In Part I we saw how the model of the concerted and centralized political regulation of the economy, after functioning with conspicuous success for almost fifty years, entered a phase of decline. This is by no means a novel finding – indeed, it is taken for granted by that strand of debate in the social sciences which, by paraphrasing the title of an article by Panitch (1980), we could call ‘the crisis industry’ – but it should be viewed in a new light when set in relation to the tendencies that I shall now examine in Part II.

To begin with, the emphasis should be placed on these three adjectives -political, concerted and centralized – as applied to the model of economic regulation described in preceding chapters. The fact that three distinct adjectives are required to specify this type of regulation demonstrates that there is not just a single nonmarket institution by which the economy can be regulated, or a single way in which nonmarket institutions work. This was the principal error of the many analyses conducted during the 1980s of the deregulation of Western economies, analyses which often did nothing more than simplistically echo what, for business people and neo-laissez-faire politicians, was a slogan from the realm of wishful thinking. But, on closer examination, even considerably more sophisticated analyses of the advent of ‘disorganized capitalism’ (Offe 1985; Lash and Urry 1987) were based on a similar premise: that the crisis of a historically specific form of regulation signalled the decline tout court in the capacity of social and political institutions to structure economic behaviour.