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Subtitle: How Economic and Political Power is
Made and Maintained, Cambridge Univ. Press, N.Y., 2018, index, references,
footnotes, paperback
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Reviewer comments:
This is a strange book. The author describes (as something newly discovered by
economists) the essence of politics well known to have existed throughout
history and to comprise some of the essential insights of political science as
well described by historians. He admonishes fellow economists for neglecting
some of the fundamental concepts he explains. Perhaps he is showing that
economists developed amnesia when they divorced themselves from the other half
of 'political/economy' and created the famous 'economic man' who made decisions
based on maximizing the marginal value of his 'utility factor." It is not
clear just what factors he considers as definitive for the definition of
capitalism. It is clear that he believes this 'political capitalism' is a
recent and expanding phenomena. He does not like it. Everything he writes about
the ways in which rulers seek to advance themselves, in all manner, especially
in power, is abundantly true but did not begin with 'capitalism'. But I do not
believe it requires the development of a new 'theory' to describe what has
always been apparent in the historical record.
But, considering that so many of the members of the 'economist' profession
think only in theoretical terms, perhaps creating theories that can appear to
be divorced from history might generate some interest in the academic world.
For instance, he cogently writes in Chapter 10: "In the nineteenth
century, when economics and politics were studied together as political
economy, the connection the academic discipline saw between the economy and
public policy was more obvious and more explicit than when the discipline
divided into economics and political science at the beginning of the twentieth
century"
Bravo for this. My contention for years has been exactly that this bifurcation
of a unified subject has been the bane of both academic fields. And it has
resulted in huge damage far beyond academic thinking, to policies in the real
world.
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Preface
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Chapter 1 - The Concept of Political
Capitalism
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Chapter 2 - Political Capitalism as an
Economic System
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Chapter 3 - The Political and Economic Elite
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Chapter 4 - Interest Groups and Political
Exchange
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Chapter 5 - Political Creation of Economic
Rents
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Chapter 6 - Transitional Gains and Rent
Extraction
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Chapter 7 - The Regulatory State
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Chapter 8 - Capitalism Versus Democracy
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Chapter 9 - The Institutional Evolution of
Political Capitalism
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Chapter 10 - Public Policy and Political
Capitalism
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Chapter 11 - Is Political Capitalism
Inevitable?
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Some references
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