The Origins of Nonliberal Capitalism: Germany and Japan in Comparison. Edited by Wolfgang Streeck and Kozo Yamamura. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. Pp. xvii, 261.

Extract

This volume explores phenomena frequently noted (yet seldom analyzed) in the scholarly literature: the profound similarities in the industrialization processes and the contemporary political economies of Germany and Japan. These parallels—not just in the early stages of industrialization, but through the experiences of depression and war, and on to the rise of postwar “miracle” economies in both nations—are often casually ascribed to the late-developer effect, to the strategic imitation of German economic institutions in Japan, or to cultural factors, from lingering “feudal remnants” to enduring “traditional” social structures. Tagging the economic regimes which had evolved in Germany and Japan by the 1970s “nonliberal” capitalist systems, the essays in this collection seek to investigate systematically “the many similarities between the two capitalisms, the no less intriguing differences between them, and the differences between the two and Anglo-American ‘standard capitalism’” (p. xiii). More specifically, this volume examines “the origins of some of the social institutions that have constrained the spread of free markets within the capitalist economies of Germany and Japan while providing them with alternate mechanisms of economic governance” (p. 5). Throughout, the contributors argue for a more subtle, historically grounded, and systematic understanding of the distinctive practices and institutions of the German and Japanese “nationally embedded capitalisms.”