The United States in the Post-war Global Political Economy: Another Look at the Brenner Debate

Over the past decades, mainstream comparative and international political economy has displayed a renewed concern with the role of institutions and political agency. The rise to intellectual prominence of institutionalist themes is best understood against the background of the crisis of the post-war period. During the first decades after the war, marked as they were by economic growth and political stability, there had been little reason to theoretically problematize institutions as distinct from the economic or social system. This assumption was dented when the post-war economic dynamic began to taper off towards the end of the 1960s, and became increasingly anachronistic as the downturn began to envelop broader social processes and political arrangements during the 1970s and 1980s. Institutions were back in the scholarly limelight, and with the benefit of hindsight, the immediate post-war period could be explained as a function of the integrative capacities of international regimes and national institutional arrangements.