Political and Legal

The Civic Bargain: How

Democracy Survives

BY BROOK MANVILLE AND JOSH OBER. Princeton University Press, 2023, 312 pp.

Manville and Ober urge defenders of liberal democracy to take the long view. The book provides fascinating portraits of four great breakthroughs in citizen self-rule: classical Athens, republican Rome, parliamentary Great Britain, and the United States. Each was a world-historical experiment in building collective self-government; politics, that is, without a boss. What allowed these democratic experiments to endure for centuries? Manville and Ober argue that despite their manifold differences, they shared a core set of features. They built institutions that divided and dispersed political authority, creating procedures for collective decision-making. They fostered trust and a spirit of compromise. They conceived of themselves as organic, evolving entities rather than as sets of static players. They understood the importance of civic education, which reinforced the norms of citizenship rights and responsibilities. Most important, Manville and Ober argue, the great democracies survived because they forged and maintained a “civic bargain,” a political pact about who is a citizen, how decisions are made, and the distribution of responsibilities and entitlements. As a result, these democracies were able to persevere through recurring crises and face down existential threats.

Authoritarian Century: Omens of a Post-Liberal Future

BY AZEEM IBRAHIM. Hurst, 2022, 336 pp.

Ibrahim argues that the ongoing authoritarian and populist backlash to liberalism is rooted in the fragile core of the liberal project itself. From its Enlightenment beginnings onward, liberalism’s guiding belief has been that human beings have equal and inherent moral worth; the grand task of liberalism is to bring more fully into existence a society in which people are treated with dignity and are free to pursue their own well-being. A liberal society is ultimately a “work in progress,” but its

legitimacy rests on its continuous movement toward the ideals of openness and pluralism.The problem, Ibrahim claims, is that this model is always threatened by reactionary forces that do not want to live in an open, multicultural society and by critics who doubt that liberalism can guarantee sufficient progress. The failings of liberal democracy—including the corruption of elites, inequality, and economic stagnation—have led to a loss of faith in public institutions and a dangerous creeping rejection of the entire model of liberal society. Ibrahim does not offer a silver bullet; he acknowledges liberalism’s failings, looks for ways to reform and strengthen laws and democratic processes, and insists that only liberal values have the capacity to guide the world to a better future.

Global Policymaking: The Patchwork of Global Governance

BY VINCENT POULIOT AND JEANPHILIPPE THÉRIEN. Cambridge University Press, 2023, 294 pp.

Focusing on the United Nations and its ecosystem of summits, assemblies, and commissions, Pouliot and Thérien find, perhaps not surprisingly, that the process of global governance tends to be chaotic and haphazard. The term of art they use to describe global policymaking is bricolage—a French word for tinkering that nicely captures the improvisational, patchwork character of such governance. The book looks closely at the operations of the United Nations in sustainable development, human rights, and the protection of civilians in war. In each area, the authors find governments, NGOs, and international bureaucrats caught in inherently unresolvable clashes of values and interests. The UN’s 2005 initiative to create the Human Rights Commission, for instance, revealed tensions among countries from the global North and South and required the papering over of deep disagreements about sovereignty, the role of experts, the inclusion of NGOs, and the universality of rights. Global governance is a story of politics and social conflict, in which the costs and benefits of outcomes are unequally distributed, and values and worldviews stubbornly resist calls for harmony and consensus. Policymakers cannot make the world better if they do not understand how it works.

The United Nations as Leviathan: Global Governance in the PostAmerican World

BY ROLAND RICH. Rowman & Littlefield, 2022, 296 pp.

For many years after the end of the Cold War, the United States played the role of a benign hegemon, stabilizing the global system, providing public goods, and fostering multilateral problem solving. Rich, an Australian diplomat, contends that this approach to world order has now broken down, and in the emerging “post-American world,” the United Nations is the only body capable of generating a peaceful and cooperative order. Taking a leaf from the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s famous treatise, the book makes the case for turning the UN into a sort of benign Leviathan. Governments around the world should cede some authority to the global body to craft solutions and build coalitions to tackle pressing problems. Membership

should be extended beyond nationstates to the wider constituencies of global business and civil society. The secretary-general should not be selected by the permanent five member states of the Security Council but by the wider General Assembly. Rich proposes that the UN should become less reliant on funding from its member states—a dependence that limits and shapes its operations. Instead, an international tax on currency transactions or airline travel could become a direct source of funding for the UN and give it the independence to step out of the shadows of the state system. Rich recognizes the major obstacles to reforming the UN but suggests that growing crises and dangers make failure to reform the institution even more unthinkable.

also stemmed from the collapse of anonymous “arm’s-length markets” in the Great Depression and the rise of antitrust policies favoring integrated companies over cartels. Unlike Chandler, whose seminal book on the rise of the modern corporation, The Visible Hand, was published in the 1970s, when the large corporation was at its apogee, Langlois questions whether businesses will inevitably seek to organize production internally, within the corporation, rather than externally, via markets. Indeed, no sooner did Chandler detail the advantages of the large, vertically integrated firm than this corporate form went into decline. Trade liberalization, financial deregulation, and new information technologies facilitated outsourcing, contract production, and just-in-time inventory management, giving rise to a very different kind of American corporation, as epitomized by the likes of the technology firms Apple and Dell, which do much of their manufacturing through contractors abroad. How markets and corporations will interact in the future, Langlois concludes, will depend on technological developments but also on political decisions by those responsible for macroeconomic, financial, and trade policies.

We Need to Talk About Inflation: 14 Urgent Lessons From the Last 2,000 Years BY STEPHEN D. KING. Yale University Press, 2023, 240 pp.

An economist, an adviser to investment banks, and a public intellectual, King ruminates on the return of inflation. The author was among those who warned that inflation was on the horizon in 2021 and cautioned that it was unlikely to be transitory. His focus here is on the pressures facing central banks and the misjudgments they make, specifically on monetary policies. He attributes these errors in some cases to flawed economic models, and in others to political pressures. A fuller account of the return of inflation would have placed more emphasis on the effects of COVID-19, including both pandemic-related supply chain disruptions and the fiscal measures adopted by governments in response. King points to a combination of monetary policy rules and central bank independence as the best defense against inflation but concedes, somewhat dispiritingly, that politics tend to trump economics. Inevitably, central banks find it difficult to counter political pressure to turn on the monetary taps. In reaching this conclusion, King channels Arthur Burns, the U.S. Federal Reserve chair who presided over the Great Inflation of the 1970s and who despaired over the inability of central bankers to resist the coercion of politicians.

Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization

BY HAROLD JAMES. Yale University Press, 2023, 376 pp.

Most histories of economic and financial crises focus on episodes when spending collapsed owing to deficient aggregate demand, such as the Great Depression of the 1930s, or the global financial crisis of 2008–9. Inspired by the economic crisis that COVID-19 spawned, James looks instead at crashes caused by supply-side disruptions, including the Great Famine

affecting Ireland and much of Europe in the 1840s, disruptions to international trade and finance owing to World War I, and the 1970s oil shocks. These crises elicited a nationalist response, as governments scrambled to secure essential supplies, in the process deepening their involvement in the economy. Yet these supply-linked crashes also deepened globalization, as banks, firms, and governments sought to strengthen the weak links in supply chains that prompted the crisis in the first place. The crash of the 1840s encouraged the construction of global railway and telegraph networks, facilitating the growth of a global grain trade. The crisis of the 1970s sped containerization and spurred regional and multilateral trade liberalization. The Great Lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the diffusion of remote work and digitization.The author concludes, optimistically, that “we learn most when the present is most dismal.”