Abstract
The growth model perspective deploys a limited theory of the state and struggles to explain how stability was secured within pre-crisis British capitalism. This chapter advances a theoretical framework which overcomes these limitations. Drawing on neo-Marxist state theory, the chapter argues that state managers are typically driven to secure two often contradictory objectives: accumulation on the one hand and legitimation on the other. By actively shaping and discursively constructing underlying distributional processes, state managers can seek to secure a popular base of support within society. The pursuit of ‘legitimation strategies’ of this form can have the effect of stabilising the dominant growth model. This conceptual framework allows us to trace processes of continuity and change within post-crisis British capitalism.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Aglietta, M. (1976). A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience. London: Verso.
Becker, J., & Jäger, J. (2012). Integration in Crisis: A Regulationist Perspective on the Interaction of European Varieties of Capitalism. Competition & Change, 16(3), 169–187.
Beer, S. H. (1982). Britain Against Itself: The Political Contradictions of Collectivism. London: Faber and Faber.
Bertramsen, R. B., Thomsen, J. P. F., & Torfing, J. (1991). State, Economy, and Society. London: Unwin Hyman.
Block, F. (1981). Beyond Relative Autonomy: State Managers as Historical Subjects. New Political Science, 2(3), 33–49.
Bonefeld, W. (2010). Free Economy and the Strong State: Some Notes on the State. Capital & Class, 34(1), 15–24.
Boyer, R. (1990). The Regulation School: A Critical Introduction. New York: Columbia University Press.
Brenner, N., Peck, J., & Theodore, N. (2010). Variegated Neoliberalization: Geographies, Modalities, Pathways. Global Networks, 10(2), 182–222.
Bruff, I. (2013). The Rise of Authoritarian Neoliberalism. Rethinking Marxism, 26(1), 113–129.
Bulpitt, J. (1986). The Discipline of the New Democracy: Mrs Thatcher’s Domestic Statecraft. Political Studies, 34(1), 19–39.
Burnham, P. (1999). The Politics of Economic Management in the 1990s. New Political Economy, 4(1), 37–54.
Coates, D. (2005). Prolonged Labour: The Slow Birth of New Labour in Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Crouch, C. (2011). The Strange Non-death of Neoliberalism. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Duménil, G., & Lévy, D. (2004). Neoliberal Income Trends: Wealth, Class and Ownership in the USA. New Left Review, 30, 105–133.
Dunford, M. (1990). Theories of Regulation. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 8(3), 297–321.
Femia, J. (1975). Hegemony and Consciousness in the Thought of Antonio Gramsci. Political Studies, 23(1), 29–48.
Gamble, A. (1988). The Free Economy and the Strong State: The Politics of Thatcherism. Durnham: Duke University Press.
Gough, I. (1980). Thatcherism and the Welfare State. Marxism Today, 7–12.
Gough, I. (1985). The Political Economy of the Welfare State. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Graefe, P. (2006). The Social Economy and the American Model Relating New Social Policy Directions to the Old. Global Social Policy, 6(2), 197–219.
Gramsci, A. (1971). Prison Notebooks. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Green, J., & Lavery, S. (2018). After Neoliberalisation? Monetary Indiscipline, Crisis and the State. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 43(1), 79–94.
Habermas, J. (1975). Legitimation Crisis. Boston: Beacon Press.
Hall, S. (1979, January). The Great Moving Right Show. Marxism Today, 14–20.
Hall, S., & Jaques, M. (1983). The Politics of Thatcherism. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Harvey, D. (2005). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hay, C. (1996a). Narrating Crisis: The Discursive Construction of the ‘Winter of Discontent’. Sociology, 30(2), 253–277.
Hay, C. (1996b). Re-stating Social and Political Change. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Hay, C. (1999). Crisis and the Structural Transformation of the State: Interrogating the Process of Change. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 1(3), 317–344.
Hay, C. (2002). Political Analysis: A Critical Introduction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hindmoor, A. (2004). New Labour at the Centre: Constructing Political Space. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Howell, C. (2016). Regulating Class in the Neoliberal Era: The Role of the State in the Restructuring of Work and Employment Relations. Work, Employment & Society, 30(4), 573–589.
Hyman, R. (2005). Trade Unions and the Politics of the European Social Model. Economic and Industrial Democracy, 26(1), 9–40.
Jessop, B. (1983). Accumulation Strategies, State Forms, and Hegemonic Projects. Kapitalstat, 10, 89–111.
Jessop, B. (1990). State Theory: Putting the Capitalist State in Its Place. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Jessop, B. (1997). The Regulation Approach. Journal of Political Philosophy, 5(3), 287–326.
Jessop, B. (2002a). Liberalism, Neoliberalism, and Urban Governance: A State-Theoretical Perspective. Antipode, 34(3), 452–472.
Jessop, B. (2002b). The Future of the Capitalist State. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Jessop, B. (2007). New Labour or the Normalization of Neo-Liberalism. British Politics, 2(2), 282–288.
Jessop, B. (2013). Revisiting the Regulation Approach: Critical Reflections on the Contradictions, Dilemmas, Fixes and Crisis Dynamics of Growth Regimes. Capital & Class, 37(1), 5–24.
Jessop, B., Bonnett, K., Bromley, S., & Ling, T. (1988). Thatcherism: A Tale of Two Nations. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Jessop, B., & Sum, N.-L. (2006). Beyond the Regulation Approach. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Jones, M. (2002). New Institutional Spaces: Training and Enterprise Councils and the Remaking of Economic Governance. London: Taylor & Francis.
Joseph, J. (2000). A Realist Theory of Hegemony. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 30(2), 179–202.
Kenny, M. (1999). Regulation Theory. In D. Marsh, A. Gamble, & T. Tant (Eds.), Marxism and Social Science (pp. 35–60). Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Krippner, G. (2011). Capitalizing on Crisis. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Lacher, H. (2013). History, Structure and World Orders: On the (Cross-) Purposes of Neo-Gramscian Theory. In A. J. Ayers (Ed.), Gramsci, Political Economy, and International Relations Theory: Modern Princes and Naked Emperors (pp. 75–99). Basignstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lipietz, A. (1987). Mirages and Miracles: The Crisis in Global Fordism. London: Verso.
Marsh, D., & Stoker, G. (2010). Theory and Methods in Political Science. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Mirowski, P. (2013). Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. London: Verso.
O’Connor, J. (1973). The Fiscal Crisis of the State. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Offe, C. (1984). Contradictions of the Welfare State. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Peck, J. (2001). Neoliberalizing States: Thin Policies/Hard Outcomes. Progress in Human Geography, 25(3), 445–455.
Peck, J. (2010). Constructions of Neoliberal Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Peck, J., Theodore, N., & Brenner, N. (2012). Neoliberalism Resurgent? Market Rule After the Great Recession. South Atlantic Quarterly, 111(2), 265–288.
Peck, J., & Tickell, A. (1992). Local Modes of Social Regulation? Regulation Theory, Thatcherism and Uneven Development. Geoforum, 23(3), 347–363.
Peck, J., & Tickell, A. (1994). Searching for a New Institutional Fix: The After-Fordist Crisis and the Global-Local Disorder. In A. Amin (Ed.), Post-Fordism (pp. 280–315). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Peck, J., & Tickell, A. (1995). The Social Regulation of Uneven Development: “Regulatory Deficit”, England’s South East, and the Collapse of Thatcherism. Environment and Planning A, 27(1), 15–40.
Poulantzas, N. (2014). State, Power, Socialism. London: Verso.
Ruccio, D. F. (1989). Fordism on a World Scale: International Dimensions of Regulation. Review of Radical Political Economics, 21(4), 33–53.
Ruggie, J. G. (2009). International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order. International Organization, 36(02), 379.
Schmidt, V., & Thatcher, M. (2013). Resilient Liberalism in Europe’s Political Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shaw, E. (2012). New Labour’s Faustian Pact? British Politics, 7(3), 224–249.
Smith, M. (2014). Globalisation and the Resilience of Social Democracy: Reassessing New Labour’s Political Economy. The British Journal of Politics & International Relations, 16(4), 597–623.
Streeck, W. (2012). How to Study Contemporary Capitalism? European Journal of Sociology, 53(1), 1–28.
Streeck, W. (2014). Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. London: Verso.
Streeck, W. and Thelen, K. (2005). Beyond Continuity: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies. Oxford: Oxford Univesity Press.
Thompson, N. (1996). Supply Side Socialism: The Political Economy of New Labour. The Socialist Register, 216, 37–54.
Tickell, A., & Peck, J. (1995). Social Regulation After Fordism: Regulation Theory, Neo-Liberalism and the Global-Local Nexus. Economy and Society, 24(3), 357–386.
Williams, G. A. (1960). The Concept of “Egemonia” in the Thought of Antonio Gramsci: Some Notes on Interpretation. Journal of the History of Ideas, 21(4), 586–599.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Lavery, S. (2019). Theorising Capitalist Stability. In: British Capitalism After the Crisis. Building a Sustainable Political Economy: SPERI Research & Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04046-8_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04046-8_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-04045-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-04046-8
eBook Packages: Political Science and International StudiesPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)