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DOI: 10.1177/0309816813514816 2014 38: 171Capital &
Class
David CoatesThe UK: Less a liberal market economy, more a
post-imperial one
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Capital & Class2014, Vol. 38(1) 171 182
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The UK: Less a liberal market economy, more a post-imperial
one
David CoatesWake Forest University, USA
AbstractThis article adds a new element to the growing critique
of the original varieties of capitalism (VoC) distinction between
liberal and coordinated market capitalisms by questioning the
usefulness of the liberal market economy (LME) category itself. It
demonstrates that many of the distinguishing features of the LME
category are in the US and UK cases at least best explained by
those economies external global and hegemonic role, rather than by
their internal institutional complementarities. Imperialism holds
the key to liberalism a key demonstrated here by a detailed
examination of the UK case. The lessons for the study of
comparative capitalisms are major: a total setting aside of the
LME/CME distinction, and a return to the building of a global
understanding of capitalism which is more than the sum of its
individual parts. In order to understand LMEs, you need to
understand imperialism; and to understand imperialism, you have to
engage again with a revitalised Marxism.
KeywordsVarieties of capitalism, liberal market economies,
imperialism, gentlemanly capitalism, liberal militarism
IntroductionIt is conventional in much of the comparative
capitalisms (CC) literature to treat the US and the UK economies as
examples of one particular capitalist model, to be contrasted with
one or more other models, which are invariably treated as socially
superior but economically suspect. Sometimes the typology is that
of liberal market economies (LMEs) against coordinated market
economies (CMEs). Sometimes, it is Anglo-Saxon
Corresponding author:David Coates, Wake Forest University, USA.
Email: [email protected]
514816 CNC38110.1177/0309816813514816Capital &
ClassCoatesresearch-article2013
Article
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172 Capital & Class 38(1)
capitalism against Rhineland capitalism. Sometimes it is liberal
welfare states against conservative and social-democratic welfare
states; but regardless of the specific categori-sation, there is a
tendency in the relevant literatures to group the USA and the UK
together. The argument here is that putting them together obscures
more than it illumi-nates; and it does so precisely because the
similarities of the two economies are rooted in the one thing that
dominant typologies in CC studies systematically fail to emphasise:
namely, the institutional consequences of past and present
imperialisms.
The limits of LME as a categoryPrime responsibility for linking
the US and UK together as LMEs lies with Peter Hall and David
Soskice (2001: 19). Though their predominant concern was visibly
with the defence of CMEs, in treating both the US and UK as
non-coordinated economies Hall and Soskice stressed the distance
between government and business in both of them, the systemic
weakness of organised labour when compared to more coordinated
market economies, and the predominance of idea systems within the
liberal model, privileging the right of managers to manage and of
capital freely to move (see also Gallas, in this special issue, on
the UK). The LME/CME distinction was always a politically charged
one, largely functioning as a defence of European welfare
capitalism against its neoliberal critics. But in conceding the
viability of LMEs as well as CMEs, and by placing the US and UK
economies firmly in the LME camp, Hall and Soskice inadvertently
gave retro-spective reinforcement to the Reaganite enthusiasm for
business deregulation and to the Thatcherite assertion that the UKs
late-20th-century economic weaknesses had much to do with the
partial nature of the constraints on private enterprise created by
years of half-hearted social democracy. It was Hall and Soskice
(2001: 57), after all, and not Margaret Thatcher, who insisted that
because international liberalization enhances the exit options of
firms in LMEs the balance of power is likely to tilt towards
business. The result should be some weakening of organized labor
and a substantial amount of deregu-lation, much as conventional
views predict.
My general unease with the LME/CME distinction, and with the new
institutionalist paradigm it helps sustain, has been laid out
elsewhere (Coates 2002, 2005; see also my other paper in this
special issue). What concerns me here is a more specific weakness
in the basic typology: the relatively unexamined inadequacy of LME
as a category of analy-sis in the original Hall and Soskice
formulation. Applying the label liberal market econ-omy to either
the USA or the UK brought with it three significant weaknesses on
which it is valuable to dwell: the lack of fit between the model
and the reality it labelled; the truncated and ultimately
misleading view of institutional development and change it helped
to sustain; and the systematic failure of the whole approach to
place models of capitalism on some more systematically developed
historical and contemporary global map (see also Bieling and Jessop
in this special issue).
The lack of fitThe gap between model and reality is clearest in
the case of the USA as a LME. When labelling it in that way, Hall
and Soskice focused on financial systems and corporate
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Coates 173
governance, industrial relations, education and training, and
inter-company relation-ships. That focus led them to ignore or
downplay, among other things, the close working relationship
between the Pentagon and the US engineering industry, between the
oil industry and the Department of Energy, between large
agribusinesses and the Agriculture Department, and between large
pharmaceutical companies and federally funded basic research and
Medicare/Medicaid spending. Missing so much of what is defining of
US capitalism, the LME label simply played into the hands of
conservatives keen to extol the virtues of what they choose to
characterise as a free-market capitalism unburdened by extensive
welfare rights or corporate cronyism. Sadly, in contemporary
America, there is in fact far too much of the latter and far too
little of the former. The contemporary US economy is probably more
properly described as a classic example of crony capitalism, full
as it is of interlocking corporate boards, mutually reinforcing
top-salary compensa-tion committees, and revolving-door
relationships between Washington and Wall Street and the categories
of our scholarship ought not to prevent us from seeing that. The
entirety of the US economy is not a free-market capitalism in any
meaningful sense of that term, and nor for that matter is the UK
economy: a strong reason why dispensing with the LME category as a
tool of comparative analysis is long overdue.
The truncated view of historyBut there is more. By restricting
our view to just two types of capitalist economy, and by focusing
discussion of institutional change within them predominantly on the
post-1945 period, the varieties-of-capitalism approach pioneered by
Hall and Soskice pulls us away from any recognition that the
differential timing of industrial take-off remains vital to the
contemporary condition of each major national economy, not least
because of the institutional legacies left in place by the balance
of pre-capitalist and capitalist social forces at the moment of
industrialisation (see also Taylor in this special issue). There is
more than path-dependency going on in the historical trajectories
of national capital-isms, powerful as path-dependency undeniably
is. There is also the legacy of the past, including the legacy of
the pre-capitalist past; which is why it is not possible fully to
understand the contemporary balance of class forces in each major
economy, or the institutional mix each demonstrates, without
tracing both back to the origins of each particular capitalist
model.
The US and UK economies were both early industrialisers,
relative to their German and Japanese contemporary competitors, and
that still matters. In first-wave capitalisms those economies which
began the process of capitalist industrialisation on a significant
scale in the first half of the 19th century, notably Britain, the
Netherlands, the USA and, more problematically, France
industrialisation followed a relatively lengthy period of internal
social differentiation which had already brought about significant
shifts from pre-capitalist to capitalist modes of production in key
economic sectors before factory production was introduced. In the
first-wave capitalisms, it was the industrial middle class that set
the pace, presiding over an industrialisation process whose tempo
was, in retrospect, relatively slow, but whose reach and
penetration into the economy was rela-tively thorough and dense
from the very outset. Second-wave capitalisms the econo-mies of
Germany, Russia and Japan were different. Their industrialisation
on a
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174 Capital & Class 38(1)
significant scale began in the latter part of the 19th century.
Here, the impulse towards capitalist industrialisation arose less
from the internal evolution of their societies than from external
pressures working on their ruling groups from an emerging
industrial capi-talist world. In these societies, the industrial
middle class was weaker, and more depend-ent on pre-capitalist
ruling groups; and indeed, it was the national-military needs of
these autocratic regimes which often provided the key impetus to
industrialisation as such. The state apparatus tended in
consequence to preserve greater organisational roots in the landed
aristocracy, while, paradoxically, generally being from the outset
far more deeply involved in the orchestration of capital
accumulation than were the liberal states of first-wave capitalism
(Looker & Coates 1983: 99-101). Labelling one set of
capital-isms as LMEs and the other as CMEs simply blocks any
analytical capacity for letting these crucial historical
differences back in; which is a second reason why the whole LME/CME
distinction needs now to be set aside.
The lack of a global mapThere is more still. Stringing together
a number of economies as LMEs also obscures what is arguably the
most important difference between some of them and the rest, and
does so by failing to place any of the national economies on any
coherently specified global map. Globalisation is not a new feature
of capitalism, and nor are all economies equally globally potent.
What separates the UK and US economies from any others that
scholars might be tempted to label as LMEs is the global role
indeed the globally domi-nant role that the UK in the past played
and the US currently plays in a system of internationally linked
economies, a role that no other LME and certainly no CME has ever
been in a position to play. The argument developed in the rest of
this article turns centrally on this point: namely that the key
features of both the US and UK economies singled out by Hall and
Soskice as defining of their shared LME status including the
weakness of business regulation in both, their propensity for
Reagan-like conservative governments, the moderation of their
labour movements, the weight of finance relative to manufacturing
in their GDP, and their current inability to turn trade deficits
into trade surpluses can and should be linked back to the UK and
USs shared experience of early industrialisation and subsequent
global economic dominance. The argument will also be that where the
US and UK economies differ on such things as the greater politi-cal
importance of deregulation in the USA, the greater public support
for state welfare provision and even public ownership in the UK,
the greater weight of finance and the lower degree of
militarisation of core engineering industries in the UK these
differences also need to be linked back, this time to the timing of
global dominance, to the fact that the UK is now a post-imperial
economy and society, while the US is (at most) simply poised to
become one.
This is not to imply that German and Japanese capitalism are
somehow better forms of capitalism because their imperialism failed
(the weaknesses of so-called CMEs, though real, are beyond the
scope of this paper). It is rather to argue that the UK and US
econo-mies are best thought of, not as LMEs but as imperial
capitalisms, at different stages on a standard imperial trajectory.
And it is for that reason, and not because they are two versions of
some timeless LME construct, that the two economies are both so
similar and
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Coates 175
yet in critical ways now so different from one another. The
general thesis underpinning the argument below is that imperial and
post-imperial economies tend to have an unbal-anced relationship
between manufacturing and finance, an overly militarised and
increas-ingly uncompetitive manufacturing sector, a globally
focused political class, and a more than usually moderate labour
movement. The liberalism, in the LME-CME sense, of both the US and
UK economies is a product of their imperialism, and not just a
function of some accidental institutional complementarity into
which they have inadvertently blundered. This cannot be understood
without that recognition, or changed without a fundamental
resetting of their economys entire global positioning.
Legacies of imperialism: The UK caseApplied to the contemporary
UK, the argument is as follows.
Financial dominanceAll capitalist economies contain, to varying
degrees between individual capitalisms and to varying degrees over
time, different circuits of capital: merchant capital, agrarian
capi-tal, industrial capital and financial capital. It is a feature
of hegemonic economies that, as their hegemonic presence grows, so
too does the weight of financial capital in the circuits that
constitute them. That increasing weight is partly a product of the
surpluses earned by global dominance then coming back to the
hegemonic centre. It is partly a product of other economies coming
to the centre to buy the technology that first established that
hegemony, and needing to borrow local finance to do so; and it is
partly because the export needs of a dominant economy initially
require the outflow of local funds to lubri-cate its export sales.
In hegemonic economies, this outflow of capital is initially
func-tional to all its key capitalist strata merchants, farmers and
industrialists as well as bankers but over time, it inevitably
creates a gap between finance and industry that undermines the
capacity of local financial institutions to help the hegemonic
industrial base retool in order to meet the overseas competitive
challenges its hegemony has helped call into existence. The retreat
from circuits of industrial capital to those of finance capi-tal
would appear endemic to all dominant capitalisms (Arrighi 1994). We
certainly see it in the separation of financial and manufacturing
capital in the contemporary USA (Coates 2011: 1426).
In the UK case, it is impossible fully to understand the weight
of finance in the con-temporary economic formation without linking
that weight back to the gap that opened up between UK-based finance
and UK-based industry in the critical decades before 1914. The
story has often been told of how initially Britains world monopoly
position gave its industrial capitalists surpluses on which
internally-financed long-term invest-ment could proceed apace; how
that world monopoly position also gave sterling a par-ticular role
in the 19th-century world economy (broadly similar to that of the
dollar between 1944 and 1971); and how it attracted to London
foreign borrowers keen to draw on those surpluses for their own
industrial take-off. From the 1890s, in conse-quence, the English
banking system found it more profitable to finance foreign trade
and to handle portfolio investment abroad than to seek out domestic
industrial demand for
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176 Capital & Class 38(1)
long-term finance. This established both a distance between
industrial and financial interests and an international focus for
British banking practices that had no close con-temporary parallel
elsewhere (Coates 1986: 26971; Coates 1994: 15362). It was in this
manner that, as Andrew Gamble (2004: 37) rightly observed, far from
being the pioneer of industrialism, Britain [became] an economy
dominated by financiers and rentiers. Indeed, the word became may
not actually be entirely appropriate here, because industrial
capitalism in the UK, even at the height of its brief global
dominance, was always the minor player always the bastard child of
a capitalist social formation that was throughout predominantly
commercial and financial in nature.
Manufacturing weaknessWhat that brief period of global
manufacturing dominance then consolidated was what Cain and Hopkins
(1993) have labelled as gentlemanly capitalism: the fusion of
aristo-cratic and banking interests and the generation of a social
culture that prioritised the making of money from money over the
making of money from industrial enterprise.1 Though the UK is known
as the home of the first industrial revolution, that primacy was
possible only because of the prior development within the UK of
both agrarian and mercantile capitalism; and there remains much
academic controversy, particularly in Marxist academic circles,
about exactly why, and exactly when, UK manufacturing industry fell
victim to the dominance of financial interests in the circles
surrounding the British state (cf. Ingham 1984, 1988; Lees 1986;
Anderson 1987; Barrett Brown 1988; Callinicos 1988). Certainly by
1914, with over 40 percent of the total exported capital of the
world raised on its financial markets, London was the leading
centre for the issue of foreign loans and equities (Cassis 1990:
1), and a fully capitalist rentier class had come into existence.
In consequence, the viability of London as an imperial centre had
come to depend heavily on its role as a financial entrept rather
than as a major manu-facturing centre with global leadership
capacities.
That in its turn reminds us that the economic (and political)
weakness of UK-based manufacturing industry is of long standing.
The industrial-owning class was, from the outset of the UKs rise to
brief global manufacturing dominance, heavily concentrated
regionally away from London; and this class never replaced in
political dominance more traditional elites whose income depended
on banking and on land. The brief mid- Victorian period of
unrivalled manufacturing supremacy left economic and political
elites in the UK slow to respond to the challenges to dominance
represented by the pre-1914 rise of German and American
competition. There is plenty of evidence in the late-Victorian UK
economic story of a retreat into imperial markets by established
industries, and of a general institutional rigidity a slowness to
make the move from proprietary capitalism to the managerial
capitalism made necessary by the second industrial revolu-tion
(Elbaum & Lazonick 1984). The long-term legacy of that a
postwar flawed Fordism (Boyer 1996; Clark 2001) left the UK
manufacturing sector vulnerable to German competition a second time
after the brief hiatus caused by the devastation suf-fered by
German industry during the Second World War; and by then, the UK
state lacked both the capacity and the will for effective rapid
economic modernisation. There can be no full explanation of the UK
economys continuing trade deficit without some
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Coates 177
recognition of that particular lack, and the resulting failure
to seize the opportunity of full-scale postwar industrial
modernisation before the revival of Germany and Japanese
competition.
Liberal militarismWhy this lack of capacity and will? In part,
because of the long-term impact on UK manufacturing competitiveness
of a century of liberal militarism. Globally hegemonic powers spend
money on armaments and on war. The UK did (and still does) both.
Paul Kennedy (1988: 243) noted this for the 1980s, and linked it to
UK decline: Britain spends proportionately more (5.5 percent of
GDP) than any other NATO partner except Greece. Globally hegemonic
powers develop and sustain a large military-industrial com-plex.
The UK still has that: a manufacturing sector disproportionately
focused on (and holding global leadership capacities in) military
rather than civilian industrial produc-tion. And globally hegemonic
powers of the UK kind which industrialised prior to dominance with
only the minimum of direct state economic leadership demonstrate a
propensity for what David Edgerton (1991) properly called liberal
militarism, namely a state propensity to regularly reconfigure
military-focused manufacturing while deliberat-ing abstaining from
similar leadership in the civilian sector.
It is true that, undefeated militarily but seriously weakened
economically by the Second World War, successive UK governments did
then periodically attempt state-led industrial modernisation; but
always to very limited effect. For far too long for the
com-petitive health of the UKs manufacturing sector, postwar UK
governments attempted to retain the possessions and trappings of
empire (Blank 1977). For far too long, both Labour and Conservative
governments pursued an expensive strategy of keeping Britains
military industries at the leading edge (Edgerton 1991: 1401). For
far too long, a disproportionately large share of UK R&D, and
associated scientists and engi-neers, remained focused on military,
not civilian, production (Coates 1994: 193201; 2000: 198201) and
this at the very time in which countries such as Japan were
invest-ing in the long-term technological development of motor
vehicles and other manufac-turing industries under strong state
leadership (in Japans case, through MITI) (Fine & Harris 1985:
243). For far too long, that is (initially from 1985, and then
again from 1995), the UK has remained a major net exporter of
armaments but a net importer of manufactures (Edgerton 1991: 164;
emphases added).
Therefore, by the time the UK political class did come to terms
with the UKs dimin-ished global role, it had let slip key
opportunities for civilian manufacturing modernisa-tion of the kind
underway in the UKs main CME competitors, most notably Germany and
Japan. The 20th-century UK state was one created far more for
empire than for domestic industrial modernisation. Its strongest
institutional nexus in the years before 1964 was that linking the
Treasury to the Foreign Office and the Ministries of
Supply/Defence. As the UKs global power waned, so did the standing
of the Foreign Office replaced within the core institutional
triangle by various iterations of a civilian industry ministry. To
this day, the UK state remains a triangular structure linking the
Treasury, the Ministry of Defence and the DTI (with the last
perennially renamed and persistently denied real purpose and
purchase). There is an important industry ministry story to be
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178 Capital & Class 38(1)
told for post-war Britain, and sadly it remains (as we see once
more with Vince Cable) largely a story of failure.2 And even today,
after years of attempts of civilian modernisa-tion and a curtailing
of the UK defense budget, the volume of arms sales still rose
glob-ally during the recent economic downturn, and BAE still tops
the list of the worlds largest weapons manufacturers.
The consolidation of an imperial mindsetIn the modern era, the
legacies of empire are not simply institutional and economic; they
are also cultural. In empire after empire, predominant patterns of
thought emerge to reinforce the imperial project patterns which
then help to undermine the very imperi-alism that first created
them. In the UK case, there is a legitimate debate in the relevant
historical literature about how deep and wide support was for the
British Empire even at its height (Porter 2006: 227). It is
possible to point to critics of imperialism throughout the 19th
century free-trade liberal critics as the UK began to lay claim to
more and more territory from the 1840s, and centre-left
(social-democratic) critics at centurys end, when imperial jingoism
peaked. But there is no escaping the fact that those critics
remained a minority voice within the British political class prior
to 1914 imperialism at its height was politically popular and that
although the proportions shifted thereaf-ter, the Empire project
left a generalised hubris among British politicians and state
administrators which has still not entirely gone away.
The 1940s freeze of the international architecture of the
postwar world order still encourages UK governments to punch above
their weight, to see themselves as the USs ally in global policing,
and to be at best reluctant Europeans for fear of losing their
capacity for an independent role on the world stage. And that is
true not just of post-war Conservative governments: Old Labour
governments were equally prone to this global posturing, and so too
was New Labour after 1997. In Tony Blairs defiant internationalism,
and arguably even in Robin Cooks ethical foreign policy (doing good
in the world), we see the same propensity to rearrange other
peoples political furniture the same imperial hubris that once
justified colonial expansion (Coates & Krieger 2004: 110-12).
That hubris is there in the wider political culture, too we need
only remember the popularity of the Thatcher invasion of the
Falklands to realise that. Certainly as late as 1983, the UK
electorate seemed to have no difficulty support-ing sovereignty
claims on territory at the other end of the world, without in any
way conceding similar sovereignty to others: imagine what the
British popular reaction would have been, had the Argentinians laid
claim to the Isle of Man for some equally specious historical
reason.
Given the disproportionate involvement of residual aristocratic
elements in the staff-ing of the Empire, and the general propensity
of right-wing politics to emphasise issues of national (rather than
class) interest, the persistence of an imperial hubris on the right
of British politics is perhaps only to be expected. What is less
clear is why centre-left par-ties in the UK should still be so
vulnerable to the same thing. That vulnerability has a structural,
as well as a personal and accidental, origin. Tony Blairs
personality may explain some of the reason for British involvement
in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but it does not explain it all. The
vulnerability of the British centre-left to the residue
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Coates 179
of imperial hubris lies in the manner in which the relatively
slow transformation of the pre-capitalist UK economy into an
industrial capitalist one, and the associated slowness (or in the
USs case, the entire absence) of the destruction of a traditional
peasantry, combined in the 19th century to moderate early
working-class politics in both the UK and USA: moderate, that is,
when compared to labour politics in later industrialisers like
Germany, Russia and Japan (Coates 2010).
It was this moderation that was then reinforced by the bounty of
empire, with the contradictions of early capitalist accumulation
being softened in the core of the global system by being pushed to
its edge. It is not just conservative politics in the UK (and the
USA) that is anchored away to the right in the wake of empire. The
whole centre of political gravity shifts that way, to the extent
that entire labour movements are suborned into the imperial
project. This incorporation is both extreme and unavoidably visible
in the contemporary US case, but it is there too in the UK. British
labourism was always less radical than mainstream European social
democracy, and in large measure remains so. Remember with what ease
Gordon Brown could articulate a discourse of Britishness, and with
what speed the post-New Labour parliamentary leadership moved, in
2012, to condemn the renewed Argentinian claims on the Malvinas
(Hoggart 2012).
Perhaps there is a general truth here: that ultimately the whole
centre of gravity of UK (and indeed US) politics can only be
explained in the imperial way. Certainly the ease with which UK
(and later US) industrial capital established a powerful global
presence without any direct and systematic state intervention for
that purpose reinforced in conservative circles, once the economy
became globally hegemonic, an equation of business interests with
limited government at home and with market-opening policies abroad.
It was in catch-up capitalisms, not in early capitalisms, that
conservative political elites and supporting business leaders
readily deployed state-led civilian industrial modernisation
programmes. It was business and political elites in economies like
Germany and France (and indeed, even in the USA after the Civil
War, and Japan after the Second World War) that deployed
protectionism against the pen-etration of their domestic markets by
manufactured goods from stronger economies abroad. Political and
industrial elites in early capitalisms, by comparison, became
wed-ded to limited government and free-trade maxims during their
period of global domi-nance when they needed open markets to keep
their export factories in full production and then proved slow to
shed that non-interventionist and free-trade mentality when their
economic supremacy began to wane. We invariably see the persistence
of a strong state, free market liberalism in imperial capitalisms
which was functional to the begin-ning of their imperial story, but
not to its end. What was it that Keynes (1936: 32) said: that
Ricardos doctrine conquered England as completely as the Holy
Inquisition conquered Spain!
Concluding remarksAt least two things follow from the UK case
study that should be of interest to all scholars of comparative
capitalisms. The first is that if it is their imperialism rather
than their liberalism that places the US and UK economies in the
LME category, then for the VoC literature to make further progress,
it will be necessary for its adherents to
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180 Capital & Class 38(1)
generate a typology of capitalisms that is capable of
distinguishing imperial capitalisms from post-imperial capitalisms,
and of differentiating capitalisms that have exercised global
hegemony from those that have never done so. The second is that the
new insti-tutionalism offers no particular way of explaining and
understanding imperialism. Marxism does, of course, but as a
paradigm of thought it has no monopoly of that understanding and
explanation. So if the new institutionalists do not want to
surren-der the field of comparative capitalisms simply to a
revitalised Marxism, they then too need to engage with non-Marxist
explanations of imperialism, in order to create a coherent map of
the contemporary global economy on which then to place the
path-dependent trajectory of particular national capitalisms. The
temptation in scholarly research these days is always to go to the
particular; but the particular can only be fully illuminated by its
place in the whole. It is time for Big Picture thinking again in
the study of comparative capitalisms. Marxisms intellectual moment
has returned.
Endnotes1. It was Cain and Hopkinss view that gentlemanly
capitalism then developed in ways which
emphasized the distance between land, high finance and the upper
reaches of the service sec-tor on the one side, and mechanical
industry on the other (1993: 15). There is much debate in the
relevant literature on whether early 20th-century UK manufacturing
suffered from a corresponding loss of the industrial spirit, or
merely from a freezing of dominant mindsets in an increasingly
inappropriate early Victorian classical liberalism (on this,
arguing the latter, see Coates 2000: 13541).
2. It is possible to trace the DTI story back to the first
Wilson government, with the initial clash between George Browns DEA
and James Callaghans Treasury over the National Plan (won by
Callaghan). Stronger attempts were then made to create a powerful
civil-ian industry ministry by Anthony Wedgewood Benn: his 1960s
DTI was dismantled by Heath. His second attempt at the Department
of Industry was diminished by the lefts defeat in the EEC
referendum in 1975, and was run down by Eric Varley. The DTI under
Thatcher with Nicholas Ridley at the helm was at an all-time low,
until resurrected as a power base for Michael Heseltine as deputy
prime minister under Major. The DTI was emasculated again under New
Labour by Gordon Browns resetting of the Treasury as the de facto
industry ministry, and is now the scene of a party battle inside
the current coalition between Vince Cable (wanting his ministry to
be a genuine engine of manufac-turing growth) and a Treasury under
the most austerity-prone Chancellor since Thatchers Geoffrey Howe.
In these clashes to date the Heseltine period apart the Treasury
has always won, leaving the civilian industry ministry subject to a
regular change of title, functions, and status (Lee 1997:
10865).
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Author biographyDavid Coates holds the Worrell Chair in
Anglo-American Studies in the Department of Politics and
International Affairs at Wake Forest University, North Carolina,
USA. He has written exten-sively on contemporary political economy,
labour history and US and UK public policy. His writ-ings are at
.
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