The Origins of Nonliberal Capitalism: Germany and Japan in Comparison

Why was the rise of capitalism in Germany and Japan associated not with liberal institutions and democratic politics, but rather with statist controls and authoritarian rule? A stellar group of international scholars addresses this classic issue in political development. In The Origins of Nonliberal Capitalism, German sociologists and American and Japanese political scientists draw extensively on the work of economists and historians from their home countries, as well as from the United Kingdom and France.

The contributors discuss the potential disappearance, evolution, and reconstitution of nonliberal capitalism in Germany and Japan by analyzing its historical origins from two perspectives: the emergence and survival of nonliberal capitalism, and the causes of differences between the systems of Germany and Japan. They also outline the requirements for internally coherent national models of an embedded capitalist economy. The histories of German and Japanese capitalism demonstrate that capitalism’s structural forms and functional relations evolve by means of different processes with different goals.

Wolfgang Streeck is Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany, and Professor of Sociology at the University of Cologne. Among the many books he has published is The Political Economy of Modern Capitalism. Kozo Yamamura is the Job and Gertrud Tamaki Professor of Japanese Studies and Economics at the University of Washington.