Choose Your Capitalism?
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Review
Choose Your Capitalism? Robert E. Goodin Philosophy Programme, Research School of Social Sciences, The Australia National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia. E-mail: [email protected]
Comparative European Politics (2003) 1, 203–213. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cep.6110009
Scholars of comparative capitalism, from Shonfield’s (1965) forward, have assured us that there are different forms of capitalism to choose from. Each variant has its own peculiar strengths and weaknesses, but each performs about as well as every other overall, economically.2 Where they differ is in their social cost: not all forms of capitalism are as corrosive to the basic fabric of society as the cut-throat US variety.3 ‘There is indeed an alternative’ in the principal take-home message of this large and distinguished literature. That thesis finds its most recent and most sophisticated expression in the work of Peter Hall, David Soskice and their collaborators in Varieties of Capitalism (2001).
Capitalisms Along a Continuum Inevitably, one initially wonders whether the different national brands of capitalism represent ‘cases’ or ‘classes’: whether they are isolated points, or whether they form a common pattern and a connected continuum. Shonfield plumps for the first option. When he discusses ‘Varieties of European Experience’, Shonfield (1965, chapter 9) is discussing national patterns that he clearly sees as sui generis, not as representative of any more general types. That is certainly true a propos the four countries discussed in the chapter of that title. It is equally clearly true a propos the cases of Britain and France which he discusses at greater length. Hall and Soskice (2001) opt for the second approach. ‘The object of [their] book is to elaborate a new framework for understanding the institutional similarities and differences among the developed economiesy . In contrast to liberal market economies (LMEs), where the equilibrium outcomes of firm behavior are usually given by demand and supply conditions in competitive markets, the equilibria on which firms coordinate in coordinated market economies (CMEs) are more often the result of strategic interaction among firms and other actors’ (Hall and Soskice, 2001, 1, 8). Their ‘varieties of capitalism’ are but two, the US serving as the prime exemplar of an LME and
Robert E. Goodin Choose Your Capitalism?
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Germany of a CME, and with other developed economies being treated as resembling one or the other or some combination of the two. Naturally, every country’s arrangements are different, in various subtle and non-subtle ways, from every other’s. In their introductory chapter in Varieties of Capitalism, Hall and Soskice succeed wonderfully well in demonstrating that economic arrangements differ in the US and Germany. But that in itself does not, of course, show that they differ along a ‘dimension of difference’ along which other advanced capitalism regimes can also be arrayed. The question is whether Hall and Soskice have found a difference within capitalism itself or, after the more
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