Description
Book SynopsisCharles Maier offers a new narrative of the long twentieth century, focused on institutions that shaped politics and societies: project-states, driven by democratic or authoritarian ideologies; capital; and advocates of apolitical values, such as health, human rights, and international law. In this we discern the unfolding of our own troubled time.
Trade ReviewMaier offers an alternative account of the last century, looking at how a wide range of actors tried to harness industrial modernity in the pursuit of power and material interests…[He] weaves a narrative about the explosive interplay of economic privilege and political grievance. -- G. John Ikenberry * Foreign Affairs *
Ambitious…It is Maier’s open worry about the fragility of our democratic order and about the considerable strength of the antidemocratic impulses in this third decade of the 21st century that makes
The Project-State and Its Rivals a book that will last. -- Paul Kennedy * Wall Street Journal *
Extraordinarily erudite and brimming with insight…[Maier] leaves open the question of whether the project-state will escape the dustbin of history and be revivified and redeployed, democratically, for the common good. -- Jonathan Ira Levy * Project Syndicate *
Through his decades of scholarship and teaching on both sides of the Atlantic, Charles S. Maier has focused on one basic question, formulating and refining his answers with each successive book and monograph. His goal has been to understand and explain the ways in which advanced capitalist states evolved over the past century in response to world war, colonial war, cold war and economic globalisation. This…fascinating book provides a summation and updating of Maier’s lifelong work. -- David C. Unger * Survival *
A very refreshing take on a history I thought I knew well. -- J. Bradford Delong * Harvard Magazine *
[The] story of the exhaustion of the postwar political-economic order has now been told many times; what sets Maier’s account apart is the way he weaves together the work of capitalist activists and their allies in politics and think tanks with the work of governance activists in the same years. His wide-angle lens shows how the political and economic turbulence of that period led not only to the Volcker shock but to the rising prominence of NGOs and foundations seeking to restore order and stability at home and abroad. -- Jonathan S. Blake * Boston Review *
An intriguing, sophisticated book about the relationships between the evolution of the modern nation-state and the concurrent forces of capitalism, popular politics, socialist responses, and bureaucratic governance. This is a deep and clever work, the culmination of an erudite historian's long grappling with humankind's mixed record of progress and failure. -- Paul Kennedy, author of
The Rise and Fall of the Great PowersCharles Maier has produced a brilliantly innovative reconceptualization of twentieth-century history in terms of the interaction between states, resources, and markets. He sets a bold agenda for future thinking about the shape of the past one hundred years. -- Harold James, author of
The War of Words: A Glossary of GlobalizationA true history of the present.
The Project-State and Its Rivals is a powerful, insightful, and penetrating analysis of the major shifts in global order and social dynamics across the past century. There are few historians today who can venture to undertake such a tour d'horizon with equal confidence and expertise as Maier. -- Sebastian Conrad, author of
What Is Global History?
