Late Soviet Britain

Abby Innes is Associate Professor of Political Economy in the European Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Why has the United Kingdom, historically one of the strongest democracies in the world, become so unstable? What changed? This book demonstrates that a major part of the answer lies in the transformation of its state. It shows how Britain championed radical economic liberalisation only to weaken and ultimately break its own governing institutions. The crisis of democracy in rich countries has brought forward many urgent analyses of neoliberal capitalism. This book explores for the first time how the 'governing science' in Leninist and neoliberal revolutions fails for many of the same reasons. These systems may have been utterly opposed in their political values, but Abby Innes argues that when we grasp the kinship in their closed-system forms of economic reasoning and their strategies for government, we may better understand the causes of state failure in what remains an inescapably open-system reality.

Explains why radical economic liberalism in the UK reproduces Soviet state failures, only now in capitalist form.

Introduction: the Gods that failed; Part I. The Materialist Utopias: 1. Rationality and closed-system reasoning; 2. General equilibrium and the balanced plan; 3. On bureaucracy; 4. On 'organised forgetting' in the governing science; Part II. Britain's Neoliberal Revolution: 5. The new public management, or Enterprise planning in capitalist form; 6. Quasi-markets in welfare, or The non-withering state; 7. Tax competition, or The return of regulatory bargaining; 8. Efficient markets and climate change, or Soviet cybernetics 2.0; Part III. The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal 'Movement Regime': 9. Neoliberalism: the Brezhnev years; 10. A politics for the end of time.