The Origins of Nonliberal Capitalism: Germany and Japan in Comparison / Edition 1

by Wolfgang Streeck, Kozo Yamamura

Overview

Why was the rise of capitalism in Germany and Japan associated not with liberal institutions and democratic politics, but rather with statist controls and authoritarian rule? A stellar group of international scholars addresses this classic issue in political development.

In The Origins of Nonliberal Capitalism, German sociologists and American and Japanese political scientists draw extensively on the work of economists and historians from their home countries, as well as from the United Kingdom and France. The contributors discuss the potential disappearance, evolution, and reconstitution of nonliberal capitalism in Germany and Japan by analyzing its historical origins from two perspectives: the emergence and survival of nonliberal capitalism, and the causes of differences between the systems of Germany and Japan. They also outline the requirements for internally coherent national models of an embedded capitalist economy. The histories of German and Japanese capitalism demonstrate that capitalism's structural forms and functional relations evolve by means of different processes with different goals.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801489839
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	03/07/2005
Series:	Cornell Studies in Political Economy
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	857,166
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.69(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Wolfgang Streeck is Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany, and Professor of Sociology at the University of Cologne. Among the many books he has published is The Political Economy of Modern Capitalism. Kozo Yamamura is the Job and Gertrud Tamaki Professor of Japanese Studies and Economics at the University of Washington.

What People are Saying About This

Business Horizons

An international and interdisciplinary group of authors set out to explain Germany's and Japan's development of nonliberal types of capitalism by looking at the institutional histories of the welfare state, financial system, corporate governance, and skill formation.

Richard Deeg

The book constitutes an exemplary and skillful application of historical institutional analysis by master practitioners. For this reason alone it is well worth reading. It is all the more deserving of attention because it also provides us with a unique and highly insightful comparative analysis of two leading national economies and suggests why they, despite tremendous success over a long period of time, may now be moving from nonliberal to liberal capitalism.

Kathryn Ibata-Arens

The volume's contributions offer historical-institutional analyses of the evolution of how non-liberal capitalism emerged in Germany and Japan, paying attention to the liberal paths not taken; how divergence between the non-liberal capitalism in these countries can be accounted for; and what makes these systems internally cohesive.

Masahiko Aoki

There have been many observations of and conjectures about the similarities and differences of Japanese and German capitalism, but few systematic and interdisciplinary analyses of the subject. The Origins of Nonliberal Capitalism takes us a long way in that direction.

Editorial Reviews

This is an unusually valuable work on an understudied topic; ambitious in its comparative, interdisciplinary focus, it achieves an admirable balance between historical detail and schematic simplification.

The Journal of Economic History - William M. Tsutsui

This is an unusually valuable work on an understudied topic; ambitious in its comparative, interdisciplinary focus, it achieves an admirable balance between historical detail and schematic simplification.

--William M. Tsutsui, University of Kansas "The Journal of Economic History"

From the Publisher