The Failure of Anglo-Liberal Capitalism

The global financial crisis has generated an intense debate in academic, business, journalistic and political circles alike about what went wrong and how to put it right. In this provocative reassessment of the crisis and its implications, Colin Hay argues that it is only by acknowledging the complicity and culpability of an Anglo-liberal model of capitalism in the inflation and then bursting of the bubble that we can begin to see the full extent of what is broken and what now must be fixed. He argues that the crisis is best seen as a crisis of and indeed for growth and not as a crisis of debt. It is, moreover, a crisis of and for an excessively liberalised Anglo-American form of capitalism and the Anglo-liberal growth model to which it gave rise. This is a form of capitalism and a growth model that was inherently unstable and threatened the entire world economy – its excesses cannot be tolerated again.

Colin Hay is Professor of Political Analysis at the University of Sheffield, UK, where he co-directs the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI) and, from November 2013, Professor of Government and Comparative Public Policy at Sciences Po, Paris, France. He is the author of many books including, most recently, The Political Economy of European Welfare Capitalism (2012 with Daniel Wincott) and The Legacy of Thatcherism (2014, with Stephen Farrall). He is editor or co-editor of the journals New Political Economy, Comparative European Politics and British Politics.