Recasting Welfare Capitalism: Economic Adjustment in Contemporary France and Germany

Preface

Preface H ow and why capitalism changes is among the most important and most difficult questions in comparative politics. As the Heisenberg uncertainty principle teaches us in the study of particle physics, it is often difficult to measure the position and momentum of particles with equal precision . Similarly, in comparative political economy, many have chosen to emphasize either the “position” or the “momentum” of advanced capitalist countries, thereby capturing important aspects of political-economic dynamics while neglecting others. Structural approaches, whether Marxist, sociological, or institutional , tend to highlight capitalism’s enduring class or institutional foundations . Except with respect to rare and cataclysmic moments such as revolution or depression, however, such approaches fail to capture the subtle mechanisms through which capitalism changes, or else they assume unproblematically that capitalism will continue to evolve in ways that are consistent with broad historical trajectories, characterized by vague monikers such as “late” or “advanced.” Other, more “voluntarist” approaches tend to emphasize change and the role of human volition, whether of groups or of individuals, more than underlying structures. Such perspectives are good at capturing the process of change but often gloss over the organizational and institutional predicates that provide capitalist economies with long-term stability. This book grew out of my dissatisfaction with both tendencies. It provides a synthetic analysis of change in the welfare states and broader political economies of two advanced industrial countries over a period of several decades. For reasons both disciplinary and ideological, studies of these two domains of xii Preface capitalism have remained largely separate; this book aims to help bridge that gap. It also works to remedy some of the relatively thin treatments of politics that are prevalent in contemporary comparative political economy. It sees politics not merely as a foundational bargain (between, say, employers and the working class or workers and social-democratic parties) or as an institutionally congealed underpinning for relatively static national features, but, rather, as a fluid—but identifiable and traceable—driver of political and economic change. In this way, it represents an attempt to reconnect analytically the institutional structures of capitalism to the evolving political relationships that govern its adjustment. Unfortunately, there has been more recent change in advanced capitalist societies than in the analytical tools used to study them. In the mid-1960s, Andrew Shonfield’s magisterial Modern Capitalism eloquently conveyed the diversity of postwar capitalist systems and inspired a rich series of scholarly studies of that variation and explanations for its endurance. Since the 1970s, major strands of comparative political economy—from studies of corporatism in the 1970s and 1980s, to the proliferation of studies of the state in the 1980s and 1990s, to the more recent and influential “Varieties of Capitalism” approach inaugurated by Peter Hall and David Soskice, to the “worlds-of-welfare” school initiated by Gøsta Esping-Andersen—have continued along similar lines. As a result, we have a rich array of studies of variation in certain aspects of capitalist economies and advanced welfare states but relatively few accounts that explore how and why broad models of welfare capitalism change as they do. Work that does explore such drivers of change has often reverted to tropes about “globalization ” (often invoked but rarely defined) or “politics” (used as a catchall category ). Though this book is far from a comprehensive response to these concerns, it suggests a fruitful path for, and an initial step or two toward, developing one. Like the welfare-capitalist systems that it describes, this book has developed in two distinct stages, during each of which I have incurred more debt to more people than I can adequately convey. The first stage involved the research for and writing of the dissertation that provided the foundation for the book while I was at the University of California, Berkeley. Without my dissertation committee —Jonah Levy, Gerald Feldman, Margaret Weir, J. Nicholas Ziegler, and John Zysman—I could not have gotten this project off the ground. Margaret and Nick provided patient support and engaged critically with the work in ways that improved it immeasurably. My dissertation chair, Jonah Levy, has been both a continuing source of support and the very model of an energetic and conscientious scholar. It is to him that I owe my greatest intellectual (as well as an important personal) debt. At Berkeley, I also benefited from intellectual and personal guidance from friends and colleagues, many of whom continue to offer their support. Wade Jacoby and Pepper Culpepper offered important views on the German case; Preface...