation (South Africa) and a highly disarticulated state–society relation (Brazil).

Of course, Brazil and South Africa are very different cases, but Lieberman makes a sound case for the comparison, noting that both countries have similar colonial histories and parallel trajectories of economic development through import-substitution industrialization. In explaining the divergent patterns of tax state building, he methodically dispatches a range of contending explanations (tax culture, relation to global economy, basic state capacity, regime type, etc.) and instead traces the origins of the tax state to constitutional junctures at the turn of the century. The critical junctures are important because they in effect give institutional form (and great durability) to different national political communities (NPCs)—the “historically rooted institutions which give political salience to certain group identities and not others” (p. 10). In the case of South Africa, class cohesion and a resulting willingness to tax and be taxed is cemented by white solidarity and exclusion of the black majority. In Brazil, the powerful forces of regionalism and the fact that race never becomes a source of political mobilization produce a fragmented polity in which dominant interests actively resist the federal state's many attempts to impose higher rates of income and property taxes. The argument is effectively bolstered by brief but insightful analyses of other cooperative and adversarial tax states, including a nicely constructed statistical model.

If the argument is developed with exemplary rigor, one cannot help but wonder if the concept of a national political community is not just old wine in a new bottle. The actual mechanism that drives state–society relations in Lieberman's argument is intra- and interclass cohesion. If the dominant class is cohesive and confident and recognizes the basic interdependency of class interests, then it is willing to make short-term sacrifices (pay taxes) for long-term gains (public goods, order, labor quiescence). This is the essence of what Antonio Gramsci called hegemony, a form of class politics in which dominant classes concretely coordinate their interests with subordinate classes. Similar arguments have been made about the encompassing interests of the working class as the basis of high-capacity social democratic states (e.g., Adam Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy, 1985). Lieberman undoubtedly knows this but wants to argue that the NPC concept is novel because its takes identity and institutions seriously. But then have not all serious scholars of the history of class formation (the process of going from the defense of narrow to encompassing interests) taken institutional context and identity seriously, beginning with Gramsci's focus on ideology (political construction) and, more recently, social history perspectives on class (e.g., E. P. Thompson, Ira Katznelson, and many others)?

The point here is not, moreover, just about theoretical lineage. Highlighting how the dynamics of class formation shapes political economies might also have helped correct the two weak points of the book. First, in his determination to make race and regionalism matter (and they certainly do matter), Lieberman loses sight of the equally determinant effect of the socioeconomic origins of capitalism in South Africa and Brazil. South Africa is the story of mining capital in search of cheap labor. The solution to the labor problem was the creation of a centralized and coercive state that could uproot the African peasantry and mobilize wage labor. Race became the key organizational construct. In Brazil, a plantation economy produced a far more paternalistic and clientelistic regime of labor control, one that relied on the local equations of power and dependency, including race relations that were politically obfuscated even as they were socially deployed. The relative significance of race and regionalism, and the resulting patterns of dominant class formation, thus have their roots in the colonial economy and its particular configurations of social power. Second, as Lieberman extends his analytic insights into the present phase of democratic transformations, he makes a strong case that a regressive and inefficient state tax remains a significant obstacle to change in Brazil, but is on much shakier grounds when he argues that the cooperative tax state should serve South Africa well. If it is indeed the case that the “post-apartheid state has better-than-average capacities to ameliorate income and wealth disparities” (p. 278), the posttransition class configuration may very well have trumped this advantage. To many observers, the ruling African National Congress increasingly represents a new alliance of emerging black elites and the white business community, marked most notably by the ANC's abandonment of its historical commitment to using the state as an instrument of redistributive justice and its embrace of neoliberal economic policies (including fiscal austerity and the commodification of public services). If race is on the decline, class is on the rise, and patterns of income inequality and social exclusion have actually increased over the past decade.

Be this as it may, Race and Regionalism is an invaluable contribution not only to the much neglected topic of the tax state but more broadly to an understanding of the complex political and institutional patterns that shape the possibilities of development in the semiperiphery. This book is essential reading to all students of comparative political economy.