How Will Capitalism End?: Essays on a Failing System

By Wolfgang Streeck

One of the “Best Books of the Year”: Guardian • Financial Times • Times Higher Education

A major collection of essays that questions whether contemporary capitalism will end with a bang or a whimper—from a leading political economist and the author of Buying Time.

After years of ill health, capitalism is now in a critical condition. Growth has given way to stagnation; inequality is leading to instability; and confidence in the money economy has all but evaporated.

In How Will Capitalism End?, the acclaimed analyst of contemporary politics and economics Wolfgang Streeck argues that the world is about to change. The marriage between democracy and capitalism, ill-suited partners brought together in the shadow of World War II, is coming to an end. The regulatory institutions that once restrained the financial sector’s excesses have collapsed and, after the final victory of capitalism at the end of the Cold War, there is no political agency capable of rolling back the liberalization of the markets.

Ours has become a world defined by declining growth, oligarchic rule, a shrinking public sphere, institutional corruption and international anarchy, and no cure to these ills is at hand.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Nov 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9781784784034

Wolfgang Streeck

Wolfgang Streeck is the director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Research in Cologne and Professor of Sociology at the University of Cologne. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics and a member of the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences as well as the Academia Europaea.

Reviews for How Will Capitalism End?

[the7ken7petersen · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

If I am honest, I'm not at all sure that this book answers the question which it raises. That being so, isn't it rather rash for me to give it a five star review? I don't think so and, I hope, that the following will explain why.This book is a collection of Streeck articles which have previously found an audience in the media. This has the advantage that, unlike many books upon a subject such as Capitalism, it does not presume a deep understanding from the reader. That being said, I do not profess to have understood every single idea presented; sufficient, however, made sense that the time taken (and it did take me a considerable time to read a mere 250 pages) was, I consider, well spent.If you are looking for a good Marxist attack upon Capitalism, I suggest that you move on now: this is far more subtle. It begins with an eminently readable explanation as to how Capitalism has come to its current form - and indeed, a clear insight as to what that current state is. Events such as the fight against inflation through the '70's, public debt in the '80's, deregulation in the '90's and the bank bailouts of the noughties all become an understandable, almost inevitable, chain.Streeck then goes on to link democracy and capitalism in an eternal love/hate relationship. He argues, persuasively, that each is necessary to the other for its inception and continued development but, that each has the intention of limiting the other. Capitalism is certainly on the upstroke at the moment but if, as seems more likely than previously, it proves to be victorious; that victory will be pyrrhic.So, whilst a date for the death of Capitalism is not to be found, the symptoms currently affecting it are closely examined and reasonable doubt cast upon its ability to regenerate in a Whovian fashion.

[paul_s-289480 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Incoherent rant. Keeps repeating itself ad nauseum. Makes exactly zero falsifiable predictions.