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Feb 8, 2022 · First, depicting the double movement as a process of dis-embedding and re-embedding understates the significance of the disembedded economy and the challenges of resolving the double movement within capitalism.
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historical evolution of capitalism and the current...
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Jul 10, 2021 · Global capitalism seems to be placing democracy, especially liberal democracy, under considerable stress. Support for populism has surged, especially for extreme right parties with populist and authoritarian programs.
Mar 9, 2018 · To what extent has capitalism in its varieties become a challenge for democracy and its normative standards? In our approach, capitalism is the challenger, the independent variable, while democracy functions as the dependent variable.
- Wolfgang Merkel
- wolfgang.merkel@wzb.eu
- 2014
- Streeck’s Nation-State Option
- Thesis 1: “Buying Time”
- Thesis 2: The “Forced Marriage” of Capitalism and Democracy Dissolves
- Thesis 3: from Tax State to Debt State
- Thesis 4: The EU as An Undemocratic Consolidation Regime
- Thesis 5: Rollback of Europeanization
- Habermas: The European Option
In his book Buying Time (2014), Wolfgang Streeck presents a relentless, radicalized critique of capitalism that openly takes up Karl Marx’s “critique of political economy” while also incorporating Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation (2001[1944]). Streeck’s representation of the economic crisis, impressive in its clarity, can be reconstructed in the...
Insightfully, Wolfgang Streeck shows how the “revolt of capital against the postwar mixed economy” (2014, p. 3) led to a “neoliberal quest to revive the dynamic of capitalist accumulation through all manner of deregulation, privatization and market expansion” (2014, p. 2). He describes the politics of the democratic OECD states as a strategy of “bu...
In a process unfolding over multiple stages – Thatcher (1979), Reagan (1980), and the Washington Consensus (1990) being particularly visible milestones – capitalism decoupled itself from democratic governance, step by step, from its social obligations and its political embedding (Streeck 2014, pp. 1, 5). Streeck refers to this “process of de-democr...
“Not high spending but low receipts are the cause of government debt, to be explained by economy and society […] setting limits to their taxation while at the same time making more and more demands on the state” (Streeck 2014, p. 66). The tax state gave way to the debt state because it was no longer able to cover its expenditures with tax revenues ...
In the name of reining in public debt and restoring “market confidence” in the wake of the financial crisis, the consolidation state operates in accordance with the interests of the markets, not the people, as its overriding constituency. In this process of economization of politics, the European Union has shown itself to be not a bulwark of democr...
To Wolfgang Streeck, the euro is a “frivolous experiment” that supplants “social justice” with “market justice”, state with market, democracy with technocracy. Capitalism and democracy are only compatible if so-called market justice is accompanied by social justice. Otherwise, the citizens are in danger of “being fobbed off with the ‘democratizatio...
Jürgen Habermas shares much of Streeck’s critique of the euro. Unlike Streeck, however, he is interested primarily in the possibility of constructing a post-national European political response. Consistently enough, Habermas denounces Streeck’s perspective as a “nostalgic option” that leads back to the “nation-state barricades of the 60s and 70s” (...
- Wolfgang Merkel
- wolfgang.merkel@wzb.eu
- 2016
This article argues that the relationship between capitalism and democracy is not immutable but subject to changes over time best understood as movements across distinctive growth and representation regimes.
In this essay we revisit the principles of “embedded liberalism” and argue for their relevance to the contemporary global economy. The most essential principle is the need for markets to enjoy social legitimacy, because their politi-cal sustainability ultimately depends on it.
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Sep 11, 2019 · Is contemporary capitalism compatible with liberal democracy? The glib answer, though not wrong, is that it had better be. There are no known examples of fully socialized economies with a...
