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Abstract

In Buying Time (Verso Books), compiled from his Adorno Lectures given in Frankfurt, Wolfgang Streeck lays bare the roots of the present financial, fiscal and economic crisis, seeing it as part of the long neoliberal transformation of postwar capitalism that began in the 1970s. Linking up with the crisis theories of that decade, he analyzes the subsequent tensions and conflicts involving states, governments, voters and capitalist interests—a process in which the defining focus of the European state system has shifted from taxation through debt to budgetary "consolidation". The book then ends by exploring the prospects for a restoration of social and economic stability. Buying Time shows that something deeply disturbing underlies the current economic situation: a metamorphosis of the whole relationship between democracy and capitalism.