Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism

Streeck, Wolfgang

ISBN 10: 1781685487 / ISBN 13: 9781781685488

Published by Verso, 2014

Connecting readers with great books since 1972! Used books may not include companion materials, and may have some shelf wear or limited writing. We ship orders daily and Customer Service is our top priority! Seller Inventory # S_448517351

Synopsis:

The financial crisis keeps us on edge and creates a diffuse sense of helplessness. Well-nigh unfathomable problems lead to measures that seem like emergency operations on the open heart of the Western world, performed with no knowledge of the patient's clinical history. The gravity of the situation is matched by the paucity of our understanding of it, and of how it came about in the first place. In this book, compiled from his Adorno Lectures given in Frankfurt, Wolfgang Streeck lays bare the roots of the present financial, fiscal and economic crisis, seeing it as part of the long neoliberal transformation of postwar capitalism that began in the 1970s. Linking up with the crisis theories of that decade, he analyses the subsequent tensions and conflicts involving states, governments, voters and capitalist interests - a process in which the defining focus of the European state system has shifted from taxation through debt to budgetary 'consolidation'. The book then ends by exploring the prospects for a restoration of social and economic stability. Buying Time is a model of enlightenment. It shows that something deeply disturbing underlies the current situation: a metamorphosis of the whole relationship between democracy and capitalism.

About the Author: 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.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of ...
Publisher: Verso
Publication Date: 2014
Binding: Paperback
Condition: Very Good