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The Restructuring of Capitalismin Our Time, by William TabbReviewed by Daniel Müggea

a Department of Political Science, University ofAmsterdamPublished online: 04 Dec 2013.

To cite this article: Reviewed by Daniel Mügge (2013) The Restructuring of Capitalism inOur Time, by William Tabb, Review of International Political Economy, 20:5, 1139-1141,DOI: 10.1080/09692290.2013.850819

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2013.850819

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‘bond market vigilantes’. Rather, it is the decisions that states make toenhance financialization (rather than the decision to borrow itself) thatopens this door.

REFERENCES

Cohen, Benjamin J. (2006). ‘The macrofoundations of monetary power,’ in DavidM. Andrews (ed.) International Monetary Power, Ithaca NY: Cornell UniversityPress: pp. 31–50.

Mosley, Layna (2003). Global capital and national governments, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Ilene GrabelJosef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver

� 2013 Ilene Grabelhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2013.850818

William Tabb. 2012. The Restructuring of Capitalism in Our Time.New York: Columbia University Press.

For more than half a decade, the credit crisis and its aftermath havestood centre stage in much political economy debate and research. Andas befits academics, the publications have followed. The crisis-literaturehas grown exponentially as scholars have offered their own accounts andfocused on specific dimensions of the story, for example financial regula-tion, socio-economic transformations, corporate restructuring, or cross-border imbalances. Each new turn of the crisis has invited new questionsand new research that zooms in on yet other facets. But as we try to makesense of the current era, the key question is how all these piece of the puz-zle fit together. Tabb’s book answers that question in an admirable way.

The Restructuring of Capitalism in Our Time concentrates on the UnitedStates, although it also devotes a whole chapter to the rest of the world,including the crisis-experiences in Europe and so-called emerging mar-kets. Tabb analyses the American economy through a social structures ofaccumulation (SSA) lens, broadly comparable to the French regulationschool. The organization of production, both nationally and across bor-ders, the structure of financial markets, the distribution of material wel-fare and the taxation and spending patterns of governments are all seenas intertwined and at least temporarily stable. For him the key transfor-mation has been one from a national Keynesian SSA in the post-war dec-ades to a financialized SSA since the 1980s.

In and of itself, this contention is nothing new. The beauty of this book,however, lies in the way in which it places all the minute details of how

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the crisis built up, erupted and was dealt with in this comprehensiveframework. Tabb navigates between the Scylla of an a-theoretical chrono-logical narrative and the Charybdis of an overly deterministic account.He retraces the evolution of orthodox economics, maps the globalizationof production and attendant off-shoring, and shines light on the revolv-ing doors between Wall Street and Washington. We follow him in theimpenetrable world of shadow banking, tax shelters and derivatives. Wemarvel at the abusive practices and at times criminal energy in the finan-cial sector as well as the gargantuan efforts of the US Treasury and theFed to prevent financial collapse and forestall the need for deeper, struc-tural change in the economy. We witness the changing economic andfinancial structure of US households, the growth of inequality anddecline of real investment, and the changing trade relations with the restof the world, in particular with China.

For Tabb, all these developments are pieces of a puzzle that fittogether to characterize, as the title has it, the restructuring of capitalismin our time. At no point, however, does he suggest that they amount tosome clockwork-like whole that could be captured in a single theory.Agency, structure and contingency happily co-exist side by side in thisbook – mainly because Tabb strives to offer an analytically deep accountof real-world developments, not a theory for its own sake. Abstract mus-ings – questions such as whether ideas inform interests or vice versa –hardly interest him. His account is informed by a world-view, not by atheory in any narrow sense. Even then, he offers his readers a wealth ofempirical evidence and secondary references to substantiate his claims,and he opts for nuance instead of hyperbole where appropriate. Thisreviewer for one has not seen another crisis-book that manages so wellto fuse big picture thinking with attention to detail.

It is clear for Tabb that (non-)reforms in the US so far have served tosustain, rather than fundamentally overhaul, the financialized SSA. Thecontrol that most citizens have over their own lives has diminished sub-stantially over the years, certainly now that the house of (credit) cardshas collapsed. Reinstituting democracy would require loosening the con-straints that an over-sized and out-of-kilter financial system imposes onsocio-economic governance. And while Tabb offers no easy solutions(there probably are none), in one of the most surprising passages of thebook he inadvertently points to one potential source of change: shifts inpublic opinion. Survey research in the US consistently demonstrates thatmost citizens have a preference for a more equal, equitable and sustain-able economic system. But they completely misunderstand which poli-cies would promote such an outcome: for example, many median-income citizens supported Bush-era tax cuts, thinking they themselveswould be beneficiaries, while in effect they were losers, for examplethrough the limits they impose on public spending. The problem is

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not that citizens want no change, but that they lack the information totranslate their political preferences into policies and political programs.Books such as this one could go a long way to close that gap.

Daniel M€uggeDepartment of Political Science, University of Amsterdam

� 2013 Daniel M€uggehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2013.850819

Jacqui True. 2012. The Political Economy of Violence Against Women.Oxford: Oxford University Press.

‘How can there be a political economy of violence against women?’,asked a slightly perplexed but intrigued friend who saw a copy of JacquiTrue’s book sitting on my coffee table. Having just finished reading itand with a mind buzzing with its many questions and insights, I foundmyself pressed to know where to begin in answering my friend’s ques-tion. This is a book which not only marshals an enormous amount ofmaterial to reveal the many dimensions and arenas of violence againstwomen in the contemporary world, but also reveals with arresting clarityhow the roots of this global problem are to be found in political economy.Taking seriously but ultimately challenging contemporary approaches toviolence which rely on psychological, epidemiological, criminological,human rights and security frames of reference, True pulls our attentioncompellingly towards ‘the political–economic structures that underpingender inequality and women’s vulnerability to violence, especially atthe global level’ (p. 20). She roams widely and confidently across thisexpansive terrain, shining a light on a large number of very complex are-nas – sex trafficking, migration, global care chains, labour exploitation,export processing zones, trade liberalisation, international financial insti-tutions, global economic crisis, armed conflict, post-conflict peace andreconstruction, natural disasters, to name just some – in order to callupon us collectively to change the way that the global problem of vio-lence against women is understood and addressed.

To a political economist, an immediately appealing feature of True’swork is in this sense its intellectual evangelism for our field of study.Political economy’s importance and insights in understanding the prob-lems with which True is concerned are amply and deftly exposed. It isrevealed that many pressing contemporary problems which are usuallyconsidered to be security issues, say, or issues of law and criminology,are in fact intrinsically and fundamentally political economy issues. Thecase for a multi-disciplinary embrace of political economy emergespersuasively in True’s book. The practical consequences of this insight

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