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The Rise of Neoliberalism and Institutional Analysis. Edited by John L. Campbell and Ove K. Pedersen. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 288p. $65.00 cloth, $19.95 paper

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 January 2004

Colin Crouch
Affiliation:
European University Institute

Extract

This is a book with two separate purposes: to demonstrate the scope and diversity of institutional analysis, and to account for the rise of, and limitations to the rise of, neoliberalism as a politico-economic phenomenon. The authors therefore have both a methodological and a substantive aim. There is no reason that a book should not have two purposes in this way, and, especially given the firm editorial hand of John Campbell and Ove Pedersen, this particular exercise succeeds. But the whole remains less than the sum of its parts. Inevitably one or the other component becomes the dominant one, and in this case, it is the display of both the diversity of and capacity for convergence within institutional analysis. The work is unable to serve as a thoroughgoing analysis and critique of neoliberalism, because this becomes an object of study from the varying perspectives of the 13 contributors, rather than being built into a coherent, developing thesis. This would probably have required a single author or small group of authors, rather than the editors-pluscontributors format. Institutional analysis is, however, confronted cumulatively, because the internal organization of the book is based around different approaches to such analysis, rather than around different aspects of neoliberalism. The primary value of the whole therefore lies in its account of the state of this particular art; readers mainly concerned with the substantive study of neoliberalism will look more to individual chapters than the overall work.

Type
Book Reviews
Copyright
2003 by the American Political Science Association

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