Wolfgang Streeck Research Articles

Wolfgang Streeck on the Origins of Capitalist Crisis

Abstract Shortly after the financial crisis of 2008, Wolfgang Streeck emerged as a highly influential and ambitious critical theorist of capitalism and crisis. Streeck's crisis theory of capitalism is built around an account of neoliberal policy reform as a family of responses to economic upheavals that first emerged during the 1970s. Based on an analysis of four major shocks all occurring in that decade, I argue that Streeck's crisis theory is excessively economistic in its understanding of the crisis tendencies that first propelled neoliberal reform and insufficiently attentive to the global context of their emergence. Theorising the significance of this pivotal historical moment requires more attention to the conflictual entanglements between societies of the Global South and North in the context of decolonisation, war and revolution, and a more nuanced appreciation of the political context of economic reform.

Democracy at Work: Contract, Status and Post-Industrial Justice, by Ruth Dukes and Wolfgang Streeck. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022. Pp.182

Democracy at Work: Contract, Status and Post-Industrial Justice, by Ruth Dukes and Wolfgang Streeck. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022. Pp.182

Book Review: Democracy at Work: Contract, Status and Post-Industrial Justice. By Ruth Dukes and Wolfgang Streeck

Book Review: <i>Democracy at Work: Contract, Status and Post-Industrial Justice</i>. By Ruth Dukes and Wolfgang Streeck

Review of: Ruth Dukes and Wolfgang Streeck (2023) Democracy at Work: Contract, Status and Post-Industrial Justice

Review of: Ruth Dukes and Wolfgang Streeck (2023) Democracy at Work: Contract, Status and Post-Industrial Justice

Ruth Dukes, Wolfgang Streeck, Democracy at Work. Contract, Status and Post-Industrial Justice, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2023, 182p.

Ruth Dukes, Wolfgang Streeck, Democracy at Work. Contract, Status and Post-Industrial Justice, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2023, 182p.

Habermas and Capitalism: an historic overview

The article reconstructs Habermas’ view of capitalism from the 1970s to his most recent writings. It takes its starting point from Wolfgang Streeck’s claim that Habermas has failed to acknowledge that the real enemy of democracy is not bureaucracy but capitalism and that, therefore, he underestimates the role of capitalism in shaping the global order. It first returns to the diagnoses of late capitalism that Habermas developed in the 1970s and early 1980s and then moves on to some of his later writings. This will reveal that there was indeed a shift of emphasis from a critique of capitalism to a critique of technocracy, but not because of Habermas’ unawareness of the role of capitalism in shaping reality. Rather, he has come to objectify capitalism while looking for legal and political tools for reining it in instead of looking for possible alternatives to it.

Legitimacy crises in embedded democracies

Recently, many comparativists and democratic theorists have argued that democracy is in imminent peril, even in countries that are thought to be its strongholds. But theorists like Andrew Gamble, Wolfgang Streeck, and David Runciman suggest that some democracies are too embedded to collapse. Instead, they argue these democracies are experiencing long-term structural crises. This article explains how this alternative kind of crisis works. It conceives of legitimacy crises as ‘chronic crises’ in which democratic procedures are contested even as the democratic political system is affirmed. In these crises, democracies are threatened by distortion and deadlock rather than death. The article gives a precise account of chronic legitimacy crises. It treats legitimacy as a scalar concept, going beyond binary views where legitimacy is something a state either has or lacks. It distinguishes periods of chronic crisis from stable periods and from acute crises. It shows how chronic crises are distinctively about legitimacy. It carves out conceptual space for a different kind of legitimacy crisis, and it assists comparativists in thinking about how younger democracies differ from older ones.

Wolfgang Streeck on consumption, depoliticisation and neoliberal capitalism

Tucked into Wolfgang Streeck’s influential crisis theory of contemporary capitalism are various attempts at causally linking processes of neoliberalisation to generalised depoliticisation, while depoliticisation is in its turn attributed to the emergence of a diffuse ‘consumerist’ ethos in the 1970s. Streeck argues that rising consumerism led to a generalised demotic embrace of marketised forms of need satisfaction and in so doing evacuated the political will to resist neoliberal reforms. If, however, we take neoliberalisation to entail both the depoliticisation of the demos and the marketisation of the polity, then Streeck’s attempt to connect these processes to consumption is weakened by significant historical oversights on both ends. Streeck’s attribution of depoliticisation to a new consumerist ethos is beset by a reductive economism. At the same time, Streeck overlooks just how pivotal legitimatory ideals of consumer-side social order developed by specific networked elites have been for the marketisation of the polity.

Dystopian/Utopian Theatre in Britain after 2000 and Its Political Spaces, Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung / Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), University of Bielefeld, March 11–13, 2021

Dystopian/Utopian Theatre in Britain after 2000 and Its Political Spaces, Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung / Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), University of Bielefeld, March 11–13, 2021

Wolfgang Streeck in Tokyo: Japan’s secular stagnation as a delayed crisis of democratic capitalism

Since the 1990s Japan has experienced a prolonged period of crisis. Much work has thus far focused on understanding Japan’s crisis on its own terms. Yet we must also consider Japan’s situation within the wider context of global capitalism, examining how the crisis in Japan may be related to, or even integrated within, similar crisis tendencies both within other Northern countries and at the level of the capitalist world system. This article thus asks how our understanding of Japan’s crisis can be enriched by situating it within a wider analysis of crisis and transformation across the Global North. It contends that a common thread of sporadic and yet chronic economic crisis emanating from unresolved contradictions that emerged in the wake of the crisis of Keynesianism in the 1970s can be seen to link Japan’s long-term crisis with similar dynamics in the US and Europe. In developing this argument, the article engages closely with Wolfgang Streeck's 2017 book Buying Time, using a careful reading of Streeck’s argument about the delayed crisis of democratic capitalism that has afflicted countries across the Global North since the 1970s to deepen our understanding of contemporary Japan’s secular stagnation. Following Streeck, it argues that many of the same factors that have driven this “delayed crisis” in the US and elsewhere are also found in Japan. At the same time, Japan’s crisis has been sharpened by global political economic challenges, including the decline of American hegemony and the rise of China, as well as the contradiction between conditions necessary for capital accumulation and stable social reproduction. The article seeks not only to show how Streeck’s argument can help us understand Japan’s crisis in relation to similar crises across the Global North, but also to explore how the Japanese case may point to limitations in Streeck’s argument.

The racial constitution of neoliberalism

Prevailing scholarship on neoliberalism fails to recognise that it generates its own distinctive forms of racial domination. Influential analysts such as Wolfgang Streeck, David Harvey and Wendy Brown assume or argue that racism exists today because neoliberalism’s defeat of racial legacies is incomplete. This ignores how racism is reconfigured in ways that are specific to the historical moment of neoliberalism and dependent on a distinctive and substantial intellectual and political hinterland. A consideration of Friedrich Hayek’s theory of cultural evolution reveals a contradiction in neoliberal thought between its aspiration to establish a universal market system and its dependence on particularist ideas of western cultural pre-eminence. This ideological contradiction correlates with the fact that globalisation produces masses of surplus populations which are of no market value. A racial idea of culture is the means by which neoliberalism manages and works through its own limitations. Above all, ‘race’ provides a means of coding and managing the material boundaries between different forms of labour under neoliberalism: citizen and migrant, waged and ‘unexploitable’, bearers of entitlements and bare life.

The Disassembly of the Greek Welfare State under the Troika

Having broken from half a century of binary political choice between Greece's two established political parties, SYRIZA's rise to power in the 2010s represented an opportunity for the country's welfare state to resist intrusions by European entities and institutions. This paper analyses Greece’s history and political interaction during this period, arguing that Greece has now, in folding to the EU, completed its transition from a relatively liberally-spending welfare state to what Wolfgang Streeck calls a “consolidation state.” Relevant to this analysis is a set of historical details leading up to the SYRIZA election and the 2015 referendum—seen as the high-water mark of opposition to austerity and cuts to the welfare state. In turn, the impact of austerity on the Greek population is quantified and substantiated, demonstrating that austerity measures predominately impacted the welfare state, more often than not resulting in direct reductions to pension and other monetary payments to the citizenry. Finally, these factual conditions are squared with theoretical descriptions and conceptualisations of the welfare state as existing under neoliberalism. Ultimately, what can be drawn from this research is that Europe's institutions are unyielding in their prioritisation of an ordoliberal, single-market ideology over individual Member States’ varying conceptions of locally implemented fiscal policy. Keywords: Austerity; Consolidation state; Neoliberalism; Ordoliberalism; Referendum; Welfare state; SYRIZA

Responding to Socioeconomic Diversity in the European Union (and to Steven Klein’s Essay) with Democracy-Enhancing Conflicts Law

Responding to Socioeconomic Diversity in the European Union (and to Steven Klein’s Essay) with Democracy-Enhancing Conflicts Law

Cultural Political Economy and Conflicts Law – A new way to approach the Eurozone crisis

The immediate effects of the Euro crisis have been tamed but the crisis has soured the relations between Southern and Northern Member states for many years to come. Comparative political economy explains the frictions between North and South as a result of different institutional configurations of national economies (Varieties of Capitalism), different interests of capital and labor coalitions (growth model perspective) or ideational traditions (ordoliberal vs dirigisme). We argue that the exclusive focus of these approaches on either, rational institutionalism, interest coalitions or economic ideas obscures that these three factors come together in a long-term evolutionary trajectory that has formed national economic cultures within the Eurozone since the 1950s. We examplify our cultural political economy approach showing empircally how the German and Italian political economies developed in different ways since the end of WWII. In the second part of our contribution we develop a conflicts law perspective offering it as a third way that can mediate between the two extreme positions of Wolfgang Streeck (back to the nation state) and Juergen Habermas (federation) in the debate on the future of the European Union. We show how the culturally grounded diversities of European capitalisms can be accommodated through a conflicts law.

Revolution or legality? Confronting the spectre of Marx in Habermas’s legal philosophy

As early as 1962, Jurgen Habermas was convinced that Karl Marx’s theoretical attempt to ‘turn Hegel the right side up’ had resulted in a one-sided embrace of revolution and a perilous rejection of legality and rights. Habermas would restate these remarks thirty years later in Between Facts and Norms, noting that the collapse of state socialism, with its characteristic disdain for legality and rights, culminated in the discrediting of revolutionary Marxism. This article revisits Habermas’s theoretical dichotomy between revolution and legality in view of his ambivalent relationship to ‘Marx’s spectre’ and shows its significance for Habermas’s ongoing debate with Wolfgang Streeck concerning the tension between democracy and capitalism. Using textual evidence from Marx’s neglected journalistic writings before, during, and after the 1848 revolutions, the article offers a competing perspective of Marx’s views on legality and rights at a time when their respective fates were critically at stake. A careful reconsideration of Marx’s reflections and a confrontation with his spectre offers Habermas fruitful resources for responding to Streeck’s critique and for reviving the project of ‘radical reformism’ at a time when the liberal constitutional order finds itself under attack.

Neoliberalism in Crisis: A review of The Politics of Debt: Essays and Interviews, edited by Sjoero Van Tuinen and Arjen Kleinherenbrink

Neoliberalism in CrisisA review of The Politics of Debt: Essays and Interviews, edited by Sjoero Van Tuinen and Arjen Kleinherenbrink Carey James Mickalites (bio) Van Tuinen, Sjoero, and Arjen Kleinherenbrink, editors. The Politics of Debt: Essays and Interviews. Zero Books, 2020. As I write this, governments the world over are calling boisterously for the "reopening" of global, national, and local markets in the face of the biggest pandemic since the 1918 influenza. The reasoning is familiar: work and consumption must return to recent levels of growth lest we slip into an unprecedented economic depression. Perhaps nowhere has this persistent and hysterical call been more pronounced than in the U.S., where sickly and irrational reactions to catastrophe have come to define the current regime. A healthy economy trumps public health. What we're witnessing is an insistence on the ultimate kind of debt: the demand for the sacrifice of countless human lives—particularly those lacking financial security of any kind—to prop up a fiction of economic and political credit. Of course, immediate history points to several indicators that make this fiction (and the burden it demands) both palpable and predictable. The dismantling of postwar public health protocols. The dangerous privatization of medical care. World leaders ignoring the advice of medical experts on the likelihood of a pandemic. Forced austerity. Gross polarization of wealth and access, such that the credit and health of the few are paid for by the debts and diseases of the many. All of this is deeply entrenched and familiar, its realities taking hold during the Reagan-Thatcher era and sticking while we collectively failed to consider structural change during and following the 2008 crash, instead letting our leaders bail out the culprits with public money. I could go on, but the point is that the "unprecedented" impact of COVID-19 is a symptom of the neoliberal policies that enslave governments and citizens to financial markets, in turn exacerbating one of the plainest contradictions of contemporary capitalism: the inevitability of the next crisis. At the risk of sounding like a historical (or hysterical) determinist, the current economic collapse was prepared for. If the coronavirus pandemic signifies the latest global crisis—and one in which finance markets and tech industries are ready to exploit threats to public health—then it also resoundingly affirms one of the key assertions running through van Tuinen and Kleinherenbrkink's The Politics of Debt: "more than a decade after the [2008] crisis, scholars, journalists and politicians alike agree that it is not a matter of if, but when the next crisis will hit" (11). The volume, consisting of six essays and five interviews, brings together the work of philosophers, economists, political scientists, and politicians to create a chorus of multidisciplinary voices that addresses the effects of the 2008 crash ten years on. (The volume was first published in 2018, and reissued in January 2020.) With the political normalization of debt at center stage, the editors, authors, and interviewees address the perils and supposed necessity of debt and crisis through historical, theoretical, and political-economic lenses. At first sight, the texts that make up The Politics of Debt may appear a fairly loose compendium. Topics include ancient and Christian moral injunctions against enforced debt; Hobbes and other early theories of sovereignty based on power as credit; genealogies of debt and guilt or sin à la Nietzsche; and the precarious financialization of every aspect of our political economies, public and private. Yet the book appears more unified when considered as part of a general intellectual trend on the left and center- (or liberal-) left that seeks to intervene in the injustices and contradictions of our contemporary political economy through historical and theoretical analyses. The Politics of Debt returns to the works of Foucault and Deleuze from the late 1970s and offers commentary on recent influential work by David Harvey, Wolfgang Streeck, Philip Mirowski, and Thomas Picketty, among others. Most of the essays and interviews share a few important assumptions and argumentative threads, at times by implication. Foremost is the specific historical entrenchment of neoliberal policy beginning in the 1960s, whose tendency to produce bubbles, crashes, mass unemployment and the like became all-too-evident...

The counter-majoritarian difficulty in a neoliberal world: Socio-economic rights and deference in post-2008 austerity cases

Abstract:In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis courts and rights took a backseat to demands of markets and international financial institutions for austerity. Deference and judicial restraint were prevalent in austerity litigation across various European jurisdictions. This article argues that the traditional view of deference to political branches on socio-economic rights should be revised in our political-economic context. Drawing on the work of German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck on representation failures of democratic institutions in our neoliberal era, the article argues that law’s abnegation in this sphere has the effect of securing and legitimising neoliberal hegemony and serves the interests of owners of financial capital. Deference in order to avoid judicial overreach does not entail deference to democracy as legislatures have come to view financial markets as their constituency alongside the general citizenry. As public finances have become marketised, deference to legislatures amounts to deference to markets. Judicial minimalism creates not more democracy but a specific set of winners and losers. In light of severe representation failures where legislatures become tools of market justice we might, subject to various caveats, view a more active judicial role as democracy-enhancing and as a potential counterweight in favour of social justice.

Critique as ideology critique in a neoliberal age

Neo-liberalism is not working but carries on regardless. A society and all of its institutions modelled on market logics and imperatives has produced system crisis and has lost widespread popular support. To account for neo-liberalism’s continuing grip, we must submit this project to ideology critique. Max Horkheimer offers some relevant insights into what this requires. Ideology critique needs to come up with a competing measure of progress, it has to demonstrate why this ought to be the standard and it needs to expose the means by which this alternative is blocked. This article suggests that the normativity that underpins a social democratic project is best placed to prosecute these key tasks in a neo-liberal and historicizing age. It draws upon two major accounts of the ideological battlefield that has been staked out between neo-liberal and social democratic projects, looking to Wolfgang Streeck and Michel Foucault to identify the cultural resources that are available to, and the blocking strategies that have to be negotiated by, ideology critique in neo-liberal times. Finally it, turns to György Markus’s fine-grained and critical reading of the tasks of ideology critique outlined by Karl Marx. This section puts ideology critique into dialogue with a social democratic normativity in order to better consider the traction of ideology critique in a neo-liberal age.

From the Demise of Social Democracy to the ‘End of Capitalism’

Abstract Over the past decade, Wolfgang Streeck has emerged as one of the most prominent voices in the debate on the crisis of democratic capitalism. This article provides a critical appraisal of Streeck’s recent writings in light of his wider intellectual trajectory, tracing the evolutions and continuities in his work over time; highlighting its important contributions to our understanding of the present crisis; and presenting a fourfold critique of his latest book on the end of capitalism. The main argument is that Streeck’s work, while very valuable for its elucidation of the dynamics behind the demise of social democracy, ultimately remains plagued by a corporatist residue that keeps him from drawing his increasingly radical critique of capitalism to its logical conclusions. As a result, Streeck’s embrace of an exceedingly catastrophist worldview, devoid of any emancipatory potential, has tempted him to veer dangerously close to the welfare chauvinism of the nationalist right.

Fighting the State

Development and ChangeVolume 50, Issue 3 p. 836-847 Review Essay Fighting the State Wolfgang Streeck, Wolfgang StreeckSearch for more papers by this author Wolfgang Streeck, Wolfgang StreeckSearch for more papers by this author First published: 27 March 2019 https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12502Citations: 4Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume50, Issue3May 2019Pages 836-847 RelatedInformation