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This chapter observes that the implementation of market-oriented economic policies since 1991 has strengthened the political influence of the business community. By June 2000, the government had sold a controlling interest in roughly one-third of the enterprises that it owned, with a sale value of about 12.3 billion LE. Egypt's most powerful businessmen have used this opportunity to articulate a distinctive conception of market liberalism through the publications of a prominent think tank, the Egyptian Center for Economic Studies. The chapter documents and analyzes this view of the state, law, and the economy. It also notes that this approach to market liberalism has been adopted by the ruling National Democratic Party and implemented by the reformist prime minister who assumed power in 2004 (Ahmad Nazif).

This chapter observes that the path of institutional change advocated by market liberals shares important areas of agreement with the reforms advocated by supporters of liberal constitutionalism and Islamic constitutionalism. Each of these groups favors the creation of a more liberal state with effective constraints on its power, a clear and unbiased legal code, and protection of civil and political rights. However, there is no comparable degree of consensus on the value of broadening public participation in politics. This fact suggests that liberalism and democracy have become de-linked in the Egyptian case. Liberalism is likely to progress steadily in the future, while democracy is likely to advance slowly and unevenly. This trajectory may eventually lead to democracy at some point in the future, particularly if liberalism enhances the private sector's independence from the state and leads to a more autonomous and politically active middle class. However, this outcome is not inevitable.

This chapter briefly recalls to mind the ominous problem of curbing the growth of Union competence. It discusses the cases recently decided by the ECJ concerning vertical competence allocation, in this connection, reconstructing the new theory of Union jurisdiction manifest in these cases under the name of ‘market holism’ and contrasting it with the most obvious alternative — market liberalism. Market holism comprises the following pair of beliefs. According to the first belief, the internal market is not merely a specific segment of public policy for which the Union happens to have been accorded harmonization competence. Rather, the internal market is a regulatory space permeating the totality of public policy subject to certain conditions. According to the second belief, the definition of the internal market turns on the interdependence of free movement and competition.

The question of what kind of institutional set-up would be appropriate for promoting economic development is approached in terms of combination between market and state. The traditional debates on the choice of development strategy between free trade and infant industry protection is examined with reference to the historical experiences of developed economies as well as recent confrontations between import substitution industrialization and the IMF-World Bank structural adjustment policies. The nature and significance of market failures versus government failures are illustrated in terms of comparisons between the Latin American Debt Crisis in the 1880s and the Asian Financial Crisis in the 1990s. The choice of the market versus the state, as well as growth versus equity, is discussed in reference to the changing paradigms in the IMF-World Bank.

This introductory chapter considers the historical trend in the field of economics. Economists are among the few who aspire to tell society how it should manage. They rarely speak with a single voice, but that does not diminish their confidence. Society treats them with bafflement and respect. As such, the chapter examines the extent of their expertise and how they have come about it. It asks where their authority comes from and how far it is justified. After all, economic theorizing may be speculative, but its impact is powerful and real. Since the 1970s, it has been associated with a large historical trend, the ‘market turn’ associated with the rising ascendancy of market liberalism, a political and social movement that (like economics) holds up buying and selling as the norm for human relations and for social organization. In this light, the chapter considers how much influence the field of economics exerted over this ‘market turn’ and whether or not it was an improvement from previous models.

This chapter looks at how Swedish Social Democracy was eventually challenged by the doctrines honoured by the prize it had created. Economists first took their place among the Nobel Prize winners in 1969, at the height of the golden age of Social Democracy in Sweden. The prize was paid by the central bank out of public money. However, a chronic economic crisis in the 1970s drove voters away from Social Democracy and towards a market liberalism which finally prevailed (for a while) in the 1990s. The focus here is on the role of economic theory. For this purpose, the travails of Social Democracy are followed as they affected the public trajectory of Assar Lindbeck (b. 1930), ‘the key figure in Swedish economics’. The discipline of economics in Sweden mostly spoke with one voice in this period, so this method provides for a sharp focus and fewer words.

This chapter demonstrates the leverage gained by embedding theories of institutional change within the global capitalist system through an analysis of a standards war between Liverpool merchants and a coalition of the U.S. state, merchants, and cotton producers from the 1870s to the 1920s. This chapter demonstrates how merchants from Liverpool constructed their private authority over quality standards and dispute settlement as part of a broader project of British-led market liberalism in the 1870s. While this liberal market project remade the cotton trade in its image, it also unleashed the creative and destructive dynamics of capitalism and generated both new rivals and marginalized actors, particularly in the United States, who sought to challenge these governance institutions. These challenges brought a conflict-driven process of change through which the U.S. state wrested institutional power from private merchants and generated new hybrid, transnational institutions that were the product of an incremental and competitive reconstitution of the rules. This chapter demonstrates that institutional change must be understood through an analysis of path dependencies, strategic efforts on the part of actors, and their embeddedness in broader, historically specific processes of capital accumulation on a world scale.

Chapter three demonstrates that projects to create new institutions are often trial-and-error, ad hoc efforts, as institutionalist scholars suggest, but they are also driven by competitive efforts to shape the terrain of market competition. Actors create new institutions to solve the problems they face given their historically and spatially specific position within patterns of capital accumulation. Moreover, the efficacy of these institutions is limited by the patterns of conflict that they generate. This chapter traces the origins of the contemporary struggle among a U.S.-led coalition of the state, transnational merchants, and cotton producers, its rivals in China, and more marginalized actors. It explores the rise of a US-led neoliberal project in the 1970s and the efforts of the US state and transnational merchants to recast quality standards and dispute settlement to privilege their preferences in this liberalizing environment. As these U.S. institutions came to be seen as de facto global institutions, however, they generated new patterns of conflict, which limited the enforceability of these rules.

The apparent dominance of liberal-democratic ideas in the 1920s was replaced in the following decade by explicitly anti-liberal and anti-democratic political trends. Nevertheless, liberalism retained some of its intellectual potential: “national liberalism” continued the pre-1918 projects of national emancipation and modernization incorporating also the feminist agenda; “bourgeois liberalism” focused on the defense of the political, social, and economic position of the bourgeoisie; and “economic liberalism” centered on the issue of free markets, while criticizing state involvement. Cultural modernism emerged as an influential intellectual current, and in the 1930s the subculture of “progressivist modernism” also represented liberal values, even though it was ill-disposed toward economic liberalism. The period also saw the reconfiguration of feminism. Lastly, East Central European critiques of totalitarianism developed under the pressure of the proximity of Soviet Russia, fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany. They singled out the dark aspects of the “total state,” dehumanization, and the cult of violence, often in a comparative way.

This chapter examines the political economy issues surrounding the Single Market. It argues that the governance of the Single Market needs a new guiding principle in order to survive and prosper in the wake of the global economic crisis: less doctrinaire in its market liberalism and recognizing that competitiveness in a global world will require increased government activism. The socio-economic consensus underpinning the Single Market also needs to change. The political acceptability of a deepening integrated market across the EU requires a bolder approach to the restoration of economic growth; a renewed impetus for socially inclusive labour market and welfare state reforms; and the espousal of a new European alternative to a discredited Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism. This will require bold reforms to re-establish the Single Market that could be achievable if the EU can muster the strength of leadership that it currently lacks.

In this concluding chapter, Michael Mason and Aarti Gupta distil comparative insights from the preceding chapters relating to the analytical framework informing the book: whytransparency now? How is transparency being institutionalized? What effects is it having? In addressing these questions, they also assess whether the contributions validate posited hypotheses relating to:(i) democratization and marketization as drivers of disclosure; (ii) whether disclosure-based governance decentersstate-led regulation and opens up political space for other actors; and (iii) the conditions under which transparency may be transformative. Taken as a whole, the book’s findings reaffirm that transparency is here to stay, with information disclosure becoming widely institutionalized in diverse ways in global environmental governance. Its empowerment potential, however, remains limited, partly because of the dominanceof the marketization driver of disclosure over a democratization rationale. The authors conclude that the transparency turn in global environmental governancefaces a legitimation deficit, fed by procedural inequities and lack of evidence relating to its environmental effectiveness.

The belief that a civilized society should seek to prevent destitution among its citizens is one of the oldest ideas in politics, yet the idea that this should be achieved through a guaranteed minimum income is relatively new. This chapter takes John Kay’s concept of ‘Redistributive Market Liberalism’ as a starting point for examining how cash transfers became central to British social policy debate in the course of the twentieth century. Drawing on work by Samuel Fleischacker, Martin Ravallion, and Alice O’Connor, it argues that a guaranteed minimum income is a distinctly modern concept, shaped by an Enlightenment conception of distributive justice, an Anglo-American tradition of ‘poverty knowledge’, and the methodological individualism of neoclassical economics. The collapse of manufacturing employment since the 1970s, together with a declining faith in planning and collective provision, has encouraged UK governments to pursue their distributional objectives through the tax and benefit systems.

This concluding chapter addresses the implications of anti-system politics for the future of capitalism and democracy in the advanced countries. It argues that the current wave of anti-system support reflects the ultimate failure of the project of “market liberalism,” in that the limitations of the market logic have been laid bare by the financial crisis and the inability of the free market model to deliver prosperity and security. The answer to this crisis is likely to involve a reassertion of political authority over the market: either a revival of social democracy, the guiding ideology of the inclusive capitalism of the second half of the twentieth century, or a return to the nationalism and mercantilism of the interwar period.

Bad ethics can make for bad economic outcomes. Bad ethics are defined hedonically as the infliction of pain on others for private advantage. The infliction of pain is often justified by ‘Just-World Theories’, which state that everyone gets what they deserve. Market liberalism (and its theoretical underpinning in neoclassical economics) is one theory of this kind. This chapter considers an example of these outcomes. It examines both the micro and macro underperformance of the American health system. 1970–2010, which is explained in terms of the shift in policy norms from the fiduciary norm ‘first do no harm’ to the neo-liberal market norm of ‘let the buyer beware’ (caveat emptor) since the 1970s.

One of the consequences of the financial crisis was that redistributive market liberalism came under challenge from a number of directions. At a practical level, the rising budget deficit limited the scope for further increases in cash transfers; at a discursive level, Conservative politicians successfully challenged New Labour’s focus on income poverty and recast tax credits as a form of ‘welfare’. The coalition government cut working-age benefits and focused on boosting take-home pay by raising the tax threshold, whilst Labour leader Ed Miliband took up the ‘predistribution’ agenda championed by the Harvard political scientist Jacob Hacker. However, the development of Universal Credit and mounting interest in Universal Basic Income suggests that talk of a ‘crisis of the transfer state’ would be premature. Indeed, the growing difficulties which the Conservatives have faced in cutting social security spending shows that in some respects the transfer state has proved to be highly resilient.