Winner of the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung prize
The financial crisis seemed to present a fundamental challenge to
neo-liberalism, the body of ideas that have constituted the political
orthodoxy of most advanced economies in recent decades. Colin Crouch
argues in this book that it will shrug off this challenge. The reason is
that while neo-liberalism seems to be about free markets, in practice it
is concerned with the dominance over public life of the giant
corporation. This has been intensified, not checked, by the recent
financial crisis and acceptance that certain financial corporations are
'too big to fail'. Although much political debate remains preoccupied
with conflicts between the market and the state, the impact of the
corporation on both these is today far more important.
Several factors have brought us to this situation:
- Most obviously, the lobbying power of firms whose donations are of
growing importance to cash-hungry politicians and parties;
- The weakening of competitive forces by firms large enough to shape and
dominate their markets;
- The power over public policy exercised by corporations enjoying
special relationships with government as they contract to deliver
public services;
- The moral initiative that is grasped by enterprises that devise their
own agendas of corporate social responsibility.
Both democratic politics and the free market are weakened by these
processes, but they are largely inevitable and not always malign. Hope
for the future, therefore, cannot lie in suppressing them in order to
attain either an economy of pure markets or a socialist society. Rather
it lies in dragging the giant corporation fully into political
controversy. Here a key role is played by the small, cash-strapped
campaigning groups who, with precious little help from established
parties, seek to achieve corporate social accountability.
