Governing growth: the postwar transformations of capitalism and democracy

How do capitalist economies change over time? And what political consequences follow?

In his new book, Governing Growth, which he will discuss at this event, Peter Hall traces the interactions between politics and economics in Western democracies over the past eighty years, identifying a series of profound shifts in the political economies of Europe and the United States. Hall develops the concept of successive growth regimes, each the result of public policies interacting with the strategies of private firms. Alongside each growth regime, he argues, there is a distinctive representation regime, which determines whose voices have the most influence over public policy. Showing how these two regimes interact, he develops a new account of the processes through which political economies change over time. Hall outlines three postwar growth regimes: an era of modernization, from 1945 to about 1975; an era of liberalisation, from 1980 to the late 1990s; and an era of knowledge-based growth, beginning at the turn of the century. His sweeping analysis sheds new light not only on the relationship between capitalism and democracy, but also on the roots of our contemporary political dilemmas