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WOLFGANG STREECK How will Capitalism end?: Essay on a failing system Verso Books, London 2016, 262 pp.
Wolfgang Streeck is a German Political economist and economic sociologist; as well as emeritus director of the Max Planck Institute in Cologne. Streeck's initial interests in comparative political economy (CPE) as in Reforming Capitalism (2008) shifted, following the crisis of 2008, towards a systemic approach to the study of Capitalism. His following book Buying Time (2014) is a comprehensive contribution to the rooted debate over the relationship between democracy and capitalism. The author's latest publication, How Will Capitalism End?: Essay on a Failing System (2016) takes a step further, claiming that capitalism as a social and historical system has exhausted its ability to overcome crises through democratic reforms. The volume is a collection of essays on the development of capitalist society with the comprehensive intention, as stated in the introduction, to explain the factors that have led to the final stage of capitalism. The book is composed of all previously published articles, with the exception of the first chapter, which introduces and summarizes the themes of the following sections. Chapter 2 and 3 address the issue of capitalist development. Chapters 4 to 8 analyze the interactions between European governance and global capitalism. Finally, chapters 9, 10 and 11 turn to a critical assessment of the main theories on capitalism. The author's diagnosis is pessimistic: a long period of social entropy and political disorder is ahead of us, in the form of intensifying stagnation, inequality, state corruption and global wars. In line with a body of literature, which has underlined the unstable nature of market societies1, the book, coupling rigorous theoretical work with rich empirical research, traces the 2008 financial crunch back to a long series of crises that capitalism experienced. However, despite the fact that crises are a constitutive characteristic of capitalism, Streeck suggests that the most recent one stands out remarkably for a pivotal reason: the complete draining of political alternatives to reform capitalism. There is much to praise in this book, as not only does the book map out the literature on capitalist development in detail, but it also offers an original reading of the contemporary political juncture from a sociological viewpoint. Whereas other authors, such...