A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class, and State in a
Transnational World. By William I. Robinson. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2004. 224p. $46.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.
This book intervenes in the contemporary debates on globalization by
asking what it means to conceptualize the global economy. Demonstrating
the inadequacy of nation-state-based or international-centric responses
to this question, it makes a case for conceptualizing globalization as
a historically novel form of transnational capitalism. World
capitalism, William Robinson argues, has undergone an “epochal
change” involving not just a quantitative intensification but
also a qualitative reconfiguration of economic, political, and social
processes that were hitherto largely international. Taking advantage of
technological developments and organizational innovations, capital has
liberated itself from the social and political constraints imposed on
it by nation-states and reorganized—fragmented and
decentralized—the production process on a transnational basis.
This reorganization of the productive base has gone hand in hand with
the emergence of a transnational capitalist class (TCC), a
transnational state apparatus, and a transnational ideological
project.